By Michelle Woo Photograph by Eric Sueyoshi
Bobby Choy is a loser.
He reiterates this from an intimate stage at the El Cid theater on L.A.’s Sunset Boulevard, where he sits slouched on a wooden chair with his guitar (“a piece of sh*t,” he describes), his long black bangs eclipsing one eye.
“You guys can come closer,” he utters timidly to the scattered, chattering crowd. “I don’t stink.”
Wearing a faded zip-up sweatshirt, he warns that he could pass out at any moment as he’s in the final stretch of the 10-day no-solid-food Master Cleanse, partly because he can’t afford to eat. He remarks that some parts of his songs suck. His titles include “Girls Like You Don’t Go for Guys Like Me.”
You almost feel sorry for him.
Almost.
That is, until he starts singing. Then you discover what his devout army of fans have known all along. That Bobby Choy, an alt-folk singer/songwriter who goes by the moniker Big Phony, is talented. His voice, a soothing sound infused with Elliot Smith and Radiohead influences, whisks listeners into a mellow trance and teases them with unexpectedly witty lyrics.
And that whole loser thing? It’s precisely what makes him so cool.
Of course, the poor-guy spiel is no act. Choy, 30, left the corporate world to dive full force into his music, recently releasing his latest album, “Straight to Bootleg, Volume 01,” which was recorded in a friend’s home studio. (In one song, you can hear police sirens because the windows were left open.)
To promote the project, he divides his time between L.A. and New York, crashing on couches and aerobeds. “It really is a struggle, but somehow I’m making it month to month,” he says in an interview at the KoreAm office. “Somehow, when I don’t think I’m going to make this month’s bills on my own, it always works out. I’ll sell just enough CDs or I’ll get in a last-minute show.”
For Choy, music has always served as an intangible safety net. Growing up in New York City, times were rough. When his father’s apparel business went bankrupt, his family of five moved around 20 to 30 times. The lack of stability was shattering for Choy, a shy kid who already felt overshadowed by his two older brothers.
One day, his mom bought one of his brothers a guitar. “He made it clear to me that I couldn’t touch it, and if I did, he would pretty much break my face,” Choy recalls. “My way of responding to that was by playing in secret when he wasn’t home. I finally got better than he did, and Mom noticed, so she took the guitar away from him and gave it to me.”
The guitar soon became his source of comfort as he grew “tired of making friends.” He started learning gospel songs (his mother was a pastor) and then moved on to mimicking the tunes on whichever cassette tapes were in the house.
With an interest in painting, he attended the arts-centered LaGuardia High School in Manhattan. His parents moved to L.A., but he didn’t wish to follow, so he eventually ended up living alone. During his free time, he would once again turn to his guitar, writing songs mostly about his relationship with God.
He went on to attend Gordon College, a small liberal arts school in Massachusetts, with his sights on becoming a pastor. But during his first year, he had a dramatic change of heart. He started questioning his faith and everything he believed in.
“There were moments where I almost exploded emotionally and mentally,” he says. “I shocked a lot of people, disappointed a lot of people, because I changed. I wanted a different life.”
Suddenly, Choy began soaking in the sounds of artists he had never paid much attention to, including The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Nick Drake, and Simon and Garfunkel. Soon, his own music took a daring turn. While playing at open mic nights and coffee shops, he reveled in the response. “I would swear more in songs and people would be appalled by it and I loved that feeling,” he says. “I felt like I was being honest. I felt like I was making progress. I was being a better human being. So I would try to push the envelope on that level. I was writing about life and death, real feelings of loss. Even stuff as dark as suicide. Not so much to push buttons. It was just to stretch myself as an artist.”
Eventually after college, Choy moved to L.A. He started working at a law firm, but hated it. From the sidelines, he saw how his friends were giving up everything to pursue their dreams.
“I thought maybe I should just lay it all on the line,” he says. “It was definitely a gamble, but it was one I was willing to take. It was either that or burn out.” So he quit and never looked back.
Choy titled his first album “Fiction and Other Realities” as its characters are sometimes fictitious, though the emotions are always real. The rage in his music has toned down quite a bit since college, but his songs remain decidedly emo, with themes of loneliness and heartache reoccurring throughout.
The name Big Phony comes from J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. In the book, there’s a man that speaks at a podium about God and being a Christian, and Holden Caulfield calls him a big phony because he’s so fake. “It really spoke to me,” Choy says. “I felt like that for the longest time. There was a point where I was very super Christian and would kind of shove it in people’s faces.”
He also admits that he used the name Big Phony to hide the fact that he was Asian, as he didn’t think mainstream audiences could embrace that. His logo became a drawing of a guy with a paper bag over his head. Though it wasn’t about being ashamed of his heritage. “I just wanted people to focus on the music,” he says.
Recently, Choy’s songs have been featured in numerous indie films, including Michael Kang’s “West 32nd.” Like most of today’s indie artists, he garners fans through the Internet with his website (www.bigphonymusic.com), along with various music sites, MySpace and Facebook.
For most of the year, Choy lives at his brother’s home in Manhattan Beach, Calif. He says his family has been extremely supportive of his career.
He believes the song “Words that Define” on the new album sums up his ongoing journey. “I am just a loser-turned-winner despite all my disappointments,” the lyrics read.
“I desperately want to do this for the rest of my life,” Choy says.
Day by day, he proves it.
