Spotlight: Tiny Rhymes
If the members of Buffalo indie-folk band Tiny Rhymes were to get band tattoos, they’d all get watermelons and they’d do it today. It’s their one year band anniversary, or “bandiversary” as they like to call it, but don’t worry parents of Sharon Mok and Katie Weissman—the primary members of Tiny Rhymes—they don’t actually intend on getting matching band tattoos.
“We started playing last summer, so we would rehearse and then have a barbecue. Sharon would always show up with a six pack of beer and a whole watermelon, so whenever I see a watermelon it makes me think of the beginning of Tiny Rhymes,” Weissman tells me as the three of us sit on the patio of Caffe Aroma in the center of the Elmwood Village, the grey storm clouds gathering on the horizon.
Tiny Rhymes has been through a few incarnations in the short year that the band has existed. In fact, it seems okay to call Tiny Rhymes a collective rather than a band. Sometimes they’re a duo, sometimes they’re a solo act, and sometimes they’re a full band. When they’re a full band, the lineup usually consists of Mok on guitar and lead vocals, Weissman on the cello and back up vocals, Kathryn Koch on violin and vocals, Tony Lannone as bassist, and drummer Brendan Fitzgerald.
When Tiny Rhymes comes to Nietzsche’s on June 11 as part of our series The Public Presents, they’ll perform as a trio—Mok, Weissman, and Koch—alongside a couple of other talented bands, Blue Stone Groove, and Brad Gower & Eavan Kaderbeck, presented with help from the Good Neighborhood.
Mok is considered the primary songwriter of the band. “We started off with a bang. I had written some songs before I found all of the members.”
The first to join Mok was her friend Ross Aftel, who at the time was a UB grad student and percussionist.
“He really encouraged me to get out there and make music and play publicly,” says Mok. Then he left for Serbia, but before he left, he introduced Mok to another Buffalo-based cellist, T.J. Borden. Weissman was dating Borden at the time, and as dating cellists, they’d trade gigs if one of them was unavailable. Borden had a gig lined up with Mok, which he couldn’t make, and suggested Weissman take the gig. A best friendship began.
Mok believes that once the band writes their new record, rehearses it, performs it live, road tests it, gets comfortable with it, and finally records it, then they’ll have a permanent lineup to tour with. “I feel like with this kind of music, with the broad folk genre, your hometown band might be very different than your touring band. That’s a logistical thing, it’s a commitment thing, and the music allows for it,” says Weissman, who sits on the patio next to her dog, Emma.
They’ve met a lot of bands like that while on tour, says Mok, including one they especially enjoyed, led by singer/songwriter Marian Mclaughlin. “She writes all of her own stuff. Sometimes she has an entire mini-orchestra with her and sometimes it’s her and a bassist and sometimes it’s just her.”
They met Mclaughlin on one of the tours they’ve already embarked on as a young band. Last fall they travelled down to the Baltimore Folk Fest before stopping in Frederick, Maryland and Philadelphia—shooting a music video in the process.
“Going on tour with your band for the first time is a very special experience,” says Weissman.
They have an EP, A Kinder History, which they recorded at GCR, coming out June 23.
Mok and Weissman have their songwriting routine figured out, for the most part. Mok comes to Weismann with a skeleton of a song—chords, maybe a melody, and part of the arrangement of the song and Weissman helps her fill in the blanks, even scoring the music—creating sheet music so that they don’t lose track of their progress.
“I just really want to be able to write a good song,” says Mok who is inspired by Chinese traditinoal folk music. And a bad breakup. And Joanna Newsom. And ice cream. Breaking up with her ex-partner was freeing, she says. Rather than coming home and flipping on Netflix, she had free time to channel the pain of breaking up into her songs. She was never able to finish her songs before, says Mok. Now she can. “I’ve started a lot of songs in my lifetime, but this made me really get my act together,” she says.
One of their major musical achievements so far is a beautiful, lilting, yet tragic song called “O Amaranta!” The title of the song is taken from a character in the book One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
“The first time we performed that song, it was the day that Gabriel Garcia Marquez passed away. I had no idea. It was this coincidence for me.”
In the book, Amaranta is all about death, says Mok. She’s a plain Jane who has a facination with death, obsessed with sewing her own funeral shroud.
“The characters in the book hire a guy in town to make a piano lift for them, and I’m a piano rebuilder so I was really interseted in this topic.” Oh yeah, did I mention that Mok is a piano rebuilder, too? Here comes a tangent: Mok got into piano rebuilding when she met a blind man on a bus in Toronto. He needed help finding an address, so she helped him and they ended up becoming friends. He’s a piano tuner, she says, and he came over to tune her piano. In return, she would go over to his house and read his mail to him among other things. She quickly realized that she enjoyed working with pianos and soon ended up at piano tech school. End tangent. Back to Amaranta.
By sewing her own funeral shroud, Amaranta was grieving her own death before she even died. “I found it really interesting that she was trapped in this mundane act, because as soon as she finished the last stitch she’d drop dead,” says Mok.
“Sometimes you can get inspiration from random places that don’t necessarily have to do with your own emotional landscape, but you can tie your own personality into them,” Weissman adds.
Mok’s personality is ingrained into Tiny Rhymes. In fact, Tiny Rhymes is technically her name, too. It’s her Chinese name: Sui-Wun, which technically means small poem or small rhyme. Music is built right into her name.
Weissman’s musical history goes back almost as far, too. She remembers sitting under the piano while her dad would practice. She started playing the cello when she was three. According to her mother, Weissman saw Yo-Yo Ma on Sesame Street when she was 18 months old and her love affair with the cello began. “That’s the story,” says Weissman. “It must have been the sound of the cello that I loved, but it could have been him, because he’s such a charasmatic guy.”
As the grey clouds start to move directly overhead and threaten to pour down on us, Mok reveals the ultimate goal of Tiny Rhymes.
“I have very vague goals about becoming a better songwriter,” she says, finishing the last drop of her IPA. “That’s pretty much all I care about, and what can get me there is continuing to play with excellent musicians who inspire me. Katie is an amazing cellist, Kathryn is an amazing violinist. They both can sing and it’s great. I’ve been surprised by the successes that we’ve had due to people watching us perform and being interested in us. “
Weissman smiles, adding that Tiny Rhymes wouldn’t exist without the help of their local collegues. “The Buffalo music community is so intertwined and supportive and cooperative and that’s not something that we’ve found in other cities, and it’s a huge part of why we’ve been successful so far.”