A-SIDE

I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed my job.”

Joann Lim puts it bluntly.

The job she is referring to is her official one: server at a Japanese restaurant in Southern California. Terrible hours. Work that is physically and emotionally draining. The type of labor that serves like as a reality check for the nastiness that people are capable of – especially when they’re hungry. But it’s also the type of work Lim recommends everyone try once.

“It helps you develop good insight on other people,” Lim said. “And it reminds you to always be kind to strangers.”

Lim works as a server on top of studying full-time for a master’s in urban planning, on top of making music as one half of the duo Holy Girl.

There was a time Lim worked at the restaurant full-time, went to grad school full-time, and also interned and worked as a research assistant. Exhausted, burnt out, but the hardest part was not having time to work on music, she said.

“I don’t sleep,” Lim said. “Or rather, I’m always sacrificing something.”

The regulars at the restaurant have acted almost as stand-ins for Lim’s family and friends. They are people she otherwise might not come into contact with, but she has enjoyed getting to know them, despite liking little else about her customer service job.

She would give the server position up, without hesitation, to focus on Holy Girl, but Lim would not say the same about her budding career in urban planning.

“I’m not going to grad school just to get a money-making career,”

Lim said. “So much as music will always be something that I will have in my life, helping cities grow into healthier and happier places through urban planning is another passion that I hope to continue the rest of my life."

B-SIDE

Lim considers making music an integral part of her identity. It is not a hobby.

The music that she makes, alongside bandmate Conrad, consists of her vocals and keys, his guitar, bass, electronic drums and sound engineering.

Lim was sick and sneezing incessantly the day she and Conrad met five years ago (“I could only imagine what he was thinking”), but that didn’t stop them from talking for hours about music, books and video games, and the two have since become close friends. Conrad helps materialize the ideas Lim has into layers of pretty sounds, with his focus on the details.

The two go by Holy Girl, a name that, for Lim, represents the idea that desire is greater than attainment. That when you have it, it is no longer desirable.

If Holy Girl were a painting, it would be “Christina’s World,” a classic 1948 American work by Andrew Wyeth depicting a forlorn scene: the back of a woman with wind-blown hair in a pale pink dress, sitting in a vast field of dry grass, turned earnestly and reaching toward a grey house off in the distance.

Literature, video games, films, critical theory, philosophy and personal experiences are other sources of inspiration that blend together to create Holy Girl’s songs. The result is a dreamy landscape that invites you to get lost for a while, over and over again. Holy Girl creates electronic music with a warm hue, full of hope, honesty and wistfulness. Lim’s voice is sweet but always faraway.

As pleasant as it is for us, it’s difficult for Lim to hear herself sing.

“It’s really personal, you know?” Lim said. “When I hear myself, sometimes it feels like I’ve vomited up my insides, and that the music is out there to see what was inside of me.”

In Holy Girl’s songs, Lim’s voice wanders and searches, asserts an attitude, then withdraws to think about it all, to again dream. Listeners are left savoring the beauty of that hoping, while the infectious music underneath invites you to hit play one more time.

Listen to more of Holy Girl's songs here.