Local genre-bending rock band hi hi hi (pronounced “hai hai hai”) is holding a free, all-ages listening party at the Mural Amphitheatre in the Seattle Center campus on Thursday, August 13, starting at 6:30 p.m. Formed in 2023 by a group of friends and colleagues brought together by a shared love of music and the CID community, hi hi hi’s music is like listening to its band members’ diasporic life journeys and musical migrations, traveling playfully across genres; now punk, now soulful indie, now psychedelic surf rock with nods to their transpacific routes.
After a day of mentoring in this year’s CID Summer Youth Leadership Program (SYLP), the three members of the band — Le-Vy Nguyen (guitar & vocals), Jon Chu (bass & vocals), and Shaun Mejia (drums) — met up with me on a balmy summer evening over Jameson picklebacks at Fort St. George in the CID to talk about how their musical journeys shaped their eclectic sound today and what audience members should expect at their upcoming show.
Adrian Alarilla: First of all, please introduce yourselves. Where did you grow up and what was your musical background?
Le-Vy Nguyen: I’m a second generation Vietnamese, born and raised in Longview, WA. My parents came to the States in April 1975. Once they got settled, they were able to get their hands on traditional Vietnamese music. And I did have to watch a lot of Paris by Night and all the musical performers on those shows like Ý Lan. Starting when I was seven years old, I studied classical piano for 10 years. I also grew up listening to my brother singing. He was a big part of my musical journey; he took me to my first show, Bikini Kill. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was very into the riot grrrl scene, and I thought, it’s time to switch over to the guitar. So, I’ve just been playing the guitar for fun ever since. I think it’s a natural progression to grow up with immigrant refugee parents listening to their music, and then when you get to high school, you branch out. You almost kind of rebel.
Jon Chu: I was born in New York, and I was six when my family moved out to Fresno, CA. My parents are Chinese Burmese from Burma (now Myanmar), but I did not have a lot of connection to the Burmese community or Burmese music. My first instrument was probably French horn in fifth grade, but I was pretty horrible. Then I started learning piano with my younger sister, and I stuck with that through high school. For some reason, I also loved studying music theory then. In high school, I started to take up the bass because that was the time that Green Day and punk pop was getting really really big, but I was like everyone’s learning the guitar. I started to gravitate towards punk, ska, and emo skater music, but I didn’t skate. Then later in high school, I kind of caught with the hipster sort of indie music that was sweeping all through the suburbs. Then I moved up to Seattle for college at UW. I actually switched to acoustic guitar, and then also I don’t have vocal training. But then once the opportunity came to play with the band, I was actually super happy to come back on bass. I actually still feel like bass is very intuitive for me musically.
Shaun Mejia: I’m a second generation Filipino. I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Growing up, my parents would sing a lot of karaoke in the house, a lot of cheesy love songs, very slow ballady type stuff. I started taking piano lessons in second grade. We moved to Mukilteo, WA, in the early 2000s. By middle school, I started picking up the drums, translating piano to guitar and bass, and listening to a lot of pop punk. I guess a lot of that comes from skating, though I wasn’t really skating, but more like playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater. Then in high school, there was a pretty big hardcore scene there with one local band, the Fall of Troy, coming from my high school. I think that kind of informed a lot of my tastes. And then I moved to Seattle for college, and dabbled in a lot of the Seattle indie scene. After college, I started working at the Vera Project, and one of my roommates was a sound engineer for the Vera Project who also ran the whole music recording studio. So he really encouraged me to start writing more music. I started DJing too through meeting folks in CID.
Adrian Alarilla: How did you all meet each other? What made you realize that you were all interested in starting a band together?
Le-Vy Nguyen: Well, we all met basically through Wing Luke Museum. Shaun and I overlapped actually in the same office for three months, and then Jon was volunteering at the museum. So we would see each other in the neighborhood even when we weren’t together at the Museum. But we knew we were all musicians. And then after three years we were talking like, “hey, how fun would it be to start a band, and how fun would it be to have merch?” Never practiced before. Never heard each other play music. We played our first show in January 2024, and after that, other friends and bands heard about us and just kept inviting us to play, even though some had never heard us. Our community has continued to keep showing up for us.
Shaun Mejia: I’ll also add that some of the impetus of writing music together was around the Seattle Asian American Film Festival. Ellison (former SAAFF Co-Director) had asked me to record music for a festival trailer. I had done it once or twice before, but this time I was just kind of not sure how to approach it. And Le-Vy and I started talking about writing music together, and so I had asked her to send me some guitar stuff that she had been working on. We were able to craft something pretty quickly together, and that ended up being part of the trailer in 2023.
Jon Chu: Yeah, the formation of the band felt very tied to our neighborhood connections. It was very organic that we asked each other to play. But then there’s all these other parts of me that go into creating a band. There’s a whole ecosystem around being in a band, and it was just really cool that being in this band was a way for us to also connect and uplift other people that we know in the neighborhood, and let everyone bring different things to the table. We had friends help us make some merch, and with photography and video work. Also, I feel like we were very fortunate that almost all of our early shows had really good turnout because we had really good support from people.
Adrian Alarilla: Tell me more about your music writing process. How were you able to combine your different musical tastes and backgrounds together?
Le-Vy Nguyen: We’re all really busy with different schedules and we’re not together often unless we’re here in the neighborhood, so we write individually. Shaun and I prefer to write on our own, but Jon loves to collaborate in-person and vibe off what we’re doing. But typically, an idea starts from somebody, then we play around, record something, send tracks to each other, and then build off of it. There’s a cloud-based digital audio workstation called Soundtrap where we can all have access to our songs, and we all add tracks in real time. So it’s kind of like passing the ball to each other to complete a song. And then we’ll have sessions at Shaun’s studio, which is just up the street in Japantown, and we’ll have what we call listening parties, and we discuss what we’ve worked on.
Shaun Mejia: What I would say is kind of unique about this band is that it is very democratic. Everyone here can play a lot of different instruments, so we can play around, and we don’t have to stay in our own sort of instrument. We end up having to figure out how to perform whatever we’ve created live, which translates differently, but yeah, I think that in the recording process we are able to create together is really unique, and also really fun.
Jon Chu: We all kind of trust each other that we all can hop on different instruments or vocals as needed, and it’s not like one person arranges all the parts and says, “All right, just play this.” It’s like the ideas are just constantly flowing amongst all of us at all times, so it’s not like we’re trying to get that one sound. It’s like we’re bringing many different pieces together, and then just trying to make it work because that’s what feels. And a lot of our creative process is done in the neighborhood. Like there’s studios in the neighborhood, so many of our lyrics reflect experiences in the neighborhood.
Shaun Mejia: I would also say that we’re pretty genre blind. We have similar but also different tastes and I feel like there really is no singular sound that we’re trying to achieve. I think every song is very different in a lot of ways, and we’re pulling from a lot of different time periods, genres, which is also very fun.
Le-Vy Nguyen: We definitely have fun with it. And now, thanks to the Office of Arts and Culture, they are funding our show at the Seattle Center, and we hope to utilize some of those funds to go to a professional studio, record our songs, get it mixed and mastered, so we can actually release something. Because right now it’s all demos that we’ve done ourselves, and I feel like we should release something a little bit more polished. And we do plan on producing a show that hopefully activates a space in the neighborhood, and that should hopefully be an accessible show where it’s free.
Adrian Alarilla: What should listeners expect when they attend your show on August 13?
Le-Vy Nguyen: We did tagline it “listening party” because we are debuting new songs. And we’re usually in a lineup when we play shows, so this one is very special because it’s only us headlining. This show will have new merch, new songs, and guest performers. Coincidentally, or not so coincidentally, Ali Wong is performing around the corner at McCaw Hall the same night, which is why we actually chose that date because we’re like, “oh you know there’ll be passersby, so hopefully they drop by.”
Adrian Alarilla: A bunch of jungle Asians performing at the same time, haha.
Le-Vy Nguyen: Oh yeah, we should have named it the Jungle Asians tour!
Jon Chu: Kind of to this point, this performance, I think, is kind of unique because we have a budget for it, so we can potentially do something with this particular performance that we couldn’t do with other shows, while also we’re still incorporating that community component to it, and I think for first-time listeners, I think that’s kind of it could be kind of intriguing to see what does it look like for kind of that community effort all coming together in this way.
Shaun Mejia: I think we bring community, whether it be actual people coming from the community to see our shows, or maybe even just the spirit of the neighborhood. All our songs are kind of about the neighborhood, so we bring these ties to the CID out into these different spaces.
Jon Chu: It’s another intriguing thing of what we’re bringing here, because it’s grounded in a tangible place. Our songs are about real people, real lived lives, real stories.
Adrian Alarilla: What does it mean for you to represent your many homes and many identities on stage?
Le-Vy Nguyen: I think being a mom, I have a soft spot for youth and the next generations. So the Mural Amphitheatre will be nice because it’s an all ages, free show on a Thursday evening. To be able to provide a Southeast Asian presence on a main stage at the Seattle Center is a rare opportunity and I hope will inspire others to share their artistry with their communities. But also, to that point, we were approached by the Summer Youth Leadership Program (SYLP). It’s a program that was founded by Assunta Ng from Northwest Asian Weekly, and it happens for three weeks every summer, catering to Asian American high school students specifically. hi hi hi led a workshop where we talked about the songwriting process and online music collaboration, and then walked them through that process and they even started writing a song together. It was a really fun experience and super rewarding. Utilizing the stage to connect with & inspire youth is my main motivator of why I am in hi hi hi.
Jon Chu: I think just another thing I would add is that even though we all have Southeast Asian roots and it informs a lot of our own journeys, it’s also not as if we are deliberately planning the Southeast Asian-ness of our group. It’s something that again just organically happened — and I think it’s happening in a place like the International District, where there’s been a history of different folks from different backgrounds coming together and doing things. It’s very reflective of how we formed, and I think also how we approach this concept of like a diasporic Southeast Asian band. We are playing music that is reflective of music that we like, based on what we grew up, how we grew up in the U.S. and also music that we were exposed to through our families and what they might have liked, and we get to honor and pay homage to those pieces as well.
Le-Vy Nguyen: So yeah, it’s been an adventure the last two years. We get to be creative together. We’re writing music we’re passionate and excited about. We’re making impactful connections with other artists and community members and leaders. And we’re having a lot of fun while doing it.
You can catch your new favorite local Jungle Asian band hi hi hi at Mural Amphitheatre on August 13 at 6:30 pm. Artists At the Center is a multi-year collaboration between Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and Seattle Center that aims to feature emerging and established artists, with support from Uptown Arts & Culture Coalition and the communities adjacent to Seattle Center campus. The project is made possible by a 10-year grant from Climate Pledge Arena and Seattle Kraken.
Adrian Alarilla, PhD, is a program evaluator, writer, researcher, and filmmaker. Born and raised in the Philippines, he is currently based south of in Seattle, and has a PhD in History from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Besides contributing to the International Examiner, he is an associate with Alaska-based consulting firm Stellar Group, and has worked with Tribal, governmental, and nongovernmental agencies in Alaska, Hawaiʻi, and the Pacific Islands.
