Ghost Echoes Pt. 2 : Isabeau Waia’u Walker and the White Mexican Strat
Julian Saporiti
The Portland crowd was masked. There was a rapid testing van outside the venue and someone checking vaccination cards at the door. It was a little unnerving; a bit strange. My partner Emilia and I were there to open the bill for one of the first shows back at Portland’s Mississippi Studios, one of the best sounding rooms in town.
As we walked in, June Magnolia was still sound checking in all of their “prog-folk” glory. I felt awakened by the loud live music. I also felt a rising anxiety as I imagined soundtracking a potential super spreader event. Everyone in the band wore masks onstage. I looked at the bar and fretted over what drink etiquette might be.
An hour and a half later, the room filled up, the lights went down and things felt right-ish. Bodies and electricity and sound. We sang our songs. It was good.
The last act on the bill was Isabeau Waia’u Walker. Her band were all dressed in white, matching her guitar. The stage lights slowly cycled between white, gold and blue. The musicians stood four abreast, lead guitar, bass, Isabeau and keys, left to right.
Live music. For the first time in over a godforsaken year.
It felt good, man. Really good. The band was good. They sounded good. They looked cool. I was there. I needed this, like biting into a cheeseburger after a week of backpacking through the mountains.
Keep it to yourself
Your fucked up standards
Tied me at the ankles
Tripped me up
How long are the years I’ve stumbled?
Isabeau plays with some bite. In her songs and in her voice. Her guitar tone was solid, thanks in large part to an EarthQuaker Westwood overdrive running into a Matthews Effects Astronomer and an Ernie Ball tremolo. The lead guitarist brought a larger fx arsenal allowing for some nice textured pads and not a small dose of that now ubiquitous indie guitar shimmer.
The masked crowd roared their muffled approval.
Have you ever heard a local band play a song that’s really good? Like legit, this should be on the radio good. A song that if happened upon by the right music supervisor or algorithm could have millions of streams. It’s an exhilarating experience. You feel lucky, like you’re on the inside of something. Hearing a really great song at a local show, it’s like watching a high school basketball player rise up and throw down an in-game dunk; unexpected and awesome.
That’s what it felt like when Isabeau and her band played “Better Metric,” a class indie rock tune that would be a fine Phoebe Bridgers single. The whole set was great, solid from top to bottom, but “Better Metric” was close to perfect: memorable lead guitar riff and a catchy-as-hell chorus (“Yeah, keep it! / Keep it to yourself”). The structure is simple but well assembled and never boring and Isabeau’s skilled lyricism explores the timely mid-pandemic question of how and by what/whose standards we ought to measure ourselves.
When we encounter an amazing song or performance outside the context of a highly publicized album release or curated Spotify playlist, it’s special. You remember the magic of music, the alchemy of songwriting.
The set never let down. Man, I was so into it. And then, “The Prince.”
If “Better Metric” is great, “The Prince” is profound.
“This song is about my dad.” Isabeau told the audience.
Gather round the table
It’s where you hear about the one
Who showed up to save his reputation
“The Prince” is a slow burn and a great closer. It’s a beautiful ballad invoking family get togethers, faded photographs and fuzzy memories. The music builds with purpose. You can hear the laughter of a folks talking story and bullshitting. The words swim around a kid, a trouble maker, who ends up at a private school to turn things around. Then we all sing “Iesu No Ke Kahuhipa,” a Hawaiian translation of “Savior, Like A Shepard Lead Us.” And that’s it. The show is over.
The lights come up, the band walks offstage. But I don’t move. I’m stuck to my spot, caught up in my thoughts. Because, damn, “The Prince” has some real weight to it. It cuts.
Lawyers sons
Judges sons
Futures locked down with sugar cane funds
Local boys on borrowed funds
Scales growing to guard themselves from everyone
The song’s protagonist a version of Walker’s father, is the kid from the other side of the tracks, fish out of water at the preppy school—Heath Ledger in Ten Things I Hate About You or Brendan Fraser in School Ties. But it goes places, historical places. It’s a song which examines the personal consequences of imperialism and the unlawful annexation of Hawaii. The poor, native boys suffering through broken homes, severed legacies, and erased identities are reformed through American education and Christian religion.
The toy Polynesian
At the mercy of the…
Lawyers sons
Judges sons
Futures locked down with sugar cane funds
Local boys on borrowed funds
Scales growing to guard themselves from everyone
“The Prince” resonates for any person whose family has been cut up and recombined by imperialism. Even as the crowd thinned out and the sound guy began to wrap up cables, I just stood there. I thought about the portrait of a family you don’t often see represented and the wonderful nuances Isabeau brings to the listener: the competing memories bitter and sweet. As the lights came on, I felt immense gratitude towards Isabeau for making something beautiful out of all of that complication because it’s a lot for an artist, or anyone, to carry around.
*************
A few days later I met Isabeau outside the excellent southeast Portland coffee shop Heart. Being an ethnomusicologist, I’m naturally interested in exploring the cultural dynamic at play behind the sounds I’m hearing. So, I asked if I could interview her. Naturally, our conversation veered towards how growing up on Maui plays into her sound.
“I feel like what I’m making is authentic Hawaiian music,” Isabeau said. “I grew up with these kids going to rock shows. I’m not one of those whose going to do the cultural performances at the hotels.”
“You’re not putting on the grass skirt,” I responded.
“No. But that doesn’t make what I do any less Hawaiian. I’m not playing ukulele or singing what people think of as [stereotypical] Hawaiian music, but this is where I come from, and so whatever I play, this is what Hawaiian music sounds like.”
I enjoyed this conversation immensely. It made me think. Isabeau is funny, kinda cool /kinda goofy former high school teacher, so we had shared common ground. She is a gracious and open interview and offered many insights large and small about her career, mixed heritage, and this unending pandemic. But stuck with me was her reclamation of authenticity. That was meaningful.
As an artist, as a mixed race person, it struck a chord. I like the idea that it can be up to you to define the culture you’re born into and not always the other way around. This gives a lot of room for those of us who are mixed, disconnected from our “roots,” or just don’t feel 100% right wherever we are.
Can I tell you something that kind of gets on my nerves? The majority of articles about my band No-No Boy focus almost entirely on my identity as an “Asian American.” I know I invite this because my lyrics, like “The Prince,” often explore the fallout of war and imperialism in Vietnam or tackle concepts like immigrants and refugees. I get it. But there’s a particularly irksome question I’ve gotten a lot recently: “Have you thought about including traditional Asian instruments into your music.”
What does that mean? What sounds Asian? Do you think white people own guitars? What instrument should I be playing? I’m from Tennessee. I use the instruments I grew up with and whatever I happen to have around my house — guitars, mandolins, some desktop synths, samplers… The idea that certain instruments or sonic markers denote a higher level of cultural authenticity is insulting to someone who has no reason to know how to play a Koto or Dan Bau or Sitar—we didn’t get sushi in Nashville until after I was born. What I’m really hearing is you don’t check this, this and this box.
*************
While there are certainly instruments which people from specific geographic regions have created and take pride in, historically, if you dig deep enough, there is no instrument which belongs to any one culture whole cloth. That’s short sighted and reductive thinking. It ignores the incredible way music has always traveled and mutated. Look up the history of any instrument and you will traverse the globe. Let’s consider the electric guitar. Specifically, let’s examine the one Isabeau played that night at Mississippi Studios.
A solid body, electric guitar.
A white Fender Stratocaster.
Made in Mexico.
Assembled from Alder sourced from the Pacific Northwest coast.
The electric guitar strings Waia’u Walker manipulates with tatted fingers, hands and arms indicative of a PNW artist were invented in New York by John D’Angelico and John D’Addario.
From the materials, to the innovation, there are many histories and worlds contained within this one instrument.
Let’s get to the pickups, a revolutionary piece of gear which as much as any other technology transformed 20th century culture. To do that, we need to think about George Beauchamp’s electrified frying pan and to do that we have to go to Hawaii.
*************
Growing up in Nashville, one of my favorite instruments was the pedal steel guitar. I got to hear it a lot. I loved the slides and volume swells and the wizardlike multi-limbed command the player had to possess to work the instrument. Sneaky Pete Kleinow and Paul Franklin are two of my musical heroes. But, it wasn’t until last year when I bought a 1940s slide guitar that I realized that one of the identifying sounds of where I’m from was an invention of the Pacific. In fact, the first electric guitar, was Hawaiian steel guitar.
Joseph Kekuku was born in December of 1874. His biological father Ahmee was a Chinese plantation owner who returned to China from Oahu, leaving Joseph’s mother Miliama “Miriam” Kaopua before the baby was born. Miriam, a native Hawaiian, was remarried to Joseph Kekukuʻupenakanaʻiaupuniokamehameha Apuakehau who adopted Joseph. The family became enmeshed with the Mormon missionaries on Oahu which turned out to be an important footnote in the history of the steel guitar.
Joseph Kekuku grew up in the dying decades of the Hawaiian kingdom with foreigners from the United States, Europe and Asia converging on the islands and challenging Hawaiian autonomy. It’s culture shifted drastically and eventually the US annexed the kingdom unlawfully.
European stringed instruments, which are largely evolved from the medieval Islamic world, had traveled to Hawaii in the hands of some of these foreigners in the 19th century. By the 1840s, the Spanish guitar and other stringed instruments were quickly adapted into Hawaiian musical practice.
While missionaries often draw well-earned criticism for erasing native culture, the Mormons, unlike other sects were more relaxed about Hawaiians maintaining their language, dance and musical traditions. In large part because of affiliation with Church of Latter Day Saints, Joseph Kekuku “the principal architect of the Hawaiian steel guitar” was able to take part in a rich guitar culture.
As a boy, Kekuku was enrolled in the Kamehameha School for Boys in Honolulu, a private institution not dissimilar to the Indian boarding schools in North America which aimed to “kill the Indian, save the man.” By 1885, at the age of 11, Kekuku had developed a technique of running a metal object across guitar strings to change the pitch. Others Hawaiians Gabriel Davion and James Hoa have also been credited with the discovery of this technique but Kekuku remains credited with the innovation… My favorite origin story is that an Indian slave boy brought to Hawaii by Portuguese sailors came up with the technique mirroring slide techniques back in India.
In any case, the Hawaiian Steel Guitar became incredibly popular and by the 1930s, one of its practitioners George Beauchamp pioneered an electronic pickup to stick in his “frying pan” lap steel. Famously, Leo Fender and Les Paul expand this technology… and we arrive in 2021 in a masked music hall listening to Isabeau sing a song about her father which has marked similarities to Joseph Kekuku’s biography, accompanying herself on a white Mexican Strat.
*************
We’re all shattered to oblivion, aren’t we? That’s what empire does. Kids who grew up in families in imperialized places, you don’t have a chance to be whole. But that’s not what it’s really about is it? Everyone, if you go back far enough is from somewhere else or broken by people from somewhere else. Not to excuse imperialism, but it’s how you put yourself back together that matters.
And that’s what musicians do so well, in the face of true horror—war, slavery, real oppression, erasure—they make sound and allow people to dance and feel using whatever’s around, being brave or silly, both. Cultures clash and some people make art out of it. Find a way to move forward.
I’m going to end this essay with Isabeau's words about “The Prince.” I hope you listen to it and I hope you are inspired to use whatever sounds you have at your disposal to tell your story and make something new and authentic.
Email from Isabeau Waia’u Walker, October 3rd, 2021:
“The Prince” includes a hymn I learned in both English and Hawaiian as a child. The hymn comes from the Christian church and my introduction to the lyrics, the meaning and the heart of it came through Native Hawaiians practicing and communing within the Christian faith. It would seem like an off beat addition to the story being told in “The Prince” but for me and the community I was raised within that tension is a constant companion.
The Church carries a long history of hurt and erasure while also offering hope, restoration and refuge to many people long beaten down and forgotten (sometimes at the hands of the church). The song becomes more honest to my family history and my lived experience when the hymn, sung in ‘ōlelo Hawaiʻi, acts as a thread throughout the narrative. The melody grounds me and secures me. There is a safety in the promise of the lyrics. And, simultaneously, it pokes at the generational ache that feels nearly impossible to heal and resolve.
I think I wanted everyone to share in the discomfort...to just sit in it with me, with my family. “The Prince” doesn’t aim to answer any big questions. It’s meant to tell a story.”
*************
For a great read on the Hawaiian Steel Guitar check out John W. Troutman’s Kīkā Kila: How the Hawaiian Steel Guitar Changed the Sound of Modern Music.
Photo by Megan Matheson.
Julian Saporiti is a Vietnamese American songwriter and scholar born in Nashville, Tennessee. His work "No-No Boy" has transformed his doctoral research on Asian American history into concerts, albums and films which have reached a broad and diverse public audience. His latest album "1975" released through Smithsonian Folkways has been hailed by NPR as "an act of revisionist subversion" and American Songwriter called it "insanely listenable and gorgeous." By using art to dive into highly divisive issues such as race, refugees and immigration, Saporiti aims to allow audience members to sit complication as music and visuals open doorways into difficult histories. Saporiti currently lives in Portland, Oregon. He holds degrees from Berklee College of Music, University of Wyoming and Brown University.
