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Vicky Farewell loves boy bands. The bubbly, bouncy pop of the early 2000s enchanted her again when she was simply Vicky Nguyen, a classical music dork from the O.C. Since then, Nguyen’s musical palette expanded. Her R&B and soul-laden productions have been utilized by Silk Sonic’s Anderson.Paak. She’s performed piano in WILLOW, Kali Uchis, and Gentle Excessive Membership’s stay bands. You’ll by no means know she nonetheless harbors such a kinship with the music of the frosted-tips period.
“It evokes that happiness of once I was nonetheless in awe of music generally,” Nguyen tells SPIN over Zoom on a day when the L.A. solar is blinding-white behind her. “I needed to painting that in my music as a result of that’s what feels good to me.”
Candy Firm, Nguyen’s debut file as Vicky Farewell, is joyful and dreamy, very like her demeanor. However beneath the floor, Nguyen stated making music for herself was a weighty course of that concerned revisiting the music, and the recollections, of her youth. However not like these boy bands — who have been handed the songs, taught the strikes — Nguyen was on her personal and needed to reckon with simply how terrifying that’s for a younger artist.
“You don’t see a variety of Asian artists representing their artistry within the forefront,” Nguyen stated. “I needed to battle that, rewire my mind to not assume that approach with the intention to really feel assured sufficient to do that.”
Nguyen has achieved a stage of confidence as a musician the place she is creating, below her personal identify, in her personal distinct model. She desires everybody to know that she does all of it, however it took her 20 years to get there.
Nguyen grew up in Orange County, California. She performed classical piano from an early age, carried out in church choirs, and ultimately studied it in faculty. However as she transitioned into the music enterprise, Nguyen labored on Anderson .Paak’s Ventura and Malibu. She performed keyboards in stay bands for buzzy music acts like WILLOW, Kali Uchis, and Gentle Excessive Membership.
Nguyen started exploring her personal musical model by writing her personal songs in the course of the pandemic lockdowns. After years of tasks on the whims of others’ inventive needs, she used the interval of isolation from the affect from exterior of herself to make music together with her personal stylistic voice. She couldn’t consider a greater method to develop this private voice than to harness her newfound inventive management into music impressed by her childhood. Candy Firm is the place she landed: a dreamy, joyful reflection on the ache of change.
She despatched the primary monitor, “Are We Okay?” to her outdated pal Mac DeMarco. The indie singer didn’t solely have phrases of encouragement. He signed her to his file label and invited her to open for him on his U.S. tour this fall.
“Kakashi (All the Time),” one of many standout tracks on the album, was impressed by her favourite character within the anime present Naruto–which she binge-watched whereas writing Candy Firm. It’s the one tune on the album about an precise fictional character, however Farwell says her playful model permits her to blur the road between making a fictionalized model of her personal experiences and staying true to writing what she is aware of. Her songs keep a lighthearted, bouncy high quality to them, whereas nonetheless exploring extra confronting themes of lack of relationships and rising pains.
For years, Nguyen was hesitant to be on the forefront of her work, a worry internalized from noticing how so many different Asian ladies she knew within the music business solely appeared as a credit score on another person’s file. The toughest elements of turning Candy Firm right into a actuality had nothing to do with the music or the manufacturing. It was recognizing that someplace alongside the best way, she began believing she might solely make noise if it wasn’t introduced as her personal. And that voice was killing her.
There’s a motive they name them “golden handcuffs.” Nguyen didn’t wish to be one other instance of a successful-on-paper musician who spends her entire life in some invisible cage.
The most effective a part of making Candy Firm?
“Nobody might inform me ‘no.’”
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