This piece was featured first on Nov 5 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.
There’s something so fun about an underground show at an unnamed venue. Show up at some warehouse at 8 o’clock? Sure!
So it went that last Sunday night we arrived to see our friend, the musician Thao Nguyen, for a little tune-up secret show in Oakland before she heads out on the road to support her new album, Show Me.
There was a fire pit outside the small white box where she’d be playing in front of a grid of windows and flashing lights. The opener was a fascinating experimental musician named Flung (aka Kashika Kollaikal). She strummed wind chimes, cranked a music box, twisted knobs, looped sounds, triggered field recording samples, and sang us into some lightly glitching synthetic retrofuturistic nature.
Thao was milling about like a normal person, which by day, I suppose she is. She goes to the gym and hikes and reads The New Yorker and cooks delicious vegetarian food like any old East Bay person. Maybe even like someone who went to a math and science high school in Virginia before becoming an indie rock darling in college.
But that’s the Clark Kent side of her, the person who must remember which day of the month street sweeping is.
I have seen Thao play before, but only in odd settings: San Francisco city hall (with an orchestra!), the San Francisco public library, etc. She’s always been amazing, but the circumstances and audiences were unusual. As a long-time fan of her music, I have wanted to see her on a regular stage with a regular band playing rock ’n roll.
And Sunday, I finally got my chance!
Thao’s presence is enigmatic. Her dancing is slow and slinky. Her band direction is precise and gentle: a wiggle of the hand to the brass, a single finger up on the last loop through a chorus. Her audience banter is endearingly self-effacing, as if it is a surprise she’s found herself up there shredding on the guitar.
I have a metaphor for her style, but it is very nerdy, so let me explain. Some TVs have “high dynamic range,” meaning that their darkest darks and their brightest brights are further apart than on a muddier monitor.
Thao has off-the-charts dynamic range at every temporal scale. Her voice can ramp from whisper to howl over the course of a syllable. Her songs can begin in bedroom-voiced whispers and escalate into epic sonic storms. Her albums span bouncy almost dance jams to slow bluesy vamps.
Her songwriting is deceptively simple, enhanced by her idiosyncratic and unexpected phrasing. Take a track like “Give & Want.” She sing-songs through this word play:
“I decided I
would decide that I
could give
and want
to give
and want”
Before landing on the final line, repeated four times: “My whole heart at once.” On the album version, these lines are a powerful statement after the enjambed wordplay of the stanza: the wholeness of the phrase enacts the solidity of the lyric’s content. It’s satisfying.
But live! Live! Oh man. Thao’s arrival at the “My whole heart at once” lines was raw, explosive, emotional. The lines ran through her body and out of her mouth as if she was being electrocuted, her whole body pulsating as she cried the line out. Was she screaming at herself? Was I crying? How hard it is to be in love with all four chambers, and do it right. She was like a medium up there, channeling love sublime and terrifying. How rare to feel the human experience in all its range and power flowing through the air.
And then a finger went up, we heard “My whole heart at once” one last time, and the band shut down in unison.
Epiphanic, I think you’d call it.
Music. Music can do this in ways nothing else can, given the right performer. You hear Thao’s voice, reverberating, fading, and then what’s left is your own blood, your heartbeat in your ears. All at once, your whole being is there.
Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum
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