Spotify: Mic Check is like traveling the globe to hear all different kinds of music from talented musicians. This week’s episode celebrates Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month with Vietnamese-American R&B singer-songwriter thuy.
You can listen to the full episode here.
Ahead of her upcoming Spotify Singles release, thuy sits down with “Spotify: Mic Check” to discuss her Vietnamese upbringing, her journey from medical professional to pop star, how her love for Britney Spears inspired her music career, and recent Spotify x Gold House Futures Music Guild Creator honor.
Earlier this year, Spotify and Gold House, the influential non-profit collective of Asian and Pacific Islander leaders, partnered to create a program to showcase the talents of AAPI artists by providing Spotify masterclasses and recording exclusive Spotify Singles with the participating musicians. Gold House aims to shift the perception of Asians and Pacific Islanders beyond pernicious stereotypes and empower emerging AAPI artists.
Please see below for interview highlights in the episode:
02:10-02:44 - thuy on the influence of Britney Spears on her career. “Britney Spears was honestly the reason why I wanted to become a pop star in the first place. I remember when her first album came out, ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’, and I don't know what was going on in that little eight-year-old mind. But I just remember seeing her on stage and just knowing that that was what I wanted to do…And I even remember after coming home from school, I would go in the back house and I would have her CD on replay in my little boom box and the garage would be down and be super dark, and I would pretend that I was on stage.”
03:46-4:30 - thuy on how her parents’ resilience inspired her musical pursuits. “You know, my parents are immigrants from Vietnam, and coming to America they had to really figure it out and make it so that my siblings and I were able to go to school and hopefully have an education that would then pay back, you know, to my family and my elders and everything. So I feel, in that sense, they really passed those traits on to me… And so I still feel like I'm kind of an underdog in the music industry. And those traits have really helped me to, like, navigate everything. And you know when doors close or people say, No, I'm like, You know what? I'm going to figure out another way to do it. And so I feel that resourcefulness and just the relentlessness of knowing what you want. And I feel that's how my parents were moving here. They knew exactly what they wanted. They worked really hard, and they always found a way to make it work.
05:22-06:02 - thuy on her previous career as a medical professional before she turned to music. “And so, I went to school, I went to UC Santa Barbara, I got my degree in psychology. And then after I graduated, I went to a community college so that I can finish up some medical classes or anatomy and the classes that I needed to apply to physician's assistant school. And then while I was doing that, I was also working at a dental office. Then I felt like I was getting kind of bored at it. So then I moved to another dental office. Then I moved to dermatology, then I moved to optometry. Then I was shadowing a physician's assistant at the time that I was working up the optometry office.”
10:55-11:20 - thuy on participating in the Spotify x Gold House partnership. “I definitely felt for a really long time that I was lacking in my community, like not me per se, but I didn't have a big community that I can lean on. And so with Gold House, it's been really great because they're so supportive, and they just want to really make history, and they want it to be like normal, that there's Asian faces in media.”
You can listen to the full episode here.
nghe tốt -- good listening in Vietnamese.
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