Don't Throw in the Towel

When singer-songwriter Thao Nguyen has a tour break, she sometimes goes to Virginia and folds clothes. Her mother’s still there, working seven days a week at the same Laundromat she owned when, at age 12, Nguyen began teaching herself guitar. And sorting socks, making change, then practicing and writing music when business is slow represents an old routine for the Vietnamese-American alt-folk artist, who released her sophomore album in late January before hitting the road as an opener for Xiu Xiu.

“My mother will make customers listen to the record as soon as they walk in, and she’ll say, ‘Do you like it?’ and they have to say, ‘Yes,’“ Nguyen says, laughing.

We Brave Bee Stings and All is significant departure from her country-tinged, one-woman-with-guitar debut, Like the Linen. She has signed with Seattle’s Kill Rock Stars label and recruited a raucous, tumbling three-piece band consisting of Frank Stewart (guitar), Adam Thompson (bass) and Willis Thompson (drums). “This album compared to the first is a lot more rhythmic,” Nguyen says. “I was listening to Afro-Cuban music and a lot of gypsy jazz like Django Reinhardt.”

Meanwhile, Nguyen increased the percussiveness of her own guitar playing, approaching Ani DiFranco territory while maintaining her pop-meets-blues Jolie Holland aesthetic and her penchant for pairing upbeat melodies with introspective, melancholic lyrics. “Beat my brow, beat my chest, beat the ones who love me the best,” she sings on album-opener “Beat (Health, Life and Fire).”

“It’s a good balance,” Nguyen says. “Sonically, I like good old pop music, but lyrically, it is autobiographical.” Refusing to give specifics, she says she grew up in a turbulent household. “Bee stings are the things the world throws at you,” explains Nguyen, who remembers her kindergarten classmates calling her Towel. “Everybody braves bee stings, either from the world or from themselves.”

“We brave bee stings and all, and we don’t dive we cannonball, and we splash our eyes full of chemicals, just so there’s none left for little girls” is a lyric culled from “Swimming Pools,” the most feminist track on the album. “That’s an ode to what women do to try to make it easier for the younger ones coming up,” she says of the uptempo, banjo-driven bluegrass song.

Nguyen holds bachelor’s degrees in women’s studies and sociology from the College of William and Mary. “I think my interest in pursuing those studies comes from the same roots as why I’m interested in writing music,” she says. “It was a very tenuous and volatile time, and each song is a bookmark of an event.”

As for the song that started her journey from the Laundromat to the stage, Nguyen says it was an eighth-grade English project on Lord of the Flies. “It was super-intense—the most intense thing I’ve ever written.” She has come a long way.

March 23, Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 N. 6th St. (betw. Kent & Wythe Aves.), B’klyn, 212-260-4700; 8, $15/$17. (With Xiu Xiu and Get Down Stay Down)