Meet Rachel and Thu, the talented duo behind The Singer and The Songwriter, whose modern folk music has been enchanting audiences for over 15 years. Hailing from Oakland, CA, their music is a rich sonic weave of lyrical storytelling. Their latest album is entitled ‘Dreams! The Dead! Ghost! Future’ is a plunge into the ideas of loss and growing up—an absolutely raw, exposed compendium of sounds that really allows their moving songwriting to shine through.
Following an evocative sign spotted during their travels, this album has taken years to come together and is their most intimate work yet. Get an inside view through our below interview to learn more about their creative process, and how personal identity often influences their music. Discover the heartfelt stories behind their songs and what the future holds for this remarkable duo. An amazing conversation with The Singer and The Songwriter, below.
Would you like to start by telling us a little about yourselves?
We’re Rachel and Thu, and we are based in Oakland, CA in the US, and we have been writing and performing as a duo called The Singer and The Songwriter for about 15 years.
How would you describe the overall vibe of your music?
We describe our music as modern folk, and it’s rooted in lyrical storytelling. While we have lots of different vibes, a lot of our songs are sad, folk songs. Someone at a show once described our songs as “grief-forward” and that’s actually a pretty apt descriptor of our vibe.
You have recently released your album, ‘Dreams! The Dead! Ghost! Future’ what was the inspiration behind the creation of this album?
We’ve been making music together for a long time now, and this album feels like the culmination of our maturity as songwriters and people. The songs on this album are the most truthful and most personal that we’ve released so far, and many of them are about personal loss and grief. And so we wanted the sound and feeling of the album to be spare and unadorned in a way that allows for the storytelling and the songwriting to shine on its own. We wanted the album to feel as intimate and honest as when we play a house concert in someone’s living room.
What does ‘Dreams! The Dead! Ghost! Future’ mean to you?
This title was inspired by a sign in an abandoned storefront at a truck stop in McDermott, NV. We saw it while passing through on tour and Rachel took a photo of it because the words were so evocative. We had no idea what it meant or why there were exclamation points after some of the words, but we felt that it was a beautiful articulation of the themes on this album. All of the songs fit somewhere within one of these words. Then Thu had the idea to compose four instrumental guitar etudes that went with each of the words, and then we knew that was how we wanted to structure the album.
The album has been a long time in the making with the lead single having been written over a decade ago.. what has the journey been like?
It’s really interesting to let an album gestate for that long. So much about our lives and the world looks different than it did in 2014. We wrote the first single, Sound & Light, when we lived in Los Angeles, before we had ever been on tour. So between then and now, we have played over 475 shows across the US, we’ve moved to a new city, navigated multiple relationships and jobs, a global pandemic that ended our touring career – it’s been a lot of upheaval. So there is something about the release of this album that feels very cathartic.
What did the creative process look like for ‘Dreams! The Dead! Ghost! Future’?
This has been the most collaborative songwriting process for us, of all our releases. Most of these songs (e.g. Drowsy Driver, Sound & Light, Rest Stop Angels, Over Easy, Virginia) all started as poems that Rachel wrote and were adapted and translated into songs by Thu. This has become a really creatively rewarding co-writing process for us as it feels like each of us gets to bring our best skills to the table, and the result feels greater than the sum of its parts.
What do you feel has been one of the biggest lessons for you along your musical journey?
One of our biggest lessons has been to let go of any expectations about how our music will be received. When you work on something so lovingly for such a long time, it is easy to get attached to an idea of the outcome. It’s really easy to have a delusional, rigid idea of what success is going to look like. In our experience, it’s been liberating to loosen our grip on those ideas because they almost never turn out to be what you expect. The best you can do is to fulfill yourself artistically, and send it out into the world as best you can. Then you just have to trust that the music is going to do its good work out there in the world.
What would you like to see happen for you in your music from here?
We would love to bring more of our personal identities and stories to our music. Specifically, our identities of queerness, disability, POC, first-generation Vietnamese – these feel like vital aspects of our artistic identities, and the new music that we are writing dives deeper into these facets of ourselves. That feels really exciting to us. It feels like this album, Dreams!…, has really just started to scratch the surface for us with how honest and vulnerable we can be with our music. We’ve already got another album’s worth of music written that we are excited to perform and record those soon.
What is one message you would like to share with your fans?
We have so much gratitude for the fans who have known us and have been on board and excited for all the iterations of us throughout the years. As independent artists, we have the creative freedom to experiment, and since 2014, each of our releases has been quite different. We’re grateful to all the folks who first heard us play at a farmer’s market in LA that are still listening to our music now. Thank you for growing with us.
Where can people find your music?
Our music can be found on all streaming platforms, on Bandcamp, and at our website, thesingerandthesongwriter.com
You can listen to ‘Dreams! The Dead! Ghost! Future’ below:
Karen Harding is a Melbourne, Australia based singer/songwriter, founder of Sounds On The Couch, and founder and operator of boutique music PR service for emerging and independent artists, Rise Indie.