I wanted to try to be a real live person, rather than just singing songs about them. - Thao Nguyen

You know, what's so funny is that I actually feel lighter than I ever have in my life — outside of what's happening. But sometimes I think the service of a song is just to capture a moment or an emotion, and I really loved the catharsis of a more plaintive and plain statement.

The lyrics are the most important part for me and I spend most of my time on the lyrics. When I’m in that process, I try to write every morning. I wake up and write and then just spend as much time as I can generating content and lyrics. Nothing happens until the music exists and then I’m writing to the music. So the other stuff is just sort of like collecting ideas and trying to frame different narratives and capture different emotions that I want to convey.

Not ever in depth. When I was first starting out, it was so much about me and my ethnicity. I was really turned off to that. But now I’ve seen that it’s just really important to bolster that part of it as well, just so that there’s an example of someone—a woman of color—doing something that may or may not be within the realm of what is expected.