After a musical restart stateside, Ha Nguyen admits that full-time musicianship and motherhood have brought new clarity to her craft.
In her earliest musical memory, Ha Nguyen felt like a rock star, foreshadowing the adoring crowds to come. Standing atop her bed, holding a broom like a guitar, she closed her eyes and was instantly on stage, performing in front of thousands. From that moment, she knew she wanted to be a performer.
For nearly a decade, she toured her native Vietnam, pursuing that dream as part of two female-centric rock bands. She arrived in America unsure if she’d ever perform again but has been methodically building the next phase of her career stateside. Since 2021, she’s released a steady flow of singles under the moniker LOLAH. In mid-2024, Ha launched a new band, LOLAH and the Travelers, and admits she loves returning to a more communal creative experience.
“Before I was a mother, it was about me. ‘I want to share my story, and I want people to hear my feelings.’ Now, I want my songs to be helpful.”
“I love that we have three songwriters. I love the fact that we all want to do big shows, and we have a vision for the band,” she says. “Echos of Deception,” released digitally in early November, is evidence of a new-found cohesion, crunchy guitars, and a driving backbeat carrying into an anthem-like chorus. It may have taken years, but she’s back on stage sharing her love for rock music.
Growing up in Long Xuyên, a town of nearly 300,000 in south-western Vietnam, Ha first saw concert footage at the tail end of Hong Kong soap operas on VHS tapes her family rented. She took piano and vocal lessons as a child, but finally realized her dream of learning guitar when she moved to Saigon to go to dental school. She was the only female student under the tutelage of “Master Chau,” who opened a new world to Ha when he called Vietnamese pop music cheesy and began teaching her iconic rock songs like Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” and “I Hate Myself For Loving You” by Joan Jett & the Blackhearts. Soon, Ha was all rock and roll.
In search of more rock music, she began frequenting a Saigon music store owned by the bassist of UnlimiteD, one of the biggest rock bands in the city. He wanted to start an all-girl rock band and invited Ha to join. In 2006, Lazee Dolls was formed.
“The first show [we played] was an audience of 3,000. We would play for colleges. We played for TV shows, and we joined contests,” she shares of her time in the band. A personnel shake-up a few years later led the band to change its name to White Noiz. At the height of their success, the band built a circuit of club gigs scattered throughout the country. But juggling the band with her dental practice post-graduation proved difficult.
“We went through a lot of member changes. I burned bridges. I got mad. I lost control. I got depressed,” she remembers of the final days of White Noiz in the mid-2010s. At the time, she was also dealing with her first stint of writer’s block and was scared she’d never be able to write music again. While it took years to be at peace with the band dissolving, she says writing the lyrics to her 2021 single “Back in Time” helped her process her feelings: “Time flies, several years gone by / not too long to forget, but enough to believe that it’s over.”
By this time, her entire family had immigrated to the US. They urged her to join them. “I was the last one in Vietnam. I had so much fun in Saigon, until it wasn’t fun anymore,” she recalls with a laugh. She moved to San Jose in 2017. “I forgot about everything. I missed playing music, but on the other side, I had my family.”
As fate would have it, her music career got an unexpected re-start during a job interview. “[The interviewer] found out I was a singer and said, ‘This job is not for you, but I used to do shows, so I’m going to sponsor you to play at this show,’ ” she recalls. Her first American performance was inside the Chùa Di Lặc Buddhist Temple on Story Road. Performances started to pick up, but it was hard not comparing the crowds to the larger rooms she played in Vietnam. She remembers busking at San Jose Jazz Summer Fest, earning only the tips she received from passers-by. “It taught me to let go of ego,” she notes of the experience, adding that being a full-time musician has brought a new sense of humility to every opportunity to perform.
Another shift for her music? Motherhood. “Before I was a mother, it was about me. ‘I want to share my story, and I want people to hear my feelings.’ Now, I want my songs to be helpful.”
Despite the starts and stops to her career, she has a quick answer when asked why she plays music: “I love it.” After a beat, she elaborates. “When you play music, it’s healing. When you write a song, you get to say things that would be weird to say, and you can share your feelings in a creative way. When I play for people and I see that I make them happy, I feel great too.”
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