Features

At Work: Thao Nguyen

A Voice for Others

Searching is a common denominator throughout 25-yearold Thao Nguyen’s five lively albums, cut with her band The Get Down Stay Down. From her earlier focus on interpersonal relationships (emphasis on a healthy love/sex ratio) cast in a hallmark of upbeat country/folk, Nguyen now broadens the scope on her latest, We The Common, looking at the world from more of an all-encompassing view.

Considering her recent work, she muses, “I wanted to make a concerted effort to expand my songwriting and change the narrative voice and a lot of that had to do with being an active part of my life instead of watching it pass by.”

Nguyen’s work at women’s advocacy groups, such as the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, influenced her latest album. (She initially wanted to be a social worker before realizing that it wasn’t in her constitution.) She dedicated the title track to Valerie Bolden, who Nguyen met at Valley State Prison and without whom, she says, the album would not exist.

“There was a moment she spoke about her daughters and it was something like, ‘Tell my girl I love her.’ It made me exist on another level,” she says. Nguyen says she not only sees victims of a failed legal system, but also a connection with individual people who are trapped in their own microcosms of domestic problems, abusive relationships and issues of motherhood.

Once focused mainly on Appalachian music and country blues, Nguyen wanted to add her love of early ‘90s hip-hop artists like OutKast, A Tribe Called Quest and Black Sheep into the mix this time. She partnered with producer John Congleton, who encouraged a looser, rawer sound with plenty of drums and bass that felt like “a dangerous party where the walls are booming and you don’t know what’s happening, and you just want to go.”

We The Common presents itself not as a memory of where Nguyen began as an artist but rather as an expanding roadmap of where she’s headed in her spiritual narrative. “I’m not religious in [the usual] sense, but there’s a vibrance that’s coming to play in my life,” she says. “I wanted to figure out how to be a better person and more accountable. The album is certainly among
that.”