Small Void Tours to Celebrate Life and Love
SubRosa, Santa Cruz - All photos courtesy of @RaditanaDoes
Small Void is the solo project of singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Obsidian Xiu. Their music might broadly be classified as “folk punk:” Obsidian alternates between playing accordion and acoustic guitar and their lyrics are candid. However, since Obsidian’s wife, Rosalie Natalie Gann, passed away last March, their songwriting has become even more evocative as it explores grief. Just two weeks after Rosalie passed, Small Void released an album titled “farewell, rosalie.” The album is a mix of recordings that Rosalie is featured on, as well as songs that were written in the wake of her passing, and it is both vulnerable and powerful.
Small Void - All photos courtesy of @RaditanaDoes
In February of this year, Small Void released another album, “What if things turn out to be more beautiful than we can see right now?” which they describe as “a second installment to my repertoire of mourning works driven by the grief of losing Rosalie, a love of my life, and a question I sincerely hope for us all to consider.” From late February to early March, Small Void embarked on a West Coast tour dubbed the “Worst Year of Our Lives Tour,” to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Gann’s passing.
“farewell, Rosalie” by Small Void
The Santa Cruz stop of the tour was particularly special for Obsidian, as it took place at SubRosa, an anarchist community space that they used to be a staff member at. Gender Violence opened the show with a set of high-energy songs about transgender resistance. Small Void then played a powerful selection of songs from old and new releases as the crowd sang along, leaving no dry eyes in the venue. Ballast Bunny, who was on the entire tour with Small Void, then played a soulful set accompanied by an accordion player and dear friend named Fawn. Dirty Laundry finished out the night with a mix of originals and deep cuts from the American songbook played on guitar, banjo, and harmonica. The night was a lively experience of contemporary folk music.
The following is an interview with Obsidian Xiu about this show, the Worst Year Of Our Lives Tour, and their upcoming plans for Small Void.
Goody James: Can you describe the significance of the “Worst Year Our Lives Tour” for you?
Obsidian Xiu: Whenever we hit the six-month mark after Rosalie died, I messaged her best friend, and I was like, “Holy shit, it’s been most of a year.” It made it feel so tangibly close to be approaching the year mark from that point. And it was really overwhelming to think about what it might feel like to go past a year and to deal with the anniversary itself, especially because Rosalie’s birthday is February 24, her death day is March 1, and she was on life support until March 4. So that whole period of time is really fraught.
I was imagining wanting to be with friends during that period of time because right now, I live in Kansas City, and I moved here just after Rosalie died. I’ve been quite a hermit this past year, reasonably. So I don’t have a ton of friends here, never mind my closest, Rosalie-mutual friends. And so I decided that I needed to take that period of time off of doing counselling work. My job is that I’m a counsellor over the phone. I knew I needed to take that period of time off. I knew that I needed to be with friends. So I asked a couple people if they wanted to go on tour. It was really centred around wanting to be with Grass. Grass was Rosalie’s absolute soulmate and best friend. We were friends before, and now we are quite close because of how meaningful it is to share the grief with somebody who also is really devastated about the same person.
Gender Violence - All photos courtesy of @RaditanaDoes
So really, the significance of the tour is to celebrate her birthday and her death day and mourn her, and to be together in friendship. And to know that amongst great grief there is great joy, because grief is the worst proof there is of incredible love and incredible joy.
I timed it so that we would play her birthday show in Portland, where I had three giant birthday cakes and Physique as a secret headliner. Because the last date that I got to have for her was taking her to see Physique for her birthday. They’re friends of mine, and they were down to make it happen. It was incredibly meaningful.
Then her death day show was in Oakland. I wanted to plan something where people could mourn her on the West Coast because, since she died in Arkansas and her memorial—her family had one in Omaha and then we had one in NOLA—she had a lot of friends on the West Coast who weren’t able to make it out. So I just wanted a continuation of celebrating and mourning her.
But the other part of it that’s really significant is that one of her absolute favourite things in the world to do was to travel around in a van with friends and play music. So the tour, in that way, also just felt like a huge way to tribute to her specifically, and a handful of our mutual friends came along too. It was just incredibly sweet and oogly as shit, which is exactly what she loved.
GJ: How / why did you choose the other artists you performed with? Was Ballast Bunny on the whole tour with you?
OX: As far as choosing other artists to be on the bill, I mostly just went with whoever was available. But I really value playing with trans youth artists, especially if they are new to putting out music. I value creation for creation’s sake so much, and I think that it’s so, so important to encourage people who have never played music before to try. And for people who are new to playing music and have never played shows, I just want to encourage them to believe that what they have to share and what they have created is important and worthy of being heard, at whatever technical skill they’re at. I don’t give a shit about technical skill.
Dirty Laundry - All photos courtesy of @RaditanaDoes
I really love playing with new artists. And that was one of the reasons why I chose Ballast Bunny to come with me. They did come with me for the whole tour. When I asked them, they were like, “I don’t know, I’ve only played a couple shows before,” and I was just like, “So what? You can tour if you want to.” We had been acquainted just through travelling, but being on tour together was kind of our first actual hangout, which is a streak with Small Void now. My past two tours and then this one that I just did—all three of them were with another artist who I had never really hung out with before. So it’s kind of like, “This is our first hangout; let’s go on tour!” And the same is gonna be true for my upcoming tour with June Hawthorn.
Ballast Bunny - All photos courtesy of @RaditanaDoes
GJ: You mentioned that you used to be involved with SubRosa. What/ when was your involvement with the space, and what was it like coming back for the show?
OX: I was a staffer at SubRosa for a couple of years in my late teens and early twenties. I think around 2014-2016, something like that. I would hold the open hours, and I also hosted the Queer Open Mic Nights as well as this sort of funny queer open space where it was just like, “Let’s meet up and hang out and see what happens.” It sort of morphed into a queer game night a lot of the time, and other times we’d just hang out, but it was really special.
Being back in the space was super nostalgic. It’s wild to see how much of it hasn’t changed as well as the things that have changed since I was going there regularly. SubRosa has so much of a special place in my heart because it was a formative time for me to be around adults who were older than me, who valued my perspective, time, and experience. Having queer elders around was really important to me at that time, especially as my parents were going through a divorce and were completely checked out.
SubRosa, Santa Cruz - All photos courtesy of @RaditanaDoes
I’m pretty sure that I started going to SubRosa when I was 19 or 20 or something. So because I’ve known of it for so long and was so involved for a minute there, it feels like an old friend.
While I was playing, there was this really incredible time travel thing happening because I remember performing there for the open mics when I was so much younger. And just thinking at that time, that was the stage that I had—to start knowing what it felt like to perform and to have people care about what you have to play. So I was like, “Okay, it’s been at least 10 years and I’m back at this stage,” and just reflecting on how much I’ve grown as a person, how much my music has changed or not: it was really a trip.
GJ: Are you planning any more tours this year?
OX: I was invited to play Slug Fest in North Carolina on June 1. I didn’t want to drive out just for the one show, and I don’t like touring alone as a solo artist. So I looked at the lineup of who else was invited, and June Hawthorn was on the list, who is someone that I was excited about because I’ve known them since 2019, when I played a show with Long Sought Rest in Vancouver and they came to the show. We were really excited about connecting with someone playing music who was also Asian and also autistic, and we kind of were like, “Oh cool, I don’t know who you are, but you’re special to me now.”
So years later, I was like, "Hey, you’re coming down? Aren’t you in Canada? Don’t you want to make a tour to make your time worth it instead of just driving down for one show?” And they were down. So yeah, I’m gonna be touring with June Hawthorn from May 17 to June 6 in the Midwest/Appalachia area.
GJ: What’s it like to have so many people connect with Small Void’s music?
OX: When I started putting out solo music, I wasn’t really thinking of it as like a career choice by any means. And I still don’t think of it quite as that now, but I think that when I started putting out music, I didn’t realize how much it would resonate with people and how much of an audience I would grow to have. It is a bizarre thing to be this hyper-niche, micro-famed person, and I think that there’s a lot of responsibility in that. Whenever I was like, “Okay, people are starting to pay attention to my music again,” after I started putting it out after Long Sought Rest, I sat down and I was like, “What do I want to put out into the world?” And I think ultimately it’s authenticity and kindness. So that’s at the forefront of my mind when I’m doing stuff with Small Void.
Small Void - All photos courtesy of @RaditanaDoes
Another huge thing is that I have morphed into becoming a beacon for queer grieving because of the loss of my wife, but also aside from grieving her, I’ve been writing grief songs about friends of mine for a long time. And I think that being very open about my grieving process is important to me because I don’t think that there is enough of a conversation, or enough space given, or enough life breathed into the need for queer grieving. So I think that sharing my process in this really raw way and encouraging myself to write music as a part of my process has meant so much to so many people, and it’s meant so much to me, and it’s helped me so much.
Sometimes when I’m at a show, I feel kind of like, “Well cool, welcome to my diary.” There’s a little joke that was happening on tour where people were trying to explain my true genre, because they were like, “Folk punk’s not quite it,” so we were joking that my true genre is “Get Wrecked.”
It was really interesting, every time, realizing that there were some people who came to the show not knowing what they were getting into and coming out of it having gone through this transformative grief process—it’s a beautiful thing to have togetherness and to have ceremony around grief and to take yourself to the well of it on purpose. Because it’s gonna come up whether you want it to or not. And whether you mean for it to or not, it comes out. So the best thing that I know to do with that is to find ways to let it come up on purpose and with intention.
Small Void and June Hawthorn’s 2025 summer tour will be called “Gaysian Joy!” They will play shows in Missouri, Indiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Illinois. Follow them on social media to keep up with new releases and updates!
The upcoming “Gaysian Joy!” tour, featuring June Hawthorn and Small Void.
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