Thavoron Loves You
Photo by Ali Rowenna
I meet Thavoron on one of Seattle’s first truly hot, summer-like days of the year. Our conversation is decorated with the jingle of ice cubes in drinks and the soft panting of Thavoron’s family dog, Goliath, who sits politely beside me throughout our interview. This apartment is relatively new to them, but it already feels like a home. It’s light, kept in a minimalistic cream, smattered here and there with the occasional earthy tone giving things warmth. “Everything is thrifted,” says Thav, “my roommate Maddie and I love to go look for things.” Things feel placed with care here, chosen.
In a way, this chapter in Thav’s music outlines a similar practice—taking care to claim space and occupy it with intention. His latest body of work, a sophomore album entitled Tommy Loves You, is an exercise in this. “Growing up in Everett, I used to go by Tommy—because my middle name is Tom—to make it easier on other people,” he explains. “My name was, quote-unquote, ‘hard to pronounce.’”
It felt like a small concession at the time. But the comfort it afforded others eventually instilled a discomfort in his own daily life. Through years of being known by another name, he was hidden in the process, transformed by an attempt to move through the world with a little less friction. And it wasn’t the only mask he wore; when he began releasing music in high school, he operated under the name “Sokeang.”
“It’s funny though,” Thav tells me, “it didn’t feel like me when I was doing it.” The veil a stage name lends an artist—that curtain to pull between a performance persona and the person—felt more like a wall to him. “It was hard to relate to it,” he says, “seeing all my music released under that. Like, who the fuck is Sokeang, you know? My name is Thavoron.”
Photo by Ali Rowenna
The blank page of his first year at college was an opportunity to reclaim it all. Over the last few years, Thavoron has gotten back to himself. “It’s a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to everyone who made me feel like I had to change my name just to be like, accepted into society,” he says. “And now I get to exist on my own accord through my artist project.” It’s a decision driving much of the power and many of the anxieties that make his latest music so vulnerable, fraught, and honest.
Rifling through the throes of love and the difficulties of growing up queer and Cambodian, Thav has developed a homing mechanism. The album is framed around this: a constant goal to return (even at his most battered), to the inner child—that version of the self that is still light with the world, that can see the wonder of it and be unafraid.
The result is a kaleidoscopic album changing shape and inferences from song to song, unraveling an alternating dance between all these selves and the memories they carry. And yet no matter what shape they take, their key composite elements are always in plain sight. Tommy Loves You is a cohesive project organized by a singular, emotive voice woven across the album—one that manages to be both delicate and devastating within a single breath.
The album’s short film, which Thav co-directed with the aforementioned thrift-savvy roommate and videographer, Maddie Ludgate, mirrors this qualtiy. "With the film, I wanted to reflect different stages and versions of myself—the ways I morphed to different situations in my life. I wanted it to feel cyclical and repetitive in a sense." To map things out, the two held brainstorming sessions on their living room floor leading up to a 3-day series of DIY shoots: A day at the rocky basalt columns of Frenchman Coulee, another at his mother's house, and then a day of Home Depot-supplied tarps to turn their living room into the stark white backdrop that contrasts a bloodied Thavoron in the project’s album art.
Photo by Ali Rowenna
There’s a phrase that he repeats a few times over the length of our conversation. It seems to be another kind of guiding philosophy, and probably one of the reasons he’s so creatively proficient (as he mentions to me, Thavoron already has another album packed and ready when it’s time.) “I just like to throw things at the wall and see what sticks,” he tells me, the inner child showing through and eager to explore. For him, it usually begins in lyrics. “I don’t like to be too abstract with my work,” he says. “I’m pretty keen to pinpoint what and how I’m feeling. Trying to translate emotions and find them in a chord progression.”
Thav is used to doing most of this on his own, but working on Tommy Loves You has shown him being a solo artist doesn’t have to make you a solitary creature. Along with Ludgate as a collaborator on the short film, Thav acquired the help of a friend, Spencer Edgers, to track saxophone on a few songs. He also worked with industry veteran Phillip Peterson, known for his orchestration and production work with an impressive range of artists, from the likes of Taylor Swift to Nas. “He’s worked with Lana and Lorde, who are huge inspirations for me,” says Thav, “and he’s from Seattle so it was a really cool, like full circle moment.” It’s from Phil that Thavoron has come to learn the protective death grip he used to have over his music could also be a means of stifling its potential. “He taught me to just do what you’re good at, like play your part, and let everyone else do their part. That blew my mind a little bit. I could do this on my own, but why should I when I could let other people in—people who are going to bring something else to the table?”
“I had a lot of naiveté with the first album,” he says, “I’ve learned a lot, and I do think I’m in a different position now than I was then, but it feels weird because I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing half of the time. This project is breaking down so many new barriers for me, as an artist and just as a person.”
Releasing music under the name Thavoron, taking that back for himself, is empowering on the surface. But the shift doesn’t come without its discomforts. “I actually just had a breakdown about this the other night,” he laughs. “As excited as I am, it can be scary. It’s like putting myself and all my thoughts on the line for other people to perceive. That part is difficult to think about.” You wouldn’t know it from his music, but he’s actually pretty reserved by nature. “But then, you know, I have to do this in order for people to relate to it. Understanding that makes it easier—knowing that this is the first step to uncovering a shared experience. None of it is singular to me.”
From what I can tell, that risk pays off. A week after our interview, I get to see Thav play a set at Belltown Bloom. Over the course of the two-day festival, I got to see nearly every act that took that platform, and nothing else drew a crowd as mezmerized as this. At its center, Thavoron stood with a smile, child-like in his awe at the people that had stuffed their way into the room. With the stage lights in halo around him, he raised his arms in song and filled that little room with all the energy of an arena.
Tommy Loves You, is out now on all platforms.
Photo by Ali Rowenna