Teeny Tiny Stevies: Life, death and bum jokes
Toilet training, peanut allergies, water safety and coping with death are fertile ground for sister act Teeny Tiny Stevies.
One Sunday in August last year, Beth Stephen was at her home in Melbourne’s inner north watching with pride as her son was learning to walk in his bedroom. He was at the stage of pulling himself up and testing the idea of holding his weight with her encouragement, and as she delighted in witnessing this essential developmental milestone, the singer-songwriter picked up a toy ukulele — one of several lying around the house — and began to strum and hum.
Inspiration soon struck as she noodled on the instrument and felt a glimmer of potential gold flash through her mind. With her phone, she recorded a sketch of an idea for a song based on what she was seeing from her son — an unfamiliar feeling for someone who had spent the last several years singing sharp, funny and memorable songs intended for young ears while only recently becoming a parent herself.
What Beth did next was entirely familiar, though. It was something she’s done for more than half of her life — she shared the idea with her sister, Sibylla, who is four years her senior.
“Hey Byll, I think this could be alright,” she wrote on August 18. “I just came up with it all pretty quickly then, so some lyrics I might need to alter slightly. But you get the idea.”
A few kilometres away at the Barkly Square shopping centre, Byll Stephen’s phone pinged with an email accompanied by a voice recording. While always keen to hear her sister’s musical ideas, time was of the essence here, as the two of them were due to head into the studio to record the third Teeny Tiny Stevies album in October. Byll pressed play and heard Beth’s voice and a simple ukulele chord progression emerge from the phone speaker, as she sang from the perspective of an infant cautiously learning a new skill.
As she sat in her car and listened, Byll smiled and teared up a little at the sentiment of the song, having lived through those milestones with her own two children. But quickly, her songwriter’s instincts kicked in, and rather than getting swept away by the emotion of her kid sister singing about her kid transitioning into a toddler her creative muscles instead began to grapple with the problem at hand and search for a solution — ideally, one that would provoke tears from her listeners. After marinating on it for a couple of weeks, she sent back an email on September 3.
“OK so this is what I’d change it to,” wrote Byll. “Add another verse and chorus at the end. And a bum joke at the start. I just cried like a baby playing around with this. As you’ll see, the chorus works in a different way (while staying completely the same) at the end.”
She concluded the note with a common joke they share: “It’s a hit.”
The finished version of the song Had You To Teach Me begins with a child’s perspective: “I’ve been feeling a little nervous lately / Every time I try to stand on my own, my legs get shaky / I need you near in case I put a foot wrong / I’m still working out how not to end up on my bum…”
Recalling that moment in the carpark when she heard Beth’s demo for the first time, Byll tells Review: “It sounded to me like there was a few really gold lyrics in there. Scrap all the rest, this is what we should focus on. If we altered it this way, I can see how this is going to be so relatable for so many people. I’ve been writing songs for a long time now and I like trying to make it universal for everybody — and make people cry.”
Accordingly, the next two verses continue the trend of narrating in the child’s voice as they grow older, become more confident and start to develop their independence. But the real sting in the song’s tail arrives in the final verse, where the perspective shifts to the parent: “Darling, I’ve been feeling wistful lately / I’m so proud of you, but I feel sad that you don’t need me / Can you stay where I can watch from the side? / I won’t get in the way, I’ll just be thinking about how time flies…”
As a result of this shift, the original chorus now takes on a double meaning when viewed through the eyes of a parent watching their child grow up: “One day soon, I’ll take the leap / And let go of that tight grasp I keep / I’ll move away and say ‘I’m OK – I got this’ / I’ll show you how brave I can be / ’Cause I had you to teach me.”
It’s a stunning and effective songwriting feat that recalls Paul Kelly’s Deeper Water, another narrative whose verses jump between the decades while remaining beautifully economical in its lyrics. Both songs are remarkably moving in their emotional depth, but the Stephen sisters’ creation manages to achieve the effect while wrapped in a jaunty three-minute arrangement topped by bass guitar, drums and backing vocals.
What began as a bedroom ukulele demo became a sparkling pop gem, while its music video — illustrated and animated by Simon Howe, and starring a family of sugargliders — is the perfect accompaniment.
The story behind Had You To Teach Me also illustrates the deep trust that exists between the sisters. Having written songs together since Beth was 15, both musicians are well aware that their good ideas as individuals can often become great ideas when shared with one another.
“That’s one of Byll’s superpowers. She’s extremely good with putting words together, and she took more of the responsibility of the lyrics for this album,” says Beth. “So much thought and consideration goes into every lyric. It’s scrutinised over several months, and through so many drafts that go back and forth. Look, she’s been like that forever — if she cries about something, in a good or a bad way, it’s a bit of a sign of a good song, I think.”
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The Stephen sisters are musical partners in two concurrent duos that are both based on abbreviations of their surname. First was The Little Stevies, a folk-pop act founded in 2006 which has released four albums, including last year’s Stopped Wishing I Was Somewhere Else. Then there’s the newer outlet, Teeny Tiny Stevies, which they formed after Byll became a mother in 2012 and found herself unimpressed by the repetitive and simplistic fare that passed for much of popular music aimed at children.
The pair decided to have a crack at writing in this style themselves, starting with their 2015 debut Useful Songs for Little People, which included album opener On the Toilet — a true fan-favourite with a chorus that ends with the line, “I only go to the toilet on the toilet” — as well as tracks based on eating healthily (I Ate a Rainbow), conquering common fears (Not Afraid of the Dark) and coming to terms with impending siblings (Baby in Mum’s Tummy).
After discovering they’d found a gap in the market for parents who felt the same way, the second act became more popular than the first, and as a result it has since become their primary focus.
“We wanted it to be music for everyone; we didn’t want it to be exclusively ‘music for kids’, which sometimes seems to be a bit of a thing,” says Beth from her home in Northcote in late July. “We wanted it to be music that everyone in the household could enjoy, and lyrical content and themes that everyone can relate to. I think it’s a bit of a myth to think that kids and adults can’t enjoy the same thing; they enjoy the same music all the time.
“Kids listen to things on repeat, so if you’re listening to something so repeatedly, you may as well be learning something.
“If you’re investing so much time in something, there may as well be a part that’s educational, or about opening your mind to things, or conversation starters that might prompt you to ask questions.”
Their second album, Helpful Songs for Little People, contained ideas for themes that members of their audience had requested; track titles include Pass the Sunscreen, No Peanuts and Boss of My Own Body.
Released in 2018 via ABC Music, it also received an ARIA Award nomination in the best children’s album category.
The first word in each album title points to their songwriting intentions, and so too does their newest release, Thoughtful Songs for Little People, which again is largely composed of themes requested by parents in their audience including water safety (Happy Swimming), the challenges of trying to maintain a work-life balance (Can’t Wait to Be Home) and respectfully acknowledging the fact that we’re all different (Abilities).
The sisters run the band as a business with Byll’s partner, Tom, and while the pandemic has put a sizeable dent in their forecasts for 2020 thanks to postponed or cancelled gigs — including what was set to be their Sydney Opera House debut — the upshot is that they now have another set of 12 songs that each address different aspects of a child’s life.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of their discography – which now totals 35 songs across three albums, as well as the beautifully crafted quarantine instructional Stay Home, which the sisters published online during the national lockdown in April — is the sheer span of musical styles they’ve covered. No two arrangements are alike, and the range of inventive playing – augmented on the new album by drummer Benjamin Graham, bassist and guitarist Aiden Arandez and keyboardist Nat Bartsch — ensures that the ear is kept engaged without the collection feeling disjointed.
“That’s one of the joyous things about this all being under the banner of ‘kids’ music’: we don’t have to stay in our lane, genre-wise,” says Byll, who lives about 5km from her sister in Princes Hill. “We can just be like, ‘we’re going to pretend to be a funk band now — oh no, we are one! We have those skills — let’s do it’. It’s so nice doing that because with The Little Stevies it’s definitely much more weird if you’re trying to do that on an ‘adult’ album, whereas kids’ music is the most beautiful invitation to just do whatever you want in the studio, and with the sound of everything. As songwriters and musicians, Teeny Tiny Stevies gives us so much room to play.”
Her younger sister — who studied a music degree at the Victorian College of the Arts — concurs. “It’s really nice to be able to showcase these skills, because after you do something for so long, you get to a point where you’re like, ‘I’m proud of what I do’,” says Beth. “We’ve worked really hard, we’ve put in a lot of training and we’ve been working our craft for ages. It’s really nice to be able to show people that range within the skill set.”
The final song on album No 3 addresses one of the most frequently requested subjects from their audience, and it begins with a series of questions that small children have been asking their parents in some form or another since language began: “What does dying mean? / Where do our spirits go? / Why can’t I see you anymore? / How do we carry on when we have lost someone? / When I just want to go back to the way things were before?”
Named Everything Comes to an End, the song has a suitably delicate feel based on acoustic guitar phrasing and gentle keyboard notes redolent of stars spaced across the night sky. Death is one of the trickiest concepts to impart to children, and for families struggling with their own grief while also trying to help their youngest members understand, this song is the sort of gift that will keep on giving.
“That’s definitely an example of one that’s a conversation starter; it’s hard to know how to bring some of those things up,” says Byll. “But if this can just be playing in the background, and if kids can be taking on these words just as they go about their day, then I find with my kids that I’ll get some amazing questions from them if something has seeped in from somewhere else, rather than from me.”
Given the finality of the subject matter, it is fitting that this song ends the album, but the emotionally intelligent way in which the sisters have chosen to frame the end of life within a three-minute song also shows how far they’ve come since On the Toilet, the opening track from their debut album. These songs cover two of life’s inevitabilities — from toilet training to the grave — yet in the history of popular Australian music, few acts have used their songwriting talents to cover so much ground with so much heart.
Thoughtful Songs for Little People is out now via ABC Music. Teeny Tiny Stevies perform in Canberra (Oct 17), Byron Bay (Nov 14), Brisbane (Nov 15, two shows) and Melbourne (Nov 22).
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