Mia Stegner Couldn’t Stop Winning If She Tried

By Annie Wojnarowski

“Everything I finish I put out”, Mia Stegner tells me over Zoom. A musician with over eight years of experience under her belt, Stegner has released five albums, twenty-two singles, and one-hundred songs as of April 30th, 2021. With an average of sixteen songs per album, Stegner is someone who seems to never have writer's block. A cascading waterfall of a music catalogue is something that Stegner attributes to wanting to share things without having to interact directly with people: “There’s a separation that makes it more comfortable even though I’m also really diving into some personal stuff.” These songs, especially from her most recent album, Scribbled Pleas on Yellowed Keys, talks about obsessive thinking, anxiety, depression, and the feeling of impending doom during a once in a lifetime pandemic. There is a gentle honesty in every Stegner song, floating between radical vulnerability and playful tongue and cheek. What makes a Stegner song a Stegner song is less about the sonic personality of it and more of the diary tone reminiscent of artists like Dodie, Samia, and Florist. “I think imagery and metaphors are very intrinsic to my mental health and my existence,” Stegner tells me from her childhood bedroom, “I do a lot of journaling and that’s how a lot of my songs start.”

Connecting her coping mechanisms for anxiety and depression to her creative ventures is something that is imperative to Stegner. Her music, which she sees as mini diary entries, can be looked at as a tracker of growth; not only to see how she’s grown as an artist, but also as an emerging adult with ever changing wants, desires, and likes. When asked about how college has impacted her sound, she makes it clear that the absence of the experience (due to the pandemic) has been most influential. “For the last year I’ve been doing online learning which I think I leaned toward thinking was the right decision for me and my family. But it definitely was challenging and isolating.” What makes it even harder for Stegner though is the fact that this was her last year as an undergraduate: “it brings some extra grief to it in terms of the question of what could’ve been or what did I miss out on which I think everyone really relates to right now.” With immense wisdom, Stegner points to that as being the college experience right now. That universal feeling has been a driving force for the music that she’s been making at the moment. However, she’s taking more time digesting her feelings this time around, “I think the older I get, or just the more albums I write, the more I put pressure on myself to make good songs. I’ve been able to put more thought into the creation process in terms of trying to make them higher quality songs. That’s been a shift of trying to be more dedicated to the music process and the end product in addition to the urge to expel all of my emotions and get them out into the world.”

This is not the only new experiment Stegner is putting into her creative process. In 2020, with an additional fifty college students tied to the project, Stegner wrote and directed Rabbits Under the Shed, an animated children’s musical. “I loved writing that and it definitely makes me want to get into the idea of writing more musicals. It was fun to combine my two passions of screenwriting and creative writing.” Nominated for an EVVY Award, and an official selection in three film festivals, it’s fair to say that Stegner has had a good track record of successfully crossing into different mediums. However, in what became a pattern during our conversation, instead of talking about her accolades, she tells me about the people who have helped her to get to this moment: “Having a team of nearly fifty students during the animation, the voice acting, the story boarding, the music…was definitely humbling because I felt like since it started with me, it was very humbling to see these people get on board with the project and also be able to make it their own in a sense. It became very much a collaboration.” With a musical, five albums, and a successful freelance business under her belt, at twenty years old, Stegner is a near expert at her craft. If she’s lightyears ahead of her peers now, I sit in feverous anticipation for what she will accomplish by the time she’s thirty.