Thao, Becca Mancari, Why Bonnie

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Eric Einweiler

Thao

$25 ($22 adv.).

media release: Thao (formerly of Thao & The Get Down Stay Down) will be embarking on a North American Spring tour beginning in March, with support from Becca Mancari and Why Bonnie for the first half of the tour.

In the Fall of 2021, Thao & The Get Down Stay Down released Temple - Deluxe Edition via Ribbon Music. The LP is a digital deluxe version of her latest album, 2020’s Temple and features acoustic and string arrangement versions of the LP’s “How Could I,” “Marauders,” “Marrow,” and “Temple.” The San Francisco Chronicle said, “the music takes on a symphonic quality with lush classical strings. It’s hard not to place yourself on the streets of Vietnam, where Nguyen’s mother is from, when hearing this operatic soundtrack, which serves to deepen the imagery of her mother’s journey, already present on every moment of the album.” Thao will be taking these songs on the road with her and her band.

Around the release of Temple, Thao performed a session for NPR’s Tiny Desk which was partially the inspiration for Temple - Deluxe Edition.  Further, Thao recently landed on the cover of The New York Times’ T Magazine as part of their “The Asian Pop Stars Taking Center Stage” feature. They note, “Temple is Nguyen’s fifth album, and the first to bring her family background to the fore. ‘I had never addressed it in my work because I had never addressed it in my life,’ she says. When Asian American organizations approached her to perform, she turned them down. She didn’t want to acknowledge her sense of shame about her background. ‘It’s so hard to admit that you’re not above that,’ she says.” 

This same sentiment was echoed in the short documentary Nobody Dies that Thao made about her first visit to Vietnam. Initially released in 2017 on PBS, it was made available for streaming on YouTube last October for a limited time. In an essay for The Talkhouse accompanying the online release, Thao says, “I came up in music at a time when emphasizing my ethnicity all too often meant being reduced or distilled to it, or offhandedly dismissed because of it, so I avoided my ethnicity as best I could. Avoiding it became a bad reflex. Fifteen years in, Temple is the first batch of songs wherein I acknowledge and honor my heritage.” 

As much as Temple is about being proudly Vietnamese, it is also the story of Thao’s coming out as queer.  In the same essay for Talkhouse she says, “One evening in Saigon, after a family gathering, my mother said to me, quite out of nowhere: ‘You have to understand for yourself what it means to be free. You have to learn for yourself why a million people would risk dying at sea. What is it about freedom. I can’t do that for you. You have to learn for yourself.’...I remember wondering what that would mean for me, if I’d ever have the occasion to truly consider and learn what it meant to be free. This moment, four years later, became the heart and bones of the lead single ‘Temple,’ and thus, the entire album.”

Thao has also made an appearance on Under The Radar’s Podcast discussing how she came out publicly as queer around Temple’s release, as well as how she is finally coping with the racism and homophobia she experienced growing up. Thao’s groundbreaking video for “Phenom” was featured on CBS Sunday Morning’s “Sunny Awards” and The Washington Post labeled it “the first great Zoom music video,” while Variety called it a “brilliantly creative use of technology and choreography.”