Catching Up With... Thao Nguyen

Photo by Tarina Westlund

Thao Nguyen just bought some new underwear, but she still needs to do laundry. “I don’t like to wear underwear if I haven’t washed it first, you know?” she says. “Even if it just came from the store, it didn’t come off another person—just the chemicals or whatever.” Fortunately, the 25-year-old Northern Virginia native and Bay Area transplant is less cautious in the ways of love, as evidenced by Know Better Learn Faster, her pummeling sophomore album (out now). Penned in the wake of a breakup and recorded earlier this year in Portland with her band The Get Down Stay Down (un-related drummer Willis Thompson and bass player Adam Thompson) and producer Tucker Martine, it’s an exuberant collection of twitching, pacing contemplations on love gone wrong, featuring contributions from Laura Veirs and Andrew Bird, among other musical friends. A few weeks ago—days before heading out on a fall tour and minutes before heading out for a much-needed trip to her neighborhood laundromat—Nguyen talked with Paste about her new album, not being role model and the weirdness of being clapped at for a living.

Paste: What part of San Francisco do you live in?
Thao Nguyen: I live in the Haight, actually.

Paste: Is it exciting as it once was?
Nguyen: Certainly not. I think it’s more annoying than it once was, but it’s really cool to be close to the ocean and the park. But there’s a lot of aggressive teenagers asking for money for pot.

Paste: How long have you lived in town?
Nguyen: I’ve been here off and on for about three years now. There was a period of time in the middle where I basically gave up my apartment because we were on tour so much, so I was away for about a year and then I came back, only to leave again to go on tour.

Paste: I was actually up in Portland while you were there recording the new album. I did a story that I had to talk to Tucker Martine for, and I went up to his house and I asked who he’d been recording with that day and he was like, “Do you know this girl, Thao?” At that time he said you were sort of couch-surfing in Portland while you were making the album. How did that work out?
Nguyen: That worked out surprisingly well, thanks to the hospitality of our friends in Portland. We stayed with a friend of ours who I used to work with who’s really gracious—she let a couple of us crash with her, and I stayed at her mom’s place. We’re in and out of Portland a lot, so we’ve had to rely pretty heavily on the kindness of others. It was fun, you know—there was structure. We would all carpool to work, Willis and Adam and I, and we hardly ever get to see that kind of structure. It was fun and we had a great time and we love Tucker.

Paste: Tell me about working with him for the second time.
Nguyen: We couldn’t even imagine it being better than the first. It was great. We’re all great friends, and we don’t really get to talk much when we’re not working together because Tucker’s really busy and we’re on tour a lot. It was awesome. It was as though we could build upon our last record and we knew each other better and we were more comfortable in the studio and we all communicated better.

Paste: Did you kind of feel like you had it more together after the first time?
Nguyen: Oh, for sure—only because the first time, I had no idea what I was doing. Ever. I couldn’t really grasp the concept of recording an album and I couldn’t fully concentrate on it—I had a lot of other things going on. We were just so new to the process.

Paste: Did you have something like a game plan when you went in?
Nguyen: Definitely, more than the last. My goal for this record was that we better convey what kind of band we are live. And it also should be considered that when we did We Brave Bee Stings and All, we were a brand-new band, formed just a month prior, so I don’t think we were comfortable or even really sure of what our sound was or what we wanted. And I think after a year and a half of pretty much constant touring, you develop more of an identity. And one thing that we aspire to is a more energetic live show—I think I’m a lot more emotional on stage than I am in real life and I wanted that intensity to be palpable. I don’t know to what extent we met our goals.

Paste: I loved Bee Stings, and when I saw you guys live I was actually really taken aback by how different it was. You could have easily been this little folky girl like up on stage kind of withering, acting like you didn’t want to be there. But it was like, “Holy crap, you’re kind of insane.” Your hair was just everywhere and I was like, “Alright, this is great! We don’t have to stand here sipping our beers quietly so we don’t disturb her concentration.”
Nguyen: [Laughs] That’s rad. That’s really good to hear. I’m glad that’s the experience you had.

Paste: How did you develop the way you act on stage? Not that it feels contrived or forced or anything, but did you have to think about, “Oh, I think I want to act this way when I go up on stage”?
Nguyen: No, it’s weird. I think that we want to put on a good show, I think that we want to engage the audience, and I think how that happens is gratefully very natural. I don’t know where it comes from because if you knew me in my real life, I’m not like that. It’s as though there’s a certain sort of freedom and comfort that I have which isn’t really anywhere else to be found. But it’s fun, you know. We want to have fun, and if we [play] every night, then we need to get into it every night. And I think the show experience is very symbiotic one, so if we can get the crowd to give us some, then we can give them more and just go back and forth with that. But it’s never a conscious decision, but I’m glad that’s the way it turns out. It’s probably just the most honest we can be.

Paste: When people who know you outside of music come to see you, are they kind of surprised by the way you act? Not that you’re onstage biting the heads off of animals or something, but you’re definitely very extroverted and I can tell that you’re very even-keeled when you’re not on stage.
Nguyen: [Laughs] Well, I like to have the animals delivered to me with the heads already off.

Paste: Well yeah, that’s just inconvenient. You shouldn’t have to be doing it.
Nguyen: I try not to be a diva, but if you’re gonna bring me a chicken, I just want the blood to be ready. But anyway, I think they are surprised, yeah. But my friends know that it’s an aspect of my personality. In a normal situation, a social situation, it’s not appropriate to act as though everyone is looking at you. ’Cause that makes you an asshole.

Paste: Well, some people don’t really care.
Nguyen: Yeah, yeah. [Laughs] I try not to hang out with those people. But if people pay money and we are there to sort of share this experience together, then I want it to feel like something. And I’m not saying it’s successful every time, but I don’t want someone to leave the show feeling as though nothing happened.

Paste: How well did you know the guys who became your band when you started making music together, and how has that changed?
Nguyen: We started as friends. Willis and I went to college together, and we were hanging out with Adam—we met him in Richmond, and we played a show. It all happened naturally and as casually as it can, I think. And then we went on tour and kind of just didn’t stop and now we find ourselves sort of musically married.

Paste: Well, two of the guys already have the same last name.
Nguyen: [Laughs] it’s actually just a trio now, because our fourth member is no longer with the band. It’s just me, Adam and Willis… I’m the non-Thompson. They’re starting to take over. I feel like my days are numbered.

Paste: When you write songs, is it just you or do you collaborate with them lyrically?
Nguyen: I write the songs, and then I bring them to them and they write their own parts, because they play drums and bass way better than I do. And then we confer on the arrangements. But the songs always start with me on acoustic guitar and I write all the lyrics, the basic songs, and then we flesh out.

Paste: Tell me about writing songs for the album and how it all came about, because I know it was pretty emotionally intense for a lot of the tracks.
Nguyen: This album, although I did not plan for it, sort of coincided with the end of a relationship and so a lot of the record—not all of it, but a lot of it—is about the end of that, the end of important things. And yeah, there’s a lot of emotion on it because it was a very intense pocket of time where I had some songs I had to be writing and obviously I was trying to work this thing out and it came pretty easily, I’ll say that. For however unfortunate the circumstances, it sort of fueled the process.

Paste: Whoever it was that a lot of the songs are about, do you know if he has heard what came out of it?
Nguyen: No, I don’t think that I would facilitate a listening session or anything. I suppose it will happen eventually.

Paste: As a songwriter—it’s not like you’re a secret songwriter in your bedroom and no one knows. But do you think that, since publicly you are a songwriter, does that make having relationships of any kind trickier? Even with friends or family members, if something bad happens, is it, “Oh God, she’s going to go write a song about it.”
Nguyen: I haven’t really run into that. I would say that what makes it most difficult to maintain any kind of relationship is being on tour for most of my life, and I think that will totally debilitate anything you try for. But as far as that, no. And I think also, I would hope that when I write song lyrics, I try to be vague enough that it could or could not be about a lot of things. I think that appeals to me more. I would never use a name or anything, or even a specific situation.

Paste: It’s not like there’s one called “To Scott, You Ruined My Life.”
Nguyen: Yeah, that’s the next record. Our double live album.

Paste: On this album, most of the songs, even though they’re vague, they’re based in like very specific conflicts—like “Body,” which kind of blew the top of my head off because it’s so angry but also so sad. But then there’s “The Give,” which doesn’t feel like it’s your voice or character. It feels like another person talking.
Nguyen: “The Give” is an example of a song that’s not about a particular relationship or a romantic one at all. It’s actually written from the perspective of a father to his daughter—specifically, mine to me. Or what I think it might be, but that obviously is a pretty, whatever, strife ridden relationship. But that one’s from his perspective. But “Body”—you know, it’s funny, that was more about a feeling that had happened more than once, more a feeling than an address to an actual specific person.

Paste: I think any song that kind of devolves into yelling at the end has an additional emotional punch, like, “Oh, you’re not holding anything back here.”
Nguyen: You know, I didn’t mean for that to happen, but I guess it’s been boiling for a while now. There’s a lot more screaming and shouting on the record than I thought there would be.

Paste: Who is doing all the screaming?
Nguyen: It depends on which song we’re talking about, but in “Body” it’s me and then my friend Merrill, who is otherwise known as Tuneyards. And then in “Oh. No.” which could be considered more of a screamer, it’s me and—I really wanted a kind of female choir on this record and so they show up in a few places. It’s Laura Veirs, Merrill and Shelley Short, who’s a songwriter in Portland. And then there’s screaming in “Fixed It!” at the beginning—that’s Adam and Willis and Tucker.

Paste: All the different people who are on the album—did you plan for them to come in? Because I know when I was out there talking to Tucker he was like, “Yeah, people just kinda come by because they live in the neighborhood, and they’ll end up playing on somebody else’s album.”
Nguyen: Yeah, that’s the amazing thing about Portland is that you can have that happen. You have all of these amazing musicians just hanging out and Tucker is friends with them all, thankfully. Merrill I definitely wanted because she’s a good friend of mine and we’d been on tour and so that was planned. And then you’re recording a song and you pretty much focus only on that one until it’s complete and so songs would come up and there’d be these spaces where we could hear something and then we would bring it up. Like, “Know Better Learn Faster,” for instance—we didn’t plan on Andrew Bird playing on it. We didn’t even know Andrew Bird—we were just really big fans of his and Tucker is a friend and Andrew was in town and he heard the track and agreed to play on it. It was very last minute but it was awesome.

Paste: Have you ever wound up randomly being on anyone else’s album before?
Nguyen: No, I’d love to be on other people’s records, though… I would, totally, if anyone ever wanted me to.

Paste: Tell me about the giant paper mache heart that’s on the cover of the album.
Nguyen: My friend made that, my friend who photographed the cover and designed the record. I didn’t have much to do with it—I was on tour or something and I came home and we’d scheduled this big photo shoot for the record and we had been bandying ideas back and forth and I definitely wanted the guys to be on the cover, and then we thought about a party scene, and then I wanted it to convey more of the darkness of the record. But I did think that this was more of an energetic album this time, so I wanted that juxtaposition and I wanted to display more self-destructive habits and then I wanted people to be watching and sort of gleaning a satisfaction from it, which is sort of the darker side of when you have to—when you choose to—write about your own life. It’s sort of a weird trade-off.

Paste: Do you feel like it was a choice? Was there a time that you were like, “Maybe I don’t want to put that much of myself out there”? Because I know some people feel it’s just not an option to not write about themselves.
Nguyen: I think when I write songs, I want to write about—I’ve always written songs that are personal. That’s just the music I choose to make. And then there’s there complication of people actually hearing it and exposing yourself and—I dunno. And maybe I modified it to make the lyrics open-ended enough that they could or could not be about a lot of things, make them available to interpretation for people to be able to attach things. But if I could write more narrative stuff that’s more detached, I would—I just don’t feel like it’d appeal to me. I guess I don’t presume that people really give a shit.

Paste: The heart, was it full of candy, or was it full of nasty corn-starch blood?
Nguyen: No, it wasn’t full of anything. It was an empty heart.

Paste: Oh my God, was it that way on purpose? It sounds so metaphorical.
Nguyen: Yeah, I know. Seriously. It was a matter of logistics, in that we were going to Photoshop anything that came out of the heart. It just didn’t make sense to put anything in it.

Paste: I want to ask you about We Brave Bee Stings and All, and also the song that that comes from—this idea of making an example of yourself to younger girls, taking care of them and making mistakes so they don’t have to. Is that something you feel is important?
Nguyen: I think I wouldn’t presume to ever be a role model for anyone, only because it’s just the gravity of it, the importance of it—I don’t know if I would be worthy. But I do take that very seriously, and I’ve always been very interested in women’s advocacy work and I think that’s where more of my interests are. And I think it’s very easy to get caught up in yourself when your job is to essentially think about your emotions, and you can really build up this image to whatever extent try to exist in a more public sphere. And I think that can be really dangerous. You know, for your job, people clap at you? It’s awesome, but it’s really skewed—it’s a really skewed perception of reality. I think that when I work with younger kids and especially with younger girls, when I try to step outside of this music thing, it really helps me and I hope that I can help in whatever way.

Paste: What do you do with the kids?
Nguyen: I do a lot of writing workshops in San Francisco—I work with 826 Valencia, just recently. That’s another thing—when you’re touring, when you’re traveling so much you can’t really do much, but when I have time I tutor and I just did a couple of rock ‘n’ roll camps. I did one in Portland, the Rock ’n Roll Camp for Girls. King of amazing. It was so incredible. And we work pretty closely with Oxfam, the international aid organization, which I was involved with before I started doing music full time, that I think are really important to stay with.

Paste: When you were growing up, when you were first getting into music, was it female musicians that you looked up to, or was it more male musicians?
Nguyen: I think I looked up to female musicians more, just ‘cause it was imperative to see that it was possible. And I just related to them better, mostly just to have them set the example showing that they had done it and, “You can do it, too.” And if a younger girl sees that, that’s the least and the most that we can do—just to show that it’s possible.

Paste: Compared to the number of very high profile male musicians, so few female musicians are of the same status—but also I wonder if, for you, it was different because there are even fewer Asian-American female musicians, or even Asian-American male musicians. Was that something you were conscious of?
Nguyen: Growing up, no, funnily enough. I never really thought about it terms of ethnicity, I just did the sex thing—the gender thing.

Paste: The Sex Thing_—_that’s your next album.
Nguyen: [Laughs] Like TLC’s Crazy Sexy Cool. But anyway—no, I never thought about it, because the challenges I faced were for more gender-based things. Just stupid things that when they start to happen a lot they really start to irk you. Like at an open mic night—“You play guitar well for a girl.” And as far as my ethnicity, it comes up more now a lot, a lot more than I thought it would, which is fine. My only suspicions when questions about my ethnicity come up are because I don’t really write about it. When people bring it up, I don’t get why it’s relevant.

Paste: You’re not like the Margaret Cho of indie rock.
Nguyen: Right. I’m not by any means ashamed. They often ask, do I sing any Vietnamese folk songs? And I’m like, “I guess you can ask that, but…” So obviously, there are things that make me a little uneasy because I’m afraid of the motivation behind them. But as far as growing up and not seeing that, I never really thought about it.