Miles Phillips greets me at the door of his house with a high five. His hair is spiked and a tiny, colourful parrot badge is pinned to his blazer collar. The two huge cameras being lugged behind me by two producers don't faze him. This seven-year-old is a rock star.
Last week, Miles' father, Joel Phillips, posted a 'full band version' of his son's song heralding the eastern rosella – a bright parrot native to south-eastern Australia. The video has more than 1.5m views on Instagram and TikTok and almost 3,000 comments.
From a veranda to viral fame
'It all started off, I was at Raymond Island, and I was feeding the bird seed on the veranda, and birds just came along,' Miles tells me from his Sydney home. 'There were pigeons, there were lorikeets, there were rosellas, but the one bird … the main bird that stood out to me was definitely the eastern rosella.'
The chorus came to him in that moment: 'Eastern rosellas, eastern rosellas, look at the beautiful colours.' 'They were really friendly because they just kept tapping on the window. When I closed the door, they kept tapping on the window like, I want more seed. Then Dad and me started workshopping on it, and we made it into a song.'
Songwriting process and comparisons
He says his songwriting started with the chorus. 'Then … the verse, then the bridge, and yeah. It starts off with a little idea that I just have, and then I think of bigger ones, and then I get bigger ones until I'm happy with it.' Triple J Unearthed list the song as sounding like Hot Hot Heat, Vampire Weekend, the Strokes, the B-52s, the Kooks, Scouting For Girls, the Killers, Taylor Swift and the Ramones. The tune has been covered by Ben Lee and Ball Park Music, among others.
Hearing his song on the radio and covered by famous artists feels 'really cool' and 'a little bit strange and weird'. 'You're like, wow, I've never really heard it like that. I felt really well loved because everybody was sending really nice comments and everybody wanted to hear it.'
Future projects and family creativity
Miles has another song in the works called The Rock of Doom, and a new band the Spikeheads, with some friends. Miles, the band's drummer, belts out a sample – 'The Rock of Doom! The Rock of Doom! Because at four in the morning I tried to get up, get up, but someone picked me up' – and it's pop-rock Meat Loaf emerging from a seven-year-old boy. Miles has been playing the drums for two years, but tapping away with his hands 'for as long as I've known', his father says.
Joel Phillips says he and his wife have always fostered creativity in their four kids. '[It's] giving permission, it's just normal to sing, it's just normal to go and create something, it's not normal to stay on a screen all day. It's obviously a lot of fun to use your imagination.' Joel Phillips says when they first shared Eastern Rosellas, the then-top-charting song was subject to debate about whether it was produced by AI. 'And this week we have my seven-year-old's song about rosellas, which I think says something about, actually, our kids are going to be OK.'
