TEHYA, courtesy contradash.

Since she moved out of her house at 16, when her mom and stepdad moved from Seattle to the East Coast, but she refused to uproot her life, Tehya has lived on a houseboat, a house to a music collective in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, and a bed and breakfast where she got free room and board in exchange for work.

Singer-songwriter Tehya Vining, 24, moved to L.A. to pursue music full time in 2020—right before the start of the pandemic. Finally, after first writing for other artists, she stepped out on her own last year. She released a handful of songs, some of which will appear on her debut EP, sorry for the wait, coming out via Neon Gold Records on March. 7.

“I initially was really chill with just writing it for other people, and then I got my own set-up, and I learned how to record myself and engineer myself,” said the artist, who’s of Filipino and Cherokee descent, in a recent video call. “The more I was hearing the songs I was making on my own, the more I was like, ‘Dang, I should probably do this myself.’”

As it so happened, Neon Gold cofounder Derek Davies discovered her through a feature Tehya recorded on a song by Pertinence (her ex) called “Psycho” and reached out to find out more about her.

“[The song] was really fun, but it was just jokes,” she said. Davies “found it, and was like, ‘Dude, you should do this full time.’”

Up until then Tehya said she was still trying to find her sound and had spent a year in a recording studio to find it and what she wanted to accomplish with her music. She collected a handful of songs and a bit of a following on social media, with fans clamoring for her to release them. Davies’ offer with Neon Gold was the final push.

Tehya wrote her first song at 11 years old, as well as poetry. Her birthfather is a well-regarded drummer in the Seattle funk scene, while she said her stepfather is a painter, so she grew up around the arts. As a child, she’d go with her birthfather to concerts, where she’d sit on his lap and play drums, which she called her “party trick.”

“It was cool, but just seeing the inner workings of how he runs his shows … was really inspiring, and I wanted to be a part of it when I got older,” she said.

Throughout her life, her parents supported her artistic pursuits and never pushed her toward conventional studies. Then when she was 16, her mom and stepdad decided to move to Pennsylvania; Seattle became too expensive.

“I was a very independent child, so I was just kind of stubborn, stuck in my ways. I didn’t want to uproot my life,” she said, adding that while her birthfather had a fit with her decision to stay on her own, her mom and stepdad let her do it. “When they left, I just kind of figured it out on my own, which was cool. I’m glad I got the experience.”

First, she stayed with a friend on his mom’s houseboat on Lake Union in Seattle. The friend, who filmed music videos, would take her to a house on Capitol Hill that was home to several musicians. As she spent more time around them, she learned production by watching other artists and by teaching herself software like Pro Tools and FL Studio whenever a room opened.

By that point, she was also playing drums, guitar and piano.

She hung around the house so much that eventually she asked the owner if she could move in. Tehya lived there until after turning 17.

“Then I moved to the coast of Washington, when I was 18, and I got free board at a bed and breakfast so long as I worked,” Tehya said. “I would do anything and everything they needed me to do. It was cool.”

When a group of friends decided to make a last-minute trip to L.A., she joined them. Then, two days before they were to leave and go back home, she got offered a job by a modeling agency in L.A. A day after that, she was offered a gig as a songwriter. She took both of those opportunities and moved to L.A.

“I realized pretty quickly that writing music doesn’t really make you a lot of money unless you’re at the top. It wasn’t doing much for me, but the modeling was,” she said. “I don’t do it anymore, but I did it for around three years.”

That’s when Davies and Neon Gold entered the picture, and when she got to work writing songs. The five she’s released so far range from guitar-tinged pop tune “trap door” and hip-hop-flavored “biscuits & gravy,” to soulful “peach pit” and her latest, “spoons for sweets,” a flirtatious, minimalistic alt-pop number.

All the songs Tehya has released so far are about personal experiences, including debut single “crowd pleaser,” about a relationship in which an ex cared more about public perception than about her.

The EP, sorry for the wait, includes a few new songs, including “dust dog” and “annie alright.” She confessed to loving alliteration in her song titles. The former is about a dog named Gucci, who she met on a trip to Lake Tahoe with producer Cameron Hale to work on songs while going through a breakup.

“He’s so sweet and cute, and all he does all day is just lay around in the gravelly dust of the little road that leads up to the house [where they stayed],” she said. “I related that to the way I felt in my very stagnant and toxic relationship that I got out of. … It’s an ode to Gucci, but it’s also about my relationship.”

For the latter song, Tehya tried to create a character and envision a story for her.

“I don’t know why that was so inspiring for me in the moment, but I picked ‘Annie,’” she said. “Then I realized I was writing about myself. I went into it with the intention of making a character. I failed, but it’s fine.”

Contact editor Roman Gokhman at Bluesky.