In the spring of 2021, three strangers — Cinya Khan, Judah Mayowa, and Maya Rae — sang together for the first time in a dorm room at Berklee College. It began on DM.
“I found them both on Instagram because we had started at Berkeley during Covid, so kind
of the way you would make friends was online,” Rae says. “Initially, I just thought they were both amazing singers, obviously, and I just wanted to be their friends. I thought they were so cool.”
It was Mayowa who showed up at Rae’s dorm first. “It was my first time really going out on my own in a place that wasn’t home,” Mayowa says. “I don’t think I had met anyone as good as them before.”
Then, Khan knocked. Earlier, Khan had posted a public plea on Instagram about the dorm’s elusive toilet paper handles and Rae responded, later inviting her to join them to sing. “I knocked on her door — shaking, so scared,” Khan recalls.
That night, after a few YouTube karaoke tracks, they recorded their first video together: a clip of the trio harmonizing to Kacey Musgraves’ 2018 Golden Hour track, “Happy & Sad.”
When the semester ended, they couldn’t wait to get together again. “I went home for the summer only thinking about singing with them,” says Rae.
From there, things moved quickly. The friends went from recording videos of themselves dropping mesmerizing harmonies in stairwell corners and dorms — going viral and catching the attention of luminaries from the likes of David Crosby and Elton John — to writing their first ballad together months later and settling on their name: Tiny Habits.
The newly formed band released their debut album, All For Something, in May 2024. The LP was a hit, filled with romantic and wistful melodies lifted by their intimate folk-pop sound. It was followed by a succession of opening tour spots with Gracie Abrams (who surprised them with a congratulatory cake), James Taylor, Sarah McLachlan, and Noah Kahan.
“Gracie does a really good job of making everyone feel like they’re valuable [on tour],” says Khan. “Noah’s the sweetest. James Taylor, obviously, the best,” adds Rae. “They’ve all just been very kind to us.”
The momentum around them continues to grow: features on tracks with Holly Humberstone, JP Saxe, Lizzy McAlpine, and Joe Jonas; a buzzy performance at Matty Healy and Gabbriette Bechtel’s Los Angeles wedding; and, in a full-circle moment, a “Perfection” collaboration with Musgraves on her Deeper Well expanded edition, Deeper Into the Well.
Now, five years after colliding in that fateful dorm room, Tiny Habits have released their sophomore album, Keepers, out now. The record is a sumptuous departure from their debut, filled with the complicated stories of love, yes, but also love’s more prickly siblings: desire, guilt, self-doubt, delusion, anger, freedom, and bittersweet joy.
It’s a balmy afternoon at the Rolling Stone offices in Los Angeles when Khan, Mayowa, and Rae come by to discuss their new LP. They say that on the drive in, they were freestyling with a bass on their lap. “Crying, laughing, it’s so fun,” smiles Khan.
There’s a cup of pens at the center of the table between us and Khan politely asks if she can use one. “I like to hold a pen during interviews,” Khan says. The others follow suit and for the next hour, there’s a delightful clicking melody that soundtracks our conversation.
We quickly dive into Keepers. The 12-track offering is sonically sharper than the last, the production vivid and intentional, and more markedly, the record sees Khan, Mayowa, and Rae tell their own narratives for the first time. When working between albums, the group discussed writing a little less about romance — which they say can be an oversaturated topic — and tapping into their personal backgrounds.
“I think our fan base only knew a certain part of our world,” Rae says. “We just knew there are so many people out there who can relate to so much of what we have to say and with this record, we wanted to dig into that.”
Mayowa adds, “On Keepers, we tell our stories together and also give ourselves space to tell our own stories, supported by the other’s background vocals.” Mayowa refers to “Pattern of a Person,” a song reflecting on generational trauma and childhood hopes. It begins with a voicemail recording of Mayowa and his brother when they were kids, before the gut-punch lyric: “When I was nine/My mother drove by houses dreaming/Promising life would one day be this easy.”
Then there’s “Survivor’s Guilt,” a devastating tale of disconnect and growth that Khan wrote about a past relationship, later realizing it was also about her family and friends from her past. “That was an interesting experience — when you write a song and then later realize what it was about,” she says.
There are moments of irony, too. “Someone You Love,” one of the LP’s most buoyant songs, began as pushback against label requests to produce a pop hit and turned out to be just that — albeit coated with slick lines about a lover’s request to take them as they are or as someone they hate. “It’s totally what everyone wants but…,” begins Rae, before Mayowa concludes, “also about not wanting to give them what they ask for.”
Wherever the needle drops on the record, Tiny Habit’s dedication to writing music according to their own ambitions is clear from the guilty consciousness of “Belt Loop” to the standout, wickedly upbeat “Love Ruins Everything.”
“The album is reflective of how we’ve grown as people. I think we’ve all become a lot more confident and a lot more extroverted in many different ways,” Khan says.
Rae muses, “There’s still a lot more growth to happen,” as the others nod.
This time around though, Khan says “the biggest blessing was to be able to believe in ourselves.” She credits producer Benjamin Millman, who is also Rae’s cousin, for nurturing that part of the band and calls Millman the “fourth Tiny Habit.”
On this new LP, Millman helped establish a new motto for the band: to explore ideas even when they didn’t have the right words to articulate how they were feeling. “We wanted to go in with no regrets of wishing we had said something,” Rae says.
When building their team for Keepers, the group compares the process to speed dating. Eventually, after a string of writing sessions that left them exhausted, they recruited Ryan Linvill, a trusted producer who they had previously worked with on a few tracks, and Jeremy Schmetterer.
Working with Schmetterer changed the way they wrote songs, Mayowa says. “It was the first time that we really had fun in a writing session,” he says of the track, “Towel.” “We were coming off having a frustrating time after doing all these sessions and so tired of nothing coming out of it — it felt so pointless trying to force this thing that we felt like we could just do by ourselves.”
Mayowa says, “We took everything with a little less seriousness and with a little less of ‘We have to do this because this is what we’ve always done it.’” Not everything needs to be “intellectual or profound,” he says, adding that now the lyric can simply exist.
Recorded between Los Angeles and New York, the group found themselves working with Philip Weinrobe at the Outlier Inn tucked away on a farm in the Catskill Mountains surrounded by leafy maples and smoking weed every night. They say Weinrobe, who also assisted on the production side, was another “big influence.”
“He’s kind of like a purist,” says Khan. “He loves to just cut it off the floor,” she adds. “He made us understand the essence of a feeling of a song more than just it sounding good.”
Khan recounts a moment when recording “Survivor’s Guilt” when she hit this “this crazy high note” and looked over to see Judah crying. “I feel like Phil made that kind of world happen,” she says. “He was like, ‘That has to be the take.’ There was an emotional response and that’s valuable.”
The record also features a subtle assist from Matty Healy of the 1975, who saw Tiny Habits open for James Taylor in North Carolina. Healy, a major Taylor fan, sent them a message after the show and told them to let him know if they ever want to make music together. When it came time to record Keepers, they took him up on the offer and he obliged. The 1975 frontman appears on the lonely ballad, “Anything He Was.” “I feel like the song needed another male perspective or voice,” says Mayowa. ”It felt like a song that he had maybe experienced before and could empathize.”
In two months, in support of their sophomore LP, Tiny Habits will embark on a 25-city North American run, the aptly titled The Keepers Tour. The band will deliver milestone shows at New York’s Irving Plaza, Boston’s House of Blues, Chicago’s Metro, San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, and Los Angeles’ Fonda Theatre.
“We’re dancing. We’re mics off the stands. We’re crowd surfing. We’re gonna have props,” teases Rae.
In between all this change, the friendship between Khan, Mayowa, and Rae remains the core of Tiny Habits. As we talk, they finish each other’s sentences, fix each other’s hair, and laugh, a lot. It’s fantastic and contagious to be around. At some points, they seem ready to burst into giggles.
“The first show we ever did was in our friend Bailey’s apartment, and there was this big note that we were gonna harmonize at the end,” Khan says. “As we’re getting to this big note, we all sing it. It was so loud, and we just started laughing midnote. It was so embarrassing, but it was so funny.”
Before David Crosby died in January 2023, he declared online, “Holy shit they are good. I need more Tiny Habits” and hopped on a Zoom call with the band. The legendary rock libertine advised them to hold onto that very essence of who they were.
Crosby told them to continue “keeping what we have very sacred, protecting it at all costs, and not letting success or even just conflict or the world taint what we have and how special it is,” says Mayowa.
Rae acknowledges that what they have is rare. “They really are chosen family, for real. It’s beautiful that time and time again we keep choosing each other.” Rae looks at Mayowa and Khan and says, “This sounds like the sappiest thing ever, but it’s honestly true.”
Click here to read the full article.
