For those uninitiated Thao & The Get Down Stay Down is the San Francisco-based alt-pop band fronted by singer and songwriter Thao Nguyen, who has with production help from tUnE-yArDs’ Merrill Garbus just released A Man Alive, one of the most exciting an refreshing records we’ve heard this year.
The album was recorded at Tiny Telephone Studios in San Francisco and it saw close personal friends Nguyen and Garbus, experiment extensively during the creation of the record resulting in a unique new sound for the band.
What makes this album especially touching though is that A Man Alive sees Nguyen explore previously untouched subjects including her relationship with her father who left the family when she was a young girl. “The record is essentially about my relationship with my dad, its trajectory,” Nguyen says. “It’s a document of my life in conjunction with his, even though we’ve always been leading our lives away from each other. Some are optimistic and forgiving, some are the opposite.”
To celebrate its release Nguyen has penned for us an incredibly touching track by track accompaniment the album which you can read below. A Man Alive is out now via Domino.
Astonished Man
I wrote this one over the course of a few days in a cabin in Northern California. Any songwriter with friends who have spare cabins = much more productive songwriter. I’d barely started writing for the record and didn’t know where it was headed. I was at the time immersed in Marilynn Robinson’s Gilead, (now one of my all-time favorites). Towards the end, I wept, I was so struck by how much of my life and my dad I saw in one of the characters.
I don’t easily weep while not watching feel-good sports movies so I knew I’d hit some kind of pay dirt. This passage opened up a curiosity and compassion and wonder about what my dad has been up to all these years, what kind of person he has been. It made me actively consider forgiveness, made me want to better understand our (non) relationship.
‘Astonished Man’ is very significant because it was pivotal in setting both the thematic and sonic tones for the entire record. Composition and arrangement wise, it was the first where I knew I’d write it on guitar but then we would rebuild and re-imagine it to being a beat and bass driven track, with guitar re-appearing more as a featured, heavily effected guest than as a chordal backbone. As soon as we’d laid down basic tracks we knew it would be the first track of the album.
Slash/Burn
This song was the very last to be written and recorded. It was a real shotgun wedding affair, as we only had a weekend to finish a bunch of things for multiple songs before the record was due. I’d not even finished writing the lyrics or melody when we started recording.
Jason Slota our drummer and I worked out basic tracking, and Adam (bass and synths) and Johanna (keys and voice) sent their parts in via internet– then Beau (our incredible magician sound engineer) and I sat around for a while experimenting with guitar tones and my guitar parts, as we loved to do throughout the entire recording process. I used a sharpie on one track, to clang the strings, that’s to achieve that coveted home-grown dulcimer effect everyone’s always after.
‘Slash/Burn’ is a beacon of the present day, and it was important to station it at the beginning of the record, a sort of where -am-I now-look-I’m fine— not directly about my struggles with my dad but about moving beyond old protections and mechanisms that worked long ago but are now no longer of service, are actually detrimental. It’s a sweet ode to conducting yourself differently and trusting and wanting be a part of something. Ok ok it’s a love song.
The Evening
We’d demo’d this song very early on and were really excited about it, but then in the studio it lost a bit of its teeth and spark. We tried a lot of different things to get it back, and I’m so glad we did. It’s one of our favorites to play live. In rehearsal. We haven’t actually played it at a show yet.
We took a lot of cues from Talking Heads, and Merrill brought in Television’s Marquee Moon which we listened to with great admiration. A lot of its energy comes from various polyrhythmic interactions high in the mix. And duelling guitars from Charlie and me.
My friend Jackie Jones is in her mid-80s and is a total gear head/instrument inventor genius and she’d built and let me borrow this sound oscillator that is responsible for the ringing phone type thing you hear in the beginning. That last guitar solo-ish thing at the end is me playing through Merrill’s Crystal Dagger pedal that will just shred your skull.
This song is written from my dad’s perspective, about being really shitty.
Departure
‘Departure’ is performed on mandolin. I didn’t really have a reason for writing on mandolin besides I’d bought one for the last record and I wanted to get my money’s worth. But I do think the attributes of mandolin are such that this song couldn’t have been written on guitar.
In recording I wanted the mandolin to sound big and fierce and removed from its roots and i wanted a truly screaming solo. Not really but I think it’s funny to make that your objective on a tiny lute.
Merrill as producer and sonic savant is especially pronounced on this track- she and Adam had been planning on Adam playing synth bass/ korg/ whatever instead of bass throughout the record- and this is another song that’s so demonstrative of re-structuring around beat and bass.
Merrill also brought in a Beyonce song with crazy drum line stuff on it as inspiration and asked Jason to just do a couple tracks of fierce snare work to nestle on top of the groove. It was so fun watching him do that. We wanted this to be a booty jam. We tested it out by playing it back and seeing if our booties moved.
Nobody Dies
This song I wrote on slide guitar and it had a much more of a country vibe to it. And thankfully Adam was like whoa, dude, maybe not on slide. And I forgot about it because I didn’t feel like finishing it.
Once we got in the studio and Merrill heard the demo she encouraged me to finish it and we attacked it live full band in the studio upon which it become much more of a scorcher. Charlie plays the guitars on this track, I was just stomping around hollering. The Pixies were a big influence for this one.
It comes from a sense of urgency and panic and wonder at how my dad and I could reach each other but we do not, instead we spend our time as though it will not end.
Guts
I absolutely love how spare and bare this song is, I think the rhythm section is just incredible on this track. ‘Guts’ is one of the songs wherein I cried while writing. I do not know if the previous sentence is grammatically correct.
Crying while writing/singing what you just wrote is at once liberating and disconcerting. I’m proud of the lyrics for this one, I think I say exactly what I meant to say.
Fool Forever
Another song born of a cabin stay. I’d borrowed my friend’s bass and wrote that line, and built the song around it. A lot of the percussion I demo’d was with muted bass, and we took a lot of those sounds from the demo and put them on the track.
This song is important for the despair it showcases in the chorus, the plaintive ‘But I loved you the most.’ Jason crushed this song, all those drums, whoo boy.
Millionaire
I had a bit of a tough time putting Millionaire on the record. It’s the most vulnerable and openly sad, grief-ridden song on the album.
I found it difficult to accept that I was going to let all that show in such a straight forward manner. Merrill convinced me that it had to be on the album. Which, of course I see now that it is from many perspectives, the emotional heart of the album. The vocals didn’t take that long.
I remember coming out of the vocal booth and seeing Merrill crying. I was pretending I was a high and lonesome cowboy singing on a mountain top.
Give Me Peace
This song was a lot of fun because I recorded the bass and drum loops at home and Merrill and Beau and I fixed them up in the studio and they each dispensed with their trademark handiwork.
I really liked the notion that we could just take what was on the demo and put it in the recording and why wouldn’t we? Would the studio police come in? Merrill is a true leader in the ‘why-the-fuck-not’ movement and I am an inspired adherent.
There was in truth a great sense of peace that came over me as I was writing and recording the lyrics for this one, a lot of philosophical equanimity floating around. (Didn’t necessarily last.)
Meticulous Bird
This song is one of my favorites because it was like a pet project that I nursed along on the side throughout the making of the album.
Hip-hop and my favorite MCs have so greatly informed how I write and deliver lyrics. This song was a chance to explore and try and pay tribute and also I talk/sing so much anyway I didn’t think it was that big of a leap.
I programmed/outlined the drums on logic a long while before we started recording. The germ of this one came from Merrill challenging me to write a song without any instruments, so I wrote the first verses on a walk in the woods, and thought they’d go well with this beat.
Jason re-created a break beat live, and Adam laid down some very choice bass grooves, and then Charlie, Jason and Adam all gathered around vibraphones and xylophones and hammered out that chorus bit, which Merrill and Beau proceeded to transform into a high tension squeal more befitting of the subject matter. We fixed up and dropped in some 808 beats and other percussive tracks from the demo I recorded.
This song is about reclamation of the body. I wrote it for survivors of all kinds of abuses of power, with a special nod to survivors of sexual assault. There’s also concern about what I see happening in San Francisco regarding displacement and disrespect, there’s a lot of exuberance and relief in getting to show rage. To lightly correct some well- meaning misinterpretations of lyrics I’ve seen –
I grow my hair so long to wrap around you
You’ve been starving for air ever since I found you
– is not about nurturing anyone, it’s about wanting to asphyxiate perpetrators of sexual violence.
Hand to God
One of the last written songs, but the song that sounds closest to our previous records. This one is also from my dad’s perspective, I wanted to capture and embody feelings of great remorse and guilt he might feel over very severe transgressions throughout our history.
Recording all the guitar tracks were a joy, I can’t explain how much fun it is to let loose and willy nilly and have Beau at the board honing in on effects and tones. Merrill is playing bass on this song, as well as Farfisa. We’re both singing the backup vocals, with our friend Sami who was assisting in studio. Very nice team effort.
Endless Love
This one I wrote on bass while playing music for fun with my friend Lynne from the band Tartufi. I recorded it on my phone and we sampled a couple of her snare hits for the record.
I re-recorded the song with Jason, then I slapped another bass line on there, then we figured it needed guitar too, so Beau and I wandered down that rabbit hole. Then Merrill did that awesome stuff she does with her voice.
I decided early on that this song didn’t need more lyrics than the few it had been born with, and Merrill agreed with me. This song is about a recognition of and a resignation to a resilient love, one that I harbor often in spite of myself. I say ‘carve it on out of me,’ but I know it’s impossible.
Thao & The Get Down Stay Down’s new album A Man Alive is out now via Domino.
