'It almost felt unreachable': Tia Wood on pursuing music full-time after TikTok stardom

The Block21:32Tia Wood Interview

Music has always been in Cree Salish singer Tia Wood's blood. Her father, Earl Wood, is part of the Juno-winning powwow drum group Northern Cree; her mother, Cynthia Jim, was in an all-women drum group; and her sister, Fawn Wood, is also a Juno-winning singer. 

Tia has performed with her family for years, telling The Block host Angeline Tetteh-Wayoe she is "just so thankful that I grew up like that."

Now, Tia is finally putting out music of her own with her first major label release, "Dirt Roads," a moving song about her home in Saddle Lake, Alta.

She joined Tetteh-Wayoe for an interview looking back at her early years as a performer, and making music her full-time career after signing with Sony Music Canada. The full interview is available above, and an excerpt of their conversation is below.

So we were talking about your musical family.

Yeah.

Let's dive into that a little bit, because I don't know, I don't come from a musical family. And I would think that coming from a musical family, it would just be like, "Everybody do music."

Yeah. 

But was that just your way of life? Music all day, every day? 

Yeah. Growing up, it was kind of inevitable to pick it up because my whole family sang. And that was kind of our way of putting food on the table and keeping the roof over our head. And I'm just so thankful that I grew up like that. It was a fun way to grow up. It was really cool to bond with my family in that way around a drum, doing gigs and powwows. And that's where I got my start in music. 

I mean, you wouldn't say that the song we just heard would fall into [traditional] Indigenous music. 

No. Not really. 

So how did you find your way to your style? If you were doing traditional Indigenous music?

Well, when I was younger, my parents really played a lot of music around the house. We would always listen to Etta James, Amy Winehouse, [Creedence Clearwater Revival], the Eagles [and] a lot of country, too, because that's all really our reservation radios would pick up, was a lot of country. [In] Alberta, that's all that's on the freaking radio. So that's kind of where ... I just started showing interest in that kind of music.

When you talk about singing and singing style, hearing your voice, how do you find that traditional Indigenous songs in the style of singing ... has been able to transfer into the type of music you want to make now? Vocally, do you feel like it really prepared you to explore the range of your music and your voice and where it could go?

Oh yeah, I feel like it definitely helped with the music that I make today. I honestly wasn't planning on doing this kind of music, R&B kind-of pop ... because I didn't really see a place for it.

[You] didn't see a place for it where?

I don't know, not a place for it, but there wasn't a lot of Indigenous women singers to look up to. 

Yeah.

So ... it almost felt unreachable in a way, to do this as a full-time thing.

So how did you find the gumption to just not let it stop you?

Honestly, the first time that [I] had that realization where I was like, "Oh, man, maybe people do want to hear this," was [during] the pandemic when TikTok was becoming big and Indigenous TikTok was becoming really big. And I [saw] this girl sing Indigenous vocals to this modern beat or some Bella Porch thing. And I was like, "Oh, wait."

I started humming something in my head, and I did a video like [hers], and it was super accidental that I would start making content. But I remember that was kind of one of the first videos I did, and it just blew up and I was like, "Oh wait, people maybe do want to hear this kind of thing." And it was crazy how big it got. And it was like, "Maybe I can do this, maybe there [are] ears that want to hear something like that." So that's when I kind of knew I wanted to mix the two.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. To hear the full interview, listen to The Block on CBC Music.