She was discovered via e-mail

An atypical act and a little luck launched Thao Nguyen's career

Thao Nguyen's new CD, "We Brave Bee Stings and All," has received glowing reviews. (Wiqan ang for the boston globe)

CAMBRIDGE - Let's be honest: good fortune and lucky timing rank right up there with talent when it comes to carving out a music career. Sometimes the path is preternaturally serendipitous. Thao Nguyen, a 23-year-old singer-songwriter from Falls Church, Va., may be endowed with a bounty of raw musicality, but she traces her rising star back to one happy accident.

First, a bit of background.

Nguyen is inherently lazy, has no attention span, and was never a tryer. Tryer isn't a word, but Nguyen's point, made during a pleasant hour of self-analysis in the office above the bar at the Middle East, is taken. Moreover, Nguyen watched so much television during her lonely childhood that she's developed a theory, only partly in jest, that her personality is a composite of sitcom characters: namely, cynical Darlene from "Roseanne" and stu dious Denise from "The Cosby Show." For a clever slacker who felt utterly invisible, writing smart, sad songs came naturally. Recording them was a snap. Asking people to listen?

"I would never do that. It's so embarrassing, and it feels so weird," Nguyen says. "That e-mail to Laura was really out of character."

"That e-mail" was a missive Nguyen (then a sociology major at the College of William & Mary) sent in 2006 to Laura Veirs (a Nonesuch recording artist) professing her fandom and offering herself as opening act should Veirs find herself in the area. Despite her aversion to self-promotion, she included a link to her songs. The man who happened to be fielding blind e-mails on Veirs's website the day Nguyen's lark of a message arrived was Slim Moon, Veirs's then-manager and founder of the esteemed indie label Kill Rock Stars.

"This was a long shot," says Moon, on the phone from Olympia. "But I really just liked her link, so we started corresponding and six months or so later Laura had a show and I asked Thao to be the opener. I already knew I liked her songs, and I really liked her swagger, and then we met and I realized I like everything about her, her talent and her manner and the way she looks at the world. So I asked if I could be her manager."

The rest is, well, you know. "We Brave Bee Stings and All," Nguyen's debut for Kill Rock Stars, was released last month to glowing reviews. The 23-year-old singer-guitarist and her band, the Get Down Stay Down, are on tour with labelmates Xiu Xiu - a Boston show is on Friday - and Nguyen is happily homeless. Asked where she lives, Nguyen motions to the van out front. As to where her mail is delivered, she says most of it is lost. A few stray bills occasionally wind up at her mother's house - appropriately enough in the hands of the woman whose strength in an abusive relationship provided the foundation for her daughter's academic and artistic achievements.

"We had a very turbulent family life, and seeing how she dealt with the challenge of being a woman with a family in a bad relationship . . . I think the same motivation I had to pursue women's studies share the same roots as my songwriting," Nguyen says. "I did a really good job of not confronting it for a long time, but it all collaborated to kick my ass."

Lines like "I have seen fear and convenience/ I have never glimpsed romance" and "Beat my brow, beat my chest/ Beat the ones who love me best" are scattered throughout Nguyen's beguiling indie-pop collection. The album's title is taken from "Swimming Pools," a quirky feminist anthem inspired by a wet T-shirt contest. Producer Tucker Martine, known for his work with Veirs, Erin McKeown, and the Decemberists, cobbled brash yet delicate ornamentation for Nguyen's songs, which are endlessly sunny on the surface and reliably (and often wryly) dark in the middle. Her singing voice - an assortment of croons and yelps that break all the rules of good pitch and conventional beauty without sacrificing an ounce of charm - bears little resemblance to the Lilith Fair ladies who entered her life during the impressionable preteen years, serving as a foil to the PBS Yanni specials her father favored.

Nguyen's older brother turned her on to the Fat Boys and Tone-Loc and she cultivated a knack for beat-boxing and humming at the same time, a talent she displays on "Bag of Hammers," the album's first single. Nguyen feels no connection, however, to Vietnamese culture or music. Her parents, who both worked abroad for the South Vietnamese government when the war broke out, were relocated to North Carolina and then Virginia, where they lived among a community of immigrants. But their daughter kept to herself, lost in the world of sitcoms and her collection of '60s pop records. A self-taught musician, Nguyen composed her first original tune for an eighth-grade project about "Lord of the Flies," and says that songwriting is the only activity that's held her attention over the years.

"I've quit everything: jobs, hobbies, people," Nguyen says. "I didn't realize until recently how many of the songs are about me screwing things up, and how responsible, or rather irresponsible, I am in relationships. My interests are pretty narrow. I'm bad at doing things I don't like to do and I don't like to do business. If people hadn't taken an interest in me I don't know to what extent I would have pursued music in a professional sense."

How thoroughly serendipitous, for Nguyen and her growing audience, that the man who shepherded the early careers of Elliott Smith and Sleater-Kinney would stumble into her life and under her spell.

"Things," says Nguyen, characteristically clear-eyed, "are falling into place."

Joan Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com. For more on music, visit boston.com/ae/music/blog.