NoSo @ Barboza

Thursday, November 10 • 7 pm

NoSo, the project of Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter and guitarist, Baek Hwong. You can catch them playing Seattle for the first time at Barboza on Thursday, November 10th. This past summer, they delivered Stay Proud of Me, a debut album whose warm melodies are weighted with all the gestalten parts that make up someone’s identity. “I always want my music to feel cinematic,” Hwong told The Forty Five. “My first interest prior to music was movies. When I write an instrumental, I always imagine a shot of two people looking at each other or a montage of them doing things together.”

Begin your dive into this record with “Suburbia,” which explores the difficulties of growing up in a suburb of Chicago (specifically the suburb that Means Girls is based on) as a queer Korean American. They told The Line of Best Fit, “I was a very weird kid growing up because the environment was predominately white and heteronormative. I stood out like a sore thumb, even though I deeply wanted to conform.” Their artist name, NoSo, is shorthand for North/South: A nod to their Korean heritage and the inappropriate origin question (“Which Korea are you from?”) that so many Korean Americans face. Their track “David” encapsulates the internalized racism in the form of a heartwrenching dream they had where they embodied a white man and saw how positively they moved through the world. Ultimately, Stay Proud of Me is an invitation for those to heal and find self-acceptance in a world that can be shaky and resistant.