“The best country songs take you home,” says Nicolette Hoang, frontwoman and songwriter for the Guelph, Ontario-based band, Nicolette & The Nobodies. “I want to write music that does that, songs that take you home.”

Nicolette is romantic about retro Western music; she speaks with a soft grit, a warm and distinguished rattle that lends her observations weight. Performing, she loosens into an unabashed howl, a fluid force turning upward at the edges with unmistakable twang. She keeps her lyrics no-nonsense—earthy comments on the human condition, floridity be damned. She reserves her flamboyance and flair for onstage attire—cowboy hats, fringed vests with matching hot pants, boots by all accounts made for walking. 

The child of Vietnamese immigrants, Nicolette’s embrace of Country music and all its glittering accouterments comes as some surprise, to even herself. “I had a complicated relationship with music growing up,” she shares. “Music was more of a skill or a task, it wasn’t really presented as a place for play or to explore emotionally, even though that’s what I was drawn to the most about it.”