soundtrack

I am in love and I already know I can't do it justice but I have to proclaim it anyway. Thao Nguyen comprised the soundtrack on repeat to my hours and nights of packing and if I miss anything about packing it's that. Her songs paint an image of a person I would like to know and would like to be. Charming but disingenuous, sensitive but strong, knowing but open, messy but together, brassy and effortlessly thoughtful. Her voice is deep and full and husky, but lilts into a lightness. It meshes with her folksy guitar and catchy beats, and then it stands on its own even as the background continues. She bares her insecurities and heartbreaks and not once seems weak for doing so. She does it so naturally and above all, honestly. In Chivalry, my favorite, she sings: "An offer of me you politely refused/Is it that my heart beat too loud/Is it I did not bid it calm down...I am tired/I am through/When I love I will love so hard." She draws out each "I," her voice up and down, and then comes the fast, beautiful plucking of guitar that forces you to keep up with her feeling, which you might've missed if you hadn't been listening because the song is light.

Those few lines make me think of one of those rare very true things that feels like a revelation when you learn it, something Hussain told me once. I was telling him how I worried that I was behind everyone else, because I kept believing in certain things that experience would then contradict and I would be surprised, how I still think about things that people get over, how I will never fully accept the idea of loss. I was worried that the ideals I thought were strong were actually naive. That maybe I hadn't matured and was left behind in the growth curve. He said that maybe maturity isn't about experience breaking down ideals, but about "having gone through that pain and hurt and all that without giving up your sense of self, without being jaded and cynical and giving up on people." And so I love Thao Nguyen for being tired now, but loving hard later.

I like the title of her second album, We Brave Bee Stings and All, her appreciation of a small, intense sensation of a bee sting. In her songs she says geography will make a mess of her, that she's a superhero, that she doesn't know, how she stings and how she's been stung. She talks about rainy seasons and big kid tables. And yes it is doubly awesome that she's a Vietnamese-American with voice. People describe her music with words suggestive of movement: bounce, jangly, poppy, vibrant. It's true that the beat draws you in first. But even amidst all the motion of her words and notes and voice and instruments and thoughts and sounds, there is a constant expression of something real and felt, and that takes you all over but really, holds you still in one place.