Thao Nguyen

The Virginian braves the wild world, one sting at a time

By Katy Henriksen
Published: January 30th, 2008 | 4:22pm

When asked about the state of feminism today, singer-songwriter Thao Nguyen of Falls Church, Virginia, says she’s most concerned about the stigma surrounding it. “The term ‘feminism’ — well there are so many definitions of it — but at the heart of it is equality and freedom of choice,” she says.

Thus it’s not surprising when Nguyen cites Lilith Fair as an artistic influence, unabashedly choosing a now snarkily referenced cultural event. It was the all-women’s music festival that sparked Nguyen’s interest in becoming a musician. “Just to see that as a little girl was so inspirational,” she says. “I don’t care about the jokes people make. ‘It’s cheesy’ or whatever. At the heart of it, I felt it was amazing.”

Around that time, Nguyen picked up a guitar that had been lying around her house. At 12, she taught herself how to play by looking up tabs; her first two songs were R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” and Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl,” choices that probably received the same reception that Don McLean’s “American Pie” does for street huskers. “I played them over and over again,” Nguyen says. “And people hated it.”

Lucky for us, she persisted and along the way developed a world-weary alto tinged with hope. Her delivery is part sing-song, part punk forthrightness, and part folk, as evidenced on her second full-length release, We Brave Bee Stings and All, released January 29, 2008.

Stings and All is an artful balance between whimsy and introspection that’s at once breezy and intense, rhythmic and lyrical, shimmery and dark. The songs are mostly swingy, up-tempo and jangly; thanks to backing band the Get Down Stay Down. It’s Nguyen’s off-kilter vocals and serious lyrics that add depth to what, at first glance, seems a purely playful affair from a skillful four-piece band.

“A lot of the lyrics are really dark,” Nguyen confirms. “Not that I’m a misanthrope. I can joke around or whatever, but there’s darkness there, some sort of melancholy.”

The group originally set out to record a four-song demo for Kill Rock Stars in Seattle. In the process, the label decided that they wanted a full-length album. “So we went ahead and made plans to finish the record,” she says. There was only one little problem: producer Tucker Martine had a very tight schedule. “We had 10 days to do seven more songs. I hadn’t even written two of them.”

Nguyen relays the setting of a dreary, rain-drenched March spent in Portland. She showed up a few days early and set up shop in an empty house that Martine’s brother had recently acquired. “I just had lots of mate and green tea, and I was staying up all night,” she recalls. “It was just me in a house with no furniture, and I was just trying to write new songs.”

When Martine and the band arrived, they headed straight for the studio. It was there that the group spent a jam-packed couple of weeks writing and recording Stings and All. The experience was so intense that Nguyen suffered chest pains and, in looking back, admits that she doesn’t remember half of what went on during the session.

Compounding her anxiety, Nguyen was transitioning from life at the College of William and Mary when writing songs for the new album. “It was the first time I could remove myself and just figure out the way I was brought up,” Nguyen explains, alluding to her un-pampered upbringing under the guidance of a strong single mother. “In a lot of the album, there’s a newfound awareness or cognizance. I’m apologetic in a lot of the songs. A lot of them are like, ‘I fucked up, sorry.’”

Readily admitting that her songs are primarily autobiographical, Nguyen is also refreshingly unrestrained when recounting the stories behind them. The album title, for example, takes its name from lyrics in “Swimming Pool,” a banjo-heavy, furiously paced romp that recounts a disturbing spring break trip Nguyen took her freshman year. “It was the dregs of humanity I swear,” Nguyen recalls of the experience. “These dudes on balconies … I call them balcony boys — you know: sipping on Bud Light, and you walk by, and they assess you — they assess whether or not they’re even going to hoot and holler.”

The bee-stings reference is an offshoot of such potentially humiliating moments. Nguyen explains, “That line is just about resilience and trying to keep on, despite what others do and what you do to yourself.” It’s also her most feminist song, she says, defining the term “feminism” further. And when she does so, you can guess it’s said forthrightly, unapologetically, and without any hint of a stigma.

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IN HER OWN WORDS BY THAO NGUYEN

We asked Thao Nguyen to tell us about herself. In her own crush-worthy words, Nguyen e-mailed Venus Zine Up Front Editor Amy Westervelt a long list of her current preoccupations and future aspirations. Here it is in its entirety.

Here is what I am up to for the foreseeable future: buying vitamins and natural health food that travels well for tour, touring, running into old romantic entanglements while on tour, interact kind of awkwardly with them, go off tour. Sleep at my mom's house, tour, freak out that I'm not writing any new songs because I've been on tour, try to get emotionally compromised so I have anything interesting to write about, record demos, write more songs, find them inadequate. Cry.

More concrete, less abstract: The band and I will be touring U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, and Australia from about late January to April. We'll also shoot videos for “Beat (Health, Life, and Fire)” and maybe “Big Kid Table.” In my off time, I'd probably return to San Francisco (where I used to live) to catch up and work farmer's markets. I also plan to volunteer in the Mission District of San Francisco. I used to volunteer at the women's building in the mission and still have ties there. I really like cooking and am incredibly impressionable when I read health food literature, so I will probably buy a lot of blue-green algae and try to use it in all my meals.

Slim [Moon, Nguyen’s manager] suggested I make a list of things I do, believe, and enjoy (some are repeated from earlier nonsense): Health food, cooking, telling stories about how I grew up working in my mom's Laundromat / boasting that I fold laundry very deftly, and how I used to make change by hand and how I could fish out $5 in quarters out of a bucket just judging by the weight and feel. I used to be obsessed with NFL football and Dan Marino in particular. I still catch a game now and then, not with him playing, he's retired. He's got plastic for knees. I write short stories sometimes, but they're really short because I have very little discipline. I used to write record reviews for No Depression, but I stopped, because that is sure-fire bad karma. Also, they stopped asking me. I am learning to play the drums and am trying to get better at piano and have a coronet that I will one day learn for live shows. When I'm not on the road I am probably sitting in a room somewhere by myself, hacking away like a hack. Then I play guitar to console myself for being bad at playing those other instruments. I hang out with my mom and my brother. My mom tells me she is very excited for me but that I should stop dressing “like a hoodrat.” My brother defends me. Later, he tells me adult things like “you should really set up your IRA.” OK! Well, hope any of this is useful. Sorry it's so dense — I'm an ego maniac.

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Blackstock (over 4 years)
Just a quick note from the No Depression folks -- we were quite happy to have Thao's contributions to our pages in recent issues -- certainly we didn't stop asking her to contribute on account of any problems with her writing, which was quite good. We also have a short piece on Thao's new album scheduled to run in our March-April issue, which is really more of a concrete reason for her to step back from writing for us, at least for the moment (as she seems to acknowledge with her "bad karma" comment). It's just better in terms of warding off any potential conflict-of-interest matters to not have her reviewing records in the same issue where we're covering her own work editorially. That's a hard line to walk...although simply in terms of her talent in both directions, I have little doubt Thao could do quite well whether she's pursuing music as an artist or as a reviewer. Thanks for giving her some attention here. Peter Blackstock No Depression