Song Exploder - Thao & The Get Down Stay Down - Astonished Man

Episode Date: December 13, 2018

Thao Nguyen is taking over as the new host of Song Exploder in 2019. This is a reissue of an episode from 2016 in which she was the guest.Thao & the Get Down Stay Down released the album A Man Alive in March 2016. In this episode, Thao Nguyen breaks down the song "Astonished Man." Thao talks about working with Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards, who produced the album, and she speaks candidly about her relationship with her estranged father, the subject of the song.songexploder.net/thao

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. If you haven't heard the news yet, Tao Winn from the band Tau and the Get Down Stay Down is taking over for me as the host of this podcast, starting in January 2019. I'm going to step a little further into the background, and she'll be the one interviewing the artists,

and you'll hear her voice introducing each episode. So I wanted to reissue the episode from April 2016, where she was the guest, breaking down one of her own songs. You can get to know her. better if you missed it the first time around, or re-listen to it if you heard it then. Tao and I have hung out a few times in person, but when we did the interview for this episode, it was over the phone, and it was the first time we'd spoken. By the time the hour had passed, it seemed clear to me that she was a kind, smart, and sensitive person who was thoughtful about

art and process. For all those reasons, I'm so excited that soon she'll be hosting Song Exploder in my place. Okay, here we go. This episode contains explicit language. My name is Tao Wynne of the band Tau in the Get Down Stay Down. I was reading Marilyn Robinson's novel, Gilead, and there is this character who is a black sheep or an outcast of his family, and he's returned after several years of being completely out of touch, and he's about to leave again and basically break his father's heart. and there's this passage where he's asking forgiveness from a family friend.

Then he stopped and looked at me and said, you know, I'm doing the worst possible thing again, leaving now. Glory will never forgive me. This character and the way that he's developed and rendered struck me so deeply, and it reminded me so much of my dad in this one passage in particular, sort of brought me closer to understanding my dad and gave me a kind of compassion and a curiosity about him that I hadn't entertained before,

wondering what kind of person he had been all these years that I didn't know him. And I just started weeping. I immediately started writing Astonished Man. Tao in the Get Down Stay Down released the album, A Man Alive, in March 2016. Coming up in this episode, Tao talks about working with Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards

and why their friendship was so important to the production of the song. But first, here's Tao talking a little bit more about the subject of the song, Astonished Man, her father. He was very charismatic and he was around when I was a kid, but not necessarily a responsible figure. He actually was very reckless and a source of great turmoil and turbulence for us. But I adored him. and then he left when I was a kid, 11 or 12 or something,

and then he just kind of phased out. I named the record a man alive because he is alive and well, I assume, and that I am and that we could both physically be capable of being in touch, but we don't and is very peculiar to me. I went up north. I live in San Francisco, and I went up. north outside of the city and a friend of mine let me borrow his cabin. I just trapped myself with a couple instruments and a notebook and tried.

I demo as soon as I'm done with the lyrics. And then I sent it to Adam, our bassist, and Merrill. Merrill Garbus produced this record and she is Tune Yards and is a really great friend of mine. I had an idea that this record would be very personal. And I couldn't have done it without a very good friend at the helm. And she knows, you know, she knows me very well and knows my history with my dad. And so that part was imperative. And sonically, Merrill embodies this kind of fearlessness and this raw energy. And that kind of

fearlessness I wanted to tap into. In pre-production meetings, I would say to Merrill, the drum sounds that she had on her records I loved and I want stuff to sound fucked up. I overemployed the term fucked up because in a way it felt like it was the most accurate thing to say or it was the thing that communicated

at the most effectively super blown out. I wanted to kind of eat you up. I wanted the drums to be the first thing that was felt and the thing that would hook you in. Jason Sloda is our drum. is incredible.

One dimension that it acquired that I wasn't envisioning was a very substantial synth bass part. You know, it's like a pillar of the song and it's also high in the mix, and it's one of the hooks of the song. I remember just loving all the drum and bass sounds that those guys were wrangling. I remember sort of like doing that kind of weird dancing thing where you're just grooving with it, but you're kind of just synch your body so low because it's just like that kind of kind of, you know, of visceral, gutteral provocation. Decades to decide I would never be satisfied with how I have been living. How the decades to decide, you know, that's how that's chopped up.

That was Merrill's idea. She, after we recorded it, she said, just, you know, indulge me for a second. And I loved it, and it felt exciting, but it didn't feel dishonest. The way that's chopped up, I think, is really appropriate, it because it's, you know, what I'm lamenting is these decades of behavior, this very cyclical, circular behavior that I'm disgusted with and I have disdain for. There's sadness in those lyrics that are in the verses, you know, the, you don't look for me, but I will look for you. You don't look for me, but I will look for you without a wish to see anybody new.

You don't look for me, how I will look for you without a wish to see. When I wrote this song, the first lyric I wrote, it's at the beginning and end of the song, is I must find and capture an astonished man. I must find him capture an astonished man, hold him till he knows he is forgiven. Which is in part inspired by Marilynne Robinson's writing is one who would be astonished with the amount of forgiveness that could be afforded him. That kind of astonishment that in the end, people would still come looking for him and want, you know, a part of him. And, you know, and he's convinced that he's undeserving of such. I said, we all love you, you know, and he laughed and said, you're all saints. He stopped in the door and lifted his hat, and then he was gone. God bless him. No matter how his family loves him or tries to,

They can never keep him, you know, for whatever his ideas about himself are, his ideas of what he deserves or what he's worth. I don't know if that's my dad's deal, but it certainly offered this different perspective and this humanity that I guess I had denied him. There's melancholy in this song, and there's some sadness and grief, but there's an optimism in the... this kind of newfound forgiveness or this idea,

you know, at least in this song that I wanted to exist differently and I wanted to be better. And I wanted that to be embodied in the chorus, to have them be rousing. I wait so worried, worry, yet I can. The greatest service of this record was to grieve, to acknowledge the kind of pain I've felt for, I guess, I guess my whole life, and to just admit it and to go in there and talk about it and write about it

and sing about it and have it on record. Making this record forced me to do that, and I'm so grateful to it. Now, here's Astonished Man by Tao and the Get Down Stay Down in its entirety. Visit SongExploder.net for links to buy this song, and for more info on Tao and the Get Down Stay Down. There's also a link to buy the novel Gilead by Marilyn Robinson. The lines that you heard from that book were read by Phoebe Judge, host of the amazing podcast, Criminal. Check out Criminal at this iscriminal.com. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th.

It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh, Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April. and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me.

So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin, Clion, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In The Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishi-kesh.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live.

That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can find all the past and future episodes of Song Exploder on iTunes, Stitcher, and at songexploder.net. You can discuss this episode with me and other Song Exploder listeners on Facebook at Facebook.com slash Song Exploder. You can also find me at Song Exploder on Twitter and Instagram. Song Exploder is a proud member of the Radiotopia Podcast Network from PRX.

My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening. RadioTopia.