 Dao Strom is a writer of both books and songs. She was born in Saigon, Vietnam and grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California. She has lived in NYC, SF, Iowa City, Austin TX, Juneau, Alaska, and now calls Portland, Oregon home. She is the author of two critically acclaimed works of fiction, Grass Roof, Tin Roof and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys. The Sea and The Mother is her new musical vessel. The New Yorker praised Dao's last book, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, as being "quietly beautiful...hip without being ironic." About her music, Grant Alden of NO DEPRESSION writes, "Her voice...is a sharp but carefully modulated brush placed amid various acoustic layers, and surprisingly pretty (though her words can be wonderfully disconcerting)...lyrics [which] seem so private as to invite solitary exploration within the comfort of headphones and winter tea... It is not clear to me what Strom wants from her music, whether it's a hobby that serves as a tonic to her fiction, or an adjunct to it. Or both. Or neither. In both cases, I tend to suspect she is only at the beginning of a long creative road, and that her work in ten or twenty years will be extraordinary." Dao's first two solo albums paid homage to her love of old-roots music, garnering "mountain music" authenticity and comparison to Gillian Welch and other neo-folk artists. Her new music project has her channeling other "folk" entities, from even further shores, and merging her two mediums. We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People is a hybrid music-literary project, combining both written and sung voices, plus text and imagery, to revive some of the old tradition of "ca dao" (a tradition of sung-poetry in Vietnamese culture ) utilizing the tools, language, and stylings of our modern era. Music and poetry-storytelling have for many centuries been a crucial part of the Vietnamese people's mode of expression. 'We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People' consists of recorded songs accompanied by (in book form) prose, poems, images, lyrics, and fragments on Viet Nam, as a late-century circumstance, a modern mythology, a war, a word, an inheritance. Dao's larger goal is a project that will encompass two "geographies" (or two EP's/books): East and West. We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People: East (EP) - a 6-song EP album and literary chapbook - is the first of these two geographies. The EP is available in CD and digital forms; the chapbook is available in e-book form and a limited print run, with a few special-edition hand-bound copies (see website for details). … Dao's books include a novel, Grass Roof, Tin Roof (2003) and a collection of novella-length stories, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys(2006). She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a James Michener Fellowship, the Nelson Algren Award, and a 2013 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship. As a singer-songwriter, Dao writes and sings songs of folk derivative influence. She has released two solo albums, Send Me Home(2004) and everything that blooms wrecks me(2008), which earned praise from discerning sources and invites to perform at SXSW, the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, Outspoken: SF Vietnamese Poetry Festival, among others. She has appeared on radio programs such as KUT with John Aeilli, KPIG with John Sandidge, and WNYC with Leonard Lopate. Dao first began her discovery of American roots music only after leaving California at the age of 20. The voice of Emmylou Harris, the songwriting of Gillian Welch, the harmonies of the Stanley Brothers, Alice and Hazel Dickens, these are the sounds that led her to wish to sing herself. She bought her first guitar in New York City and stepped onto her first stage in Austin, Texas. She recorded her debut album, Send Me Home, in 2004 with Brian Beattie (Okkervil River, Daniel Johnston) live to a 2-track analog tape machine. Grant Alden of NO DEPRESSION magazine picked this album out of a slush pile and decided to run a short profile on Dao in March 2005. Since then she has continued to write both songs and prose, eventually to discover the two mediums running in separate but parallel strands--creating between them a unique and necessary - to this artist - synergy: a new form of "voicing" perceptions and experiences that lie "in between" - places, cultures, past and present, ancient and modern, written and oral, East and West. We Were Meant To Be A Gentle People (East EP) was recorded at Type Foundry Studio in Portland, Oregon, and at home by Dao, co-produced with Dylan Magierek (Badman Recording Company). In live settings Dao may perform music and/or literary content from this project. |
