“I loved growing up there,” says Oladokun via phone from Mexico, where she was performing as part of the Dead Ahead Festival. Joy Oladokun performs at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 22, at House of Blues. “It was a really good experience for me aside from the some of the difficulties of being different. I liked growing up in the desert, and I think it’s really beautiful. My dad’s music taste was an inspiration, and I would listen to Paul Simon and Crosby, Stills and Nash and Fela Kuti and Jimmy Eat World, for some reason. I was taking it all in while sitting in the desert. I hear all those influences in my music.”
Oladokun is now a rising star, and her carefully crafted and emotionally vulnerable new album, Observations from a Crowded Room, further establishes her talent.
Since self-releasing her first EP in 2015, Oladokun has performed at the White House as part of the Respect for Marriage Act signing ceremony as well as on many major late-night shows. Her music has been included on various TV programs and her song “i see america” was also selected as a finalist for the Recording Academy’s Special Merit Award, Best Song for Social Change. Over the course of her career, she’s collaborated with artists such as Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Jason Isbell and Noah Kahan.
Written, produced and largely performed by Oladokun alone, Observations from a Crowded Room was crafted during a period of “intense introspection and questioning,” as it’s put in a press release.
“I feel like something shifted over the few years that it took me some time to process,” she says. “It was probably after [2023’s] Proof of Life. I think that’s why this album came out the way it did. This music is about this moment in the time where I go, ‘I thought I was a normal person living in Nashville, but I think I might be a musician now.’ I might be a musician for work, and that’s where the introspection comes from. I thought I was just a little guy roaming around. Now, I feel this sense of purpose and this responsibility with my music and art.”
She originally started writing and recording songs by herself at home and then ventured to New York to work on the finishing touches at Electric Lady, the studio where Jimi Hendrix famously recorded.
“I spent three days at Electric Lady,” she says. “[The song] ‘No Country’ wasn’t supposed to be on the record, but it came out of the sessions at Electric Lady. It was 3 a.m., and the engineer and I were talking about world events. All of sudden, this song came out of that discussion. Working at Electric Lady helped my confidence. I had spent so much time working on the music at home. It opened something up. I was making the album in the sense that Jimi Hendrix made albums in that I was using weird sounds and textures.”
The album incorporates electronic beats and psychedelic rock, expanding the range of Oladokun’s music. She’s clearly not a singer-songwriter in the traditional sense.
“Sometimes, for Black music, there is a space that people want me to occupy because of the sound of my voice and because of the sounds I play,” she says. “I’m a person who listens to Rage Against the Machine as much as I listen to Aretha Franklin. That also gives me language I can use when working with other people.”
The album commences with “Letter from a Blackbird,” a ballad that features soft vocals and shimmering synths as Oladokun sings, “I can change course if I want to.” A difficult tour that Oladokun says was “really difficult” for her mental health inspired the tune.
“I don’t think my career has skyrocketed, but I could feel a difference in my quality of life,” she says. “The way that people treated me had not changed. If anything, it was worse. I had hard experiences with security guards at venues and with fans of other people shouting things at me because they’re waiting for their favorite white guy to go on. I wanted to write something like a response to ‘Blackbird,’ which Paul McCartney wrote about the Civil Rights Movement. I wanted to say, ‘You wrote this to us. This is my experience decades later.’”
The album also includes various “observations” that find Oladokun simply talking about her ideas for the album.
“The music is so introspective and I know that people see themselves in the stories and it tells a story, and I wanted to talk about the emotions I’m sharing and the observations provide the context,” she says when asked about the interludes.
The video for “Am I?,” a soulful song with spirited horns and an anthemic chorus about trying to connect with others, features footage of Oladokun at various places around the world.
“The music video is me traveling around the world for work and people are listening to me play — some people better than others,” she says. “It’s like I’m taking a journey around the world. I went to almost every continent in the span of one year. I wanted people to see what it means for me to do those things. It’s a contextualization that people don’t always have. Sometimes, when I complain about work people don’t understand that. They’re like, ‘You got to open for John Mayer.’ It can still suck. I think it’s nice to be able to show that and be introspective and honest.”
The twangy “Drugs” finds Oladokun addressing her reliance on drugs, something she says has changed since she wrote the tune.
“I have always smoked a little weed,” she says. “I love weed, and it helps my anxiety. I used to take 500 milligrams to play a show. Now, I take a hit from the vape pen, and that’s enough for me. I was on one tour and did mushrooms the whole time. When I wrote ‘Drugs,’ I thought, ‘You seem to really need this, and that’s okay. But if you didn’t have access would you break down?’ I wanted to write a barnstormer about turning to drugs because I was stressed out and overworked, and I made the song fun.”
The album effectively closes with “Goodbye,” a piano ballad that features Oladokun singing over soaring strings. The song stems from the way “goodbye” took on a new meaning for her during her childhood.
“My family is Nigerian, and I spent a couple of summers in Nigeria with my parents and some people I knew,” she says. “Every summer, when I would say goodbye, I knew a year would go by before I saw this person again. My parents are religious in an Edgar Allan Poe way. They talk about death. Things could end at any moment. Growing up not knowing if I would see people again gave me a real comfort with ‘goodbye.’ I feel like ‘goodbye’ is a way for me to say that I might get dropped by my label tomorrow and have no more songs in the tank, and it’s a way of saying if we don’t see each other again, there might be something for us on the other side.”
The upcoming show at House of Blues will feature Oladokun both with and without backing musicians.
“Growing up, there were a few artists who I loved who would essentially open for themselves and do a 30-minute acoustic set,” she says. “The band then comes out, and they play more. That’s the vibe of the shows coming up. It’s a tradition that is inspiring to me and that I loved. It feels like the right mode for the past records and for this record, and it gives me the opportunity to check in with people too.”
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This article appears in Jan 1-15, 2025.