Where does the name No-No Boy come from?

 

It’s a good book that, as a teacher, I wanted people to read. 

 

Where is your family from?

 

I’m Vietnamese-Italian (with some N. European and Scandinavian) American. My mom is from Saigon. My dad is from Boston.

 

Where did you grow up?

 

Nashville, TN. Born and raised.

 

Where do you live now?

 

Pacific Northwest.

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What was the name of your old band?

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We were called The Young Republic. We formed at Berklee in 2004 and were lucky and got signed in the UK and got to play Glastonbury and tour Europe, etc.--not much going stateside. So, unless you were a hipster in England in the 2000s, you probably never heard of us. But I still stand by our two albums, especially the second one, which has some of the coolest orchestrations and string writing I've heard on an indie rock record.
 

Why have you stopped touring?

 

This project wasn’t meant to be an ongoing commercial thing. It was just a teaching model for my students on how you can successfully do rigorous academic research, but instead of writing a paper, present your findings to a wider audience using art or more digestible media such as podcasts or documentaries. 

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Will you ever perform more 'No-No Boy' concerts?

Yes, but it has to be a special occasion. Usually, it's part of a teaching residency, where I visit a campus for a few days, work with colleagues on the faculty and their students, and present a concert as part of that experience. I don't have any interest in the self-promotion or full time musician lifestyle. 

 

The material of your songs can be very heavy emotionally and historically. How do you deal with that and keep going?

 

I don’t. That’s part of the reason why I don’t tour and don’t plan to release any more music from this project. Every concert, between the storytelling, the teaching, the projected archival images, and of course the songs, every show is an emotional net loss. It’s breathing life into tragic events over and over, some of them very personal to my family and friends. I didn’t mind doing it at first because I felt like it was important to teach these histories of war and immigration and empire to as many folks as I could, but soon it became too much. I had a lot of trouble dealing with doing this show night after night. But a lot of the songs I wrote for the project have been recorded and so people can listen to them and teachers can use them to teach. 

 

How many songs have you written for No-No Boy?

 

I wrote over 100 songs.

 

Will you ever record the rest of them?

 

Not all of them. But there are at least a dozen or so more that I really like and would like to make records of. I don’t think they’ll come out on a label or we’ll do the promoting thing like we did with the two Folkways albums, but I like making records a lot and some of my favorite NNB songs haven't been released.

 

What are some of your favorite songs from the project?

 

Top of mind: “Vinh Long,” “Snow Baptism,” “Best God Damn Band in Wyoming,” “Tell Hanoi I Love Her,” “Honouliuli,” “Imperial Twist,” “Hotel Continental.” But I think most of the ones I finished have a lot of merit. I enjoyed the unique process of doing all that research for a PhD and having the time and space to transform that work into music. It was a unique experience that I hope more scholars/artists pursue.

 

Why don’t more people do creative graduate work like you did?

 

One, the folks they let into academic graduate programs are, for the most part, pretty single-minded, dedicated students who, unlike, say, me, didn’t have an entire career in the arts before coming to grad school. Two, If someone does have an artistic practice, they don’t have teachers or advisers to encourage them to explore using that as a way to share their graduate research. I had an advisor, Bob, who really encouraged me and, I had a guy named George who was a big deal in American Studies (the field of my degree) who championed me. But a lot of faculty were not supportive of my approach to blending music and academic research. Three, a grad student should be rightfully worried about getting a job after grad school, and most hiring committees, I would think, aren’t looking for people who sang their dissertations. I didn't have any college debt to pay off (a HUGE privilege) and I was accustomed to living off little since I've been a musician my whole adult life, so it wasn't that important to get a university gig. I'd rather have less money and be able to study and research exactly how I want.

 

What are the benefits of doing a creative, art-driven dissertation?

 

Well, it helped me stay focused and interested. Every time I came across a new primary source, a photograph or a document or a story, I knew I could fit it into a song somewhere and make it come alive. Also, the process of songwriting let me deal with the messiness of history in a more, um, honest way… like songs are good at holding more than one thought at the same time, so you can get at the complication of a historical moment, say a jazz band in an internment camp, you can capture the joy and tragedy and irony and boredom and excitement all at the same time. And you can reach so many more people if you’re doing something like writing a simple song. The trick is to be as good and thorough in your research as you would writing a chapter in an academic book, tons of sources and citations, but distill it down into a catchy tune that can act as—someone called it a Trojan Horse once—a gateway to a larger history. 

 

Do you currently teach at a University?

 

No.

 

Why not?

 

Many reasons. Logistically, it’s hard to tour as much as I have in recent years and be employed. I prioritize quality of life, and I like the Pacific Northwest, so I’m not keen to try and apply for the one opening that may come around that’s in the middle of not where I necessarily want to be (no mountains or forests or ocean). Also, the AI and the pandemic kids are a little tough to teach at the moment, and I’m not looking to be a sheriff in a classroom. College, in my opinion, is a place where people should want to dedicate themselves to the craft of learning, and from my experience teaching on and off the last few years, most students are cutting corners and offloading the hardest (and most rewarding parts) of learning, namely the reading and writing. Also, while I’ve had some nice colleagues say, “You should come work here, I think we could make it happen,” I don’t know how welcoming any academic institution would be of my work that eschews academic paper writing for more public-facing work (concerts, records, music videos, etc).

 

Do you want to teach again?

 

Oh, yes, dearly. Teaching is my calling. And I do get to teach as sort of an itinerant scholar, visiting different schools and doing short residencies. But it would awesome to be in one place if it was the exact right fit. The kind of environment that was a little looser and more creative in their approach. Honestly, few things have made me happier than walking across a beautiful campus quad and getting into a great discussion with a room full of students. 

 

What kind of classes do you teach?

 

I’ve taught everything from songwriting and basic music theory to cultural studies and Asian American studies courses and history. I even taught a great books/western canon course, which was really fun. It’s not the subject matter so much as encouraging young people to feel entitled to creativity and empowering them to make the most of the life in front of them. Because I’ve been a performer my entire life, I find teaching offers an exciting utilization of that skillset. 

 

What’s the best class you ever taught?

 

The American Road. It was a road trip class I taught at Wyoming when I was young (late 20s), where my TA Charles, who officiated my wedding down the line, and I took a group of honors students around the west in a shambolic caravan full of adventures and hijinks and mountain climbing and poetry and Kerouac and Steinbeck and getting lost and drinking wine and stargazing and navigating with maps… it was absolutely the best. True learning, body, mind and soul. But I’ll never do it again!

 

Why not?

 

Because I know about things like liability and boundaries, and I’m older and can’t relate to 22-year-olds anymore like I could when I was 28 or 32 or even 35. But I’m so grateful for the long leash I had in Wyoming to be a vagabond teacher. It was a time and place. Now, I’m more interested in a slower, craft-filled mode of educating. It’s like music. You don’t make the same records over and over. My first years teaching was my indie punk phase.

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What are some of your musical influences?

 

Television, Beatles, Dylan, Edith Piaf, Nina Simone, Woody Guthrie, Spoon, Wilco, White Stripes, Rage Against the Machine, Walkmen, Fiona Apple, Dwight Yokam, Loretta Lynn, Miles Davis, Berlioz, my Dad, my friend Michael who was the first guitar player my age that I ever knew, The Privates, Grimey’s Record Shop, Weezer, Flea Kuti, Mingues, Mozart, Ravel. It goes on…

 

Who are some of your academic influences?

 

Bob Lee, George Lipsitz, Yen Le Espiritu, Michael Bess, John Lachs, John Dorst, Frieda Knobloch, Walter Benjamin, Adorno (aphorisms), David Pye, Jessie Vallejo, Diego Luis, all the cats who do "Sound Studies" or any weird music/experimental theory/practice stuff. 

 

What are you going to do next?

 

Maintain balance. Be the best husband I can be. Get outdoors as much as possible. Focus on my health. I’m currently working on music that focuses on ecological research, trees, plants, rivers, and ecosystems. I really enjoy taking an instrument or a field recorder into the forest or sitting by a creek and seeing what happens. This is also much more in line with being a Buddhist, which is pretty important to my day-to-day. I still play a lot of concerts, they’re just usually for a grove of redwoods or by the river.