Minh Is Just Beginning To Find His Potential
For the past four months, Minh’s music has made gains on streaming services. In his first interview, he reflects on his new EP’s momentum and why he became a self-made musician.
Photo by Andrew Nguyen
Minh, a Houston-native singer-songwriter, is only nineteen years old but has been recording and making music since he was a freshman in high school. For the entirety of his career, it’s just been him, alone in his room, writing, recording and mixing the music that, over the past four months, has started to gain real traction on streaming.
In January, Minh passed over 100k monthly listeners and “hypnotized”, a lead single from his latest EP “angelbites” hit viral success with over two million streams on Spotify. Since then, he’s been hitting a stride with subsequent singles “vertigo” and “deserve you”. For Minh, this success is long-deserved and affirming.
“I’ve had to learn everything on my own: how to produce, how to mix, how to sing. It’s been a really long process,” he told me recently in his first interview. Working in solidarity has been a practical decision: Minh hasn’t met anyone in his hometown who makes the kind of music he’s inspired by.
“I have a lot of friends who dabble in music,” he said, “but no one who’s been that key collaborator.”
Yet his isolation has worked in Minh’s favor: It’s made him into an autonomous artist who can problem solve and execute all of his ideas on his own.
To hear the best example of Minh’s artistry, you should listen to “angelbites”, the EP he made near the end of his senior year and the summer that followed. The EP is a slow burn listen that spotlights Minh’s soft vocals and experimental production.
You can hear the influence of keshi, one of Minh’s favorite artists, on the vocals of “deserve you” or in the dark pop grind of "irresistible". But you can also hear Minh building towards a sound that is uniquely his own. On my favorite track, “vertigo”, he creates a melody that spirals and gets stuck in your head.
The lyrics for “vertigo” also reflect, Minh said, the headspace he was in while creating the project. “There was so much going on and I was trying to do everything at once,” he said. “On the surface, the narrative is about a relationship but the feeling goes deeper than that.”
“I aimed to create an EP that was eclectic. I wanted everything to sound different but still cohesive,” he told me. Though the tracks for “angelbites” came from a handful of singles that were not attached to any project, Minh explained, “I branched out my sound and I really had a bunch of different ideas I would like to try. I felt like people would understand there’s a lot of different things happening with this EP.”
Photo by Andrew Nguyen
Minh’s always made music, in some capacity, since childhood, even if it wasn’t always a source of enjoyment.
He began, like many children do, with piano lessons when he was four years old. Piano never really interested Minh – but guitar did. When his dad began to train him on the chords, things began to gel. Going to live shows with his family from a young age was also a key source of inspiration for him.
“My parents definitely have contributed a lot to me discovering music,” he remembered. “They instilled music in me from a young age.”
Having the skills instilled in him from a young age, helped Minh. “When I went to write a song,” he said, he already knew how to play the instruments or approach writing a song.
By middle school, Minh had begun finding artists on YouTube and Spotify who inspired him. It was a lightbulb moment in 2018, though, when he discovered keshi. Like Minh, keshi actually hails from a Houston suburb.
“I thought it was really interesting that he’s from the same place and that he’s also Viet,” he told me.
In keshi, Minh saw a small town boy who was able to transcend the strip mall hell he came from and become a god-like force in music. (keshi, perhaps, says so himself in “amen”: “I been playing god in arenas/ I was doing better till I wanted more”.)
What he learned, Minh observed, is that “I had to go search elsewhere for the inspiration, the style and to become bigger than life in a way.”
In his day to day life, Minh is highly introverted. (On a typical day on campus, Minh told me, he rarely talks to anyone and instead chooses to listen to music, mostly his own demos, to decide what he should develop.) But he saw how keshi and other artists transformed when they would hit the stage, and saw some of himself in that duality too. “I think on stage, I had to put on a bit of a persona because normally I’m the kind of person that keeps to myself. But when I'm on stage I have to become bigger than that. That big city vibe influences how I carry myself.”
Perhaps because he was so ambitious, Minh released his first EP, "Butterfly", when he was sixteen years old.
Looking back on it now, Minh said, he can hear how little he knew about music. He had only learned how to make music on Logic and sing six months prior.
When I told him that the EP actually is pretty well made for someone so young, he flashed a shit eating grin and replied, “I would disagree! I hate listening to that EP. I have thought about taking it down multiple times.” He laughed. “It was made super on the fly and I was using YouTube videos to learn Logic as I was writing the project.”
He struggles, even now, with whether he should keep the EP up on streaming. It’s not the best representation of his quality, he argued. Then countered, “I cringe when I hear it but people still like it and I feel like it would be wrong to take it off if people are still listening to it. It also shows people how far I’ve come over the years.”
Photo by Andrew Nguyen
The past year has been a whirlwind for Minh. Along with releasing “angelbites”, he also opened for K-R&B singers JUNNY and Jimmy Brown at their Houston tour stops. Those experiences, he said, reaffirmed how committed he is to making music work.
“Being onstage has shown me that performing is the main goal. My nerves are out of control backstage before the show, but then you walk out there and people love you, it feels amazing,” he said. “It’s pure adrenaline. Everything’s a blur.”
The live shows have also encouraged him to write music specifically for the stage. Citing keshi’s braggadocious track “GET IT” as an example, Minh’s been working to craft music that can work a crowd. He wants soaring guitar solos and music that gets fans hyped. “I need to learn how to bring that energy to the crowd,” he said.
“angelbites” could help with that. He’s excited about tracks like the angsty “irresistible”, which has some of the cockiest lyrics he’s ever written. “I’ve never written a song like that because it feels egotistical,” he continued. “But I think that also contributes to feeling like you’re bigger than life on stage.”
The biggest learning curve from this year, though, came from completing “angelbites”. To finish the EP, Minh gave himself a deadline for the end of summer. The tracks he enjoyed the most came together quickly. But others, like “deserve you”, were more of a challenge. “The lyrics took the longest for that song. I think I rewrote the last verse three or four times in the span of two weeks,” he said.
“irresitable” was also a challenge to make. “I knew I wanted something with a darker vibe and a nice bounce to it. But I didn’t know what the hook was.” The lingering due date began to stress him out as he scrapped different demos. But eventually, he found his way. “I experimented with vocal chops and stutters and I think that influenced the sonic vibe of the song,” he said. “That song was purely experimentation until it eventually came together.”
Once he had all of the tracks completed, Minh faced the biggest hurdle: organizing them. “That’s the hard part about an EP - ordering everything. I spent about a week with all the masters and listened to them in different order and thought, what feels right to me? Obviously making the songs flow in a way that is cohesive and makes sense was important.”
Overall, “angelbites” encompasses the very different headspaces Minh found himself in as he graduated from high school and experienced his last summer before beginning college. But he’s satisfied with what he delivered: “I think it showcases different sides of my artistry.”
Looking back at the past few years, Minh feels some pride in how much he’s learned, all by sheer will. “The thing that makes me most proud is to see the amount of growth from the start. When I started making music, I couldn’t sing. I couldn’t produce music. I started taking vocal lessons right before I released ‘Butterfly’.” He continued, “To see people compliment the vocals is really cool for me because singing was such a big weakness for me.”
He’s been touched by the messages he receives, sometimes paragraphs upon paragraphs, from fans who tell him how much his music means to them. Some say that they wish they had found him years ago, others tell him how a song changed their life. Those messages remind him that he’s on the right track.
“Stuff like that really keeps me going. I can’t stop now because I’ve already built so much,” he said. “It’s inspiring to know that I haven’t reached my potential yet. There’s so much more for me to do.”
