On working on everything

The songwriter THAO has been endlessly busy outside the realm of record making since her last album Temple: guest-hosting the Song Exploder podcast, hosting the PBS TV show Southern Storytellers, developing a musical, film scoring and film starring (with collaborator/Macarthur Fellow artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, currently on exhibit in contemporary art institutions), gracing the cover of New York Times’s T magazine, and working on her first book for Graywolf Press. But THAO is a stage-commanding recording artist first and foremost, and Show Me is a deeply personal exploration of THAO’s journey toward full embodiment, a flaying of flesh and old burden to reveal the rapturously beating heart therein. The record drops October 30th via Kill Rock Stars. It’s the second album Nguyen has self-produced, this time alongside longtime friends Nate Brenner (also a co-writer) and Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards.

You recorded “Sick of the Times” as your version of a protest anthem, something that gets community organizers motivated and amped up. I do some local organizing work, so I want to hear more about that from you.

One of the reasons I moved to San Francisco was to be closer to a level of organizing that I always read about and studied, and when I first moved, I spent a summer in San Francisco volunteering at a skill center for the homeless. I majored in sociology. I thought I would be going into DV [domestic violence] prevention organizing.

I’ve always had such great respect for what is happening at the local level, and when I first moved to San Francisco proper and had lived here for a few years, a housemate of mine asked me to join CCWP, which is the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. That was my first and consistent contact with and glimpse of what remarkable, resilient organizing is.

I’m a fan of what organizing actually is, and I don’t know if I have the constitution to do it. I mean, this is part of it, right? You get in where you fit in. In the past, I’ve been involved at a level that wasn’t sustainable for what my career and touring was. I’m constantly, consistently trying to figure out how to use my work and best get in where I fit in. Making music is part of that. Using whatever platform I have is part of that.

CCWP inspired your [2013] album We the Common. Can you talk about how, at that juncture earlier in your career, working with CCWP made you realize, “I can make music that’s centered around organizing, around social justice, not just the common themes of love and desire”? Even though that’s also present.

It was a huge part of my life at that point, and the people I met—the first single off that album is called “We the Common (For Valerie Bolden),” and Valerie Bolden was the first person I met inside when I started doing legal advocacy visits in Central California. That album was a way to respectfully bear witness to the stories I was hearing every time I went in, and it was a way to try to present real-life people on the inside to real-life people on the outside and bridge that gap, even for myself.

The things I saw in there were so—I had no idea the kind of parallel universe that goes on with the warehousing of people in this country, and I still have few words for it. I was impacted in such a way, and I wrote that album to capture that, better understand it, and celebrate the people who make up [CCWP].

I’ve always tried the kind of anthemic political song. I don’t know what its life is in modern times. I don’t know exactly what it’s supposed to look like. I don’t know how it transcends the different silos and becomes that banner anthem that we used to have. I’m not sure it can exist anymore and lyrically, I’m not that kind of songwriter. “We the Common” was this story I was trying to capture of a person in this one moment of reckoning, where she was deeply vulnerable and talked about how she missed her daughters so much. “Sick of the Times” is also just trying to capture a moment, but “Sick of the Times” is a more concerted effort.

You’re donating a dollar of every ticket sold for your upcoming West Coast dates to Working Families Power. Given that the streaming economy and increasingly hostile touring economy leave increasingly fewer dollars for artists who aren’t at the top of the food chain, can you talk about why that decision still felt important to you as a creative person with a platform, even though the resources for making donations may be increasingly less available?

As far back as I can remember, any extensive tour I’ve done as a headliner, I’ve tried to make sure we donated a portion, and it felt the most right and connected to donate to each organization locally and also, if we could, inviting members of that organization to the show, just to have some kind of grounding and bearing within the place we were in, just as a sign of respect and acknowledgement.

I’m lucky enough to get to do this for a living, and I’ve obviously never been in it for the money, so if I can make it work, I’ll make it work, and I assume that I will make it work, and I just want to be right. I want to be a part of contributing, and I want to set an example of contributing. I wish I could do more, but the general model for all of this is, do what you can sustainably so that you can keep going and everyone can keep going.

Regarding “I assume it’s going to work,” I’d love to hear more about that. I’m interpreting that as “I’d rather take the risk” instead of the risk aversion that prevents many people from doing something like this. Can you talk about holding and growing that mentality?

It’s part of my mentality in general, because I’ve never quite had another plan, and that’s been part of my plan. If you give yourself other options, you might take them, but if you’re clear on what you want your path to be–and I think that in itself is a great fortune, to be clear enough to know—momentum begets momentum and positivity, and I try to stay very positive.

As far as the actual fundraising or donating money, I know the corners I can cut. Ideally, I’m just a hair shy of monasticism, and I can be a true ascetic, and I love that. I’m not worried about not going out or something.

To make a living making art, you have to have this irrational swagger sometimes. It’s not good all the time, because I think that’s kind of insufferable. But when I’m on stage, or when I’ve got to present as though I know what I’m doing and you should trust me and come with me on this journey through this show, I can tap into that. It doesn’t really work otherwise. Somebody has to have this almost irrational belief, and if you’re the person, if it’s your operation, you’ve got to be the one.

In terms of not just your [2016] album A Man Alive but a lot of your work, your lyrics are considerably more personal than with your average songwriter. How is creating music inextricably linked to your emotional processing?

It is, for better or for worse, inextricably linked. The gift of getting to diversify and expand beyond writing my own personal music is that I can do it with more ease. I’m developing a musical right now, and the songs I’m writing—even though I’m very invested in the process, I belong to a team, and we are in service of this adaptation. It’s been a great relief, actually, to write music that I’m not as emotionally invested in.

For my own albums, if I’m going to do it, unfortunately, the same reason it will be so painful and will sometimes feel like it will be my demise, is the same thing required for me to do it in the first place. I started writing songs when I was probably 11 or 12, and they came from a very sad, lonely place, as I’m sure many creators can attest. There’s a reason it becomes your life and your survival mechanism, and I’m so grateful for it. It’s in my musculature, my muscle memory to use music and writing in a very personal way, and the effort, or the challenge, is to communicate things so that they can still be accessed [by] and resonant with other people.

You’re so much more than just a musician. You’ve been a guest host of Song Exploder, you’ve done a million and a half other creative pursuits. How do you balance them all? How do you tend to every garden?

I’ve learned the hard way that you have to limit the varietals in the garden, if I may extend the metaphor. I read once, I don’t know who—it was an interview—someone was saying, “Three things in the air are okay. Four, not so good,” and I agree.

I can handle three ongoing projects, and right now it’s the album [Show Me], but the album is several projects, because once you’re done making it, you’ve got to promote it, you’re making videos, so it’s like three to seven projects for an album. But I’m working on the musical and writing a book. Last year, I was fully making the album and doing these other two things, and I also shot a film and made the score, and it was too much. You can tell when it’s not exciting and you’re dreading—it’s just this heightened state of anxiety.

The way I quell it all is, I can’t express how much more I would rather be busy than not busy, and I had years where I only had to make an album, and it took me forever. Both A Man Alive and [2020’s] Temple took a long time, and I didn’t have substantial side projects going on, and I think it hurt the process, because I was so hard on myself and was so maxed out on this one thing, but there was no other way to generate energy, momentum, or self-belief.

If you’re hitting the same wall and you can’t even veer off and try to hit another wall, that’s tough. It helps me work on everything if I work on everything, because otherwise, it can get dark very quickly when you need to make the thing and it’s very important to you, but you can’t get there.

You’re gesturing at such an interesting point here, because a relatively music-industry-standard amount of time passed between We the Common and A Man Alive, and between A Man Alive and Temple. You were just saying they took a long time, but it’s been a much longer time between Temple and Show Me, and it seems like you’re implying that Show Me didn’t take as long precisely because you were doing other things. Am I understanding that correctly?

You are understanding that correctly, yeah. It’s been a long time, but I was busy with other things, so I wasn’t worried. There was no existential crisis, and I enjoyed it way more, because I just felt momentum and energy from other things, and everything was feeding each other and it was really cool.

If you’re working in different mediums, then if you want to express it in a film score and you can’t quite get it there, you’re like, “Well, maybe in the essay I’m writing, I’m expressing it.” But if it’s not there, then maybe it’s a song. But if it’s not the song, maybe you use it for the essay, and it’s great to have the versatility to try to chase the execution of this idea.

If you’re still playing older songs live, or even if you’re playing Show Me songs that are more lyrically intimate, what does that feel like? In particular, what does it feel like to revisit your old work? How do you feel about it?

It depends on the subject matter. For instance, with the song “Temple,” that’s one I’ll probably play every show from here on out because it means so much to me. That one, I can still get emotional, especially if I introduce it and I say, “This is about my mother’s life before, during, and after war, and she’s telling me about it.” I have enough distance now that I can do it and pretty much not cry, but when I first was introducing it to the world, I would get pretty emotional.

A song about my dad and our estrangement, I’ve moved away from playing some of those because I’m kind of done. I don’t want to revisit it. There’s a song on [Show Me] that’s basically, “Please god, let it be my last song about my father,”and that’s how I feel about him, like, I’m done with this dude. I’m in touch with him, kind of, but I’ve reached a different place in my life where I don’t need to exist in this plane anymore with him.

Before, when A Man Alive came out, I had some pretty rough moments on stage, because it was so visceral and present. I hadn’t quite reached that point where it was no longer mine and I’m just presenting it. Ideally, with a deeply personal song, you get to that point pretty quickly. When you’re making it, it’s for you, and then once you put it on the album and you release it, that’s for whoever can receive it, and then, you’re trying to foster this communion when you perform it. But you do have to build up a shield to protect yourself.

Other songs, I can play now and just appreciate who I was when I wrote them. I’ve been doing this long enough that I’ve had stretches where I wanted to quit music. I wasn’t getting where I wanted to be. I was really critical of what I was producing, and to still be able to do it, now, I can revisit those songs and be like, “Well, you’re just always giving it your best shot.” I can celebrate them in a way that I couldn’t for a long time.

How did you get through those moments and keep making music?

That’s part of why there were so many years [between] We the Common and A Man Alive, and then A Man Alive to Temple. Those gaps were a reflection of, I had so much writer’s block, and I didn’t even know if I wanted to tour anymore. I was so exhausted. I was touring from 2008 onward, and it was lucky and it was solid, and we were just going, and you just say yes and you go, go, go.

How did I keep going? I didn’t. How did it happen? I realized that—and it took years to realize this—it was probably in the pandemic when I finally realized that I loved music so much. I cared so much, and it’s really hard for me to fully want things because I’m so afraid of not getting them. That’s just deep childhood stuff, right? I couldn’t admit how much I wanted it, and I was trapped in wanting it so badly but not being able to admit it. I wanted to quit all the time, because I was like, “This is not good. It’s not healthy for me.”

I kept telling myself this life wasn’t healthy for me, but actually, it’s the only life I want. Denying how much I wanted it was what was unhealthy. It just kept breaking my heart, but I was breaking my own heart over it, so I had to reestablish and reassess what it means to be successful in my reality.

Is there anything more you want to say about creativity in general, or as an addition to anything I already asked that you didn’t quite get to say when I first asked it?

Just that I’m so grateful. I’m so glad I’m still here and I get to make something, or many things, every day no matter who it’s for. I mean, in the end, it’s for myself, and I’m just so glad I’m still here.