If life is a band, Dr. Julian Saporiti, 38, is playing a lot of instruments: he’s the singer-songwriter behind No-No Boy, an indie-folk project he founded as part of his dissertation for a PhD in ethnomusicology and American studies from Brown University. Saporiti attended Berklee (“the music school, not the smart one,” he says, to differentiate the Boston institution from its homophone in California), where he joined an indie-rock band and traveled the world. He burned out after a decade on the road and stumbled into academia. But when his research on the unreported histories of Asian American musicians needed to be knitted into a coherent project, he defaulted to his first love: “I was listening to interviews and transcribing quotes, and then I just picked up my guitar and started writing lyrics.” He ended up penning more than 100 songs as part of his dissertation.
After graduating, he hit the road again, playing songs and collecting ethnographies (stories) along the way, and this time traveling with wife Emilia Halvorsen Saporiti, who collaborates on the No-No Boy project. (The name references Japanese American men who answered “no” to the two most crucial questions of the World War II–era internment camp intake, the so-called “loyalty questionnaire,” declining to pledge unconditional loyalty or military service to the US government). Saporiti’s 2021 album, 1975, was something of a hit; one track has more than a million Spotify listens. The songs are equal parts jams to blast in the car and fascinating historical revisions that go as deep as you care to dig.
Empire Electric, the third and likely final No-No Boy album, is out September 29 on Smithsonian Folkways. We spoke on a sunny late afternoon earlier this month, strolling the trails of Tryon Creek State Natural Area, where Saporiti likes to meditate and bird-watch after he drops off his wife for her law school classes at Lewis & Clark—and where he recorded some of…
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