NASHVILLE, TENN.- Joy Oladokun was sitting in her backyard, stoned and scrolling Twitter when a Christian pastor appeared in her feed. As the child of Nigerian immigrants who raised Oladokun and her sisters in the church, she’s no stranger to religious doctrine and, as a queer person, no stranger to feeling as if it’s being weaponized against her. Still, she couldn’t look away.
“Those guys always pop up and I’m like, ‘What are you doing here?’ ” Oladokun, 31, said on a January afternoon, seated at her dining room table wearing a Nirvana T-shirt, an electric mug and a weed vape within reach. Then she let out a laugh — a distinct, cartoonlike thing perfect for defusing uncomfortable situations. “And they are always saying something stupid, because that’s an option to them.”
Oladokun didn’t want to fight online, though — she’d done plenty of that. She wanted prayer. The words to “Somebody Like Me,” the first song she wrote for her new album, “Proof of Life,” arrived in an explosive spurt: “Can anybody say a prayer, can anybody light a candle for somebody like me?” In her home studio, with its walls covered in Beatles and Beyoncé posters, she quickly laid down the bulk of the song. “It felt like the beginning of something,” she said.
In 2021, working mostly from home in Nashville as the COVID pandemic raged on, Oladokun went from a relatively unknown songwriter to one signed to a major label: Her streaming numbers and profile had skyrocketed thanks to key placements on television shows like “This Is Us” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” and a grant from YouTube for Black creators. “In Defense of My Own Happiness,” Oladokun’s major-label debut (and third album overall), featured a collaboration with Maren Morris, and suddenly she was making the late-night rounds. With her conversational songs about religious trauma, mental health and navigating the world as a Black, queer person, she was a salve for a time when hope felt scarce and the most urgent, effective music acknowledged life’s pain, and didn’t just dish out toxic positivity.
“Proof of Life,” out April 28, pushes one step further: How do we stay hopeful in a world that feels needlessly cruel? Can one make space for love, friends and success while still appreciating the little things — or addressing bigger ones, like climate change? Oladokun looks for answers in an emo-punk anthem about the inevitability of death called “We’re All Gonna Die” and an autobiographical reminder that even dark days turn bright titled “Keeping the Light On.”
“Nobody just feels happy when someone tells them to feel happy,” Oladokun said. “Nobody stops worrying when someone tells them to stop worrying,” she continued as she changed the record playing in the background from Haim to Fleetwood Mac after a puff on her vape. She’s big on brutal honesty, and therapy (which she insisted her record label pay for). “It speaks to who came out of the pandemic with a little more success,” she said of the post-lockdown musical landscape. “They all wrote things that were very specific and personal, and not concerned with generalities. Generalities are the small talk of music.”
Oladokun was speaking shortly after a trip to Mexico, where she appeared at Brandi Carlile’s Girls Just Wanna Weekend festival, and her dog, Joni, was sporting a child’s bib she purchased as a souvenir. “She’s pretty ridiculous for taking it,” Oladokun said, giving Joni a pat. Things like that make her laugh when hard days come.
That morning was a good one, though: She found out she’d be opening for John Mayer on his spring arena tour. She had planned to buy a ticket as a fan. “I wasn’t even going to pull the loophole thing and ask my agent,” she said and laughed.
Oladokun has lived for three years in this cozy East Nashville home with her fiancée, Rachel, a music publishing executive. A shelf of mugs includes one that reads “Don’t tell me to stay calm, I’m a Jewish mother”; another features a picture of Prince. The one that most accurately reflects Oladokun’s approach proclaims (with an expletive), “I did my best.”
“My only intention,” she said, “is to make music to help myself process everyday life, and to help other people process everyday life.”
Growing up in the small, predominantly white farming town of Casa Grande, Arizona, where her mother and father, a nurse and a pharmacist, had moved from Delaware after emigrating from Nigeria, the young Oladokun was anxious and hyper-aware that she was different. She suspected most people at her church thought homosexuality was a sin. “I had this feeling very young that something was wrong with me,” she said.
Her parents were strict and television was forbidden on school days, but on the weekend her father would let the children get lost in music videos he’d taped. She discovered Green Day and Paul Simon, but it was while watching Tracy Chapman perform at Wembley Stadium for Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday that Oladokun felt, for the first time, the “transcendent” power of a Black woman holding a guitar, playing folk music. It changed her life.
Oladokun started writing on the guitar as a way to communicate with friends. As a result, her songs are conversational and confessional, and her hooky but profound melodies turn her lyrics into mantras.
Jim James of My Morning Jacket, who toured with Oladokun in 2022, sees her in the same vein as John Prine and Bill Withers. “She has a way of talking one-on-one with the listener in this seemingly casual way while delivering the deepest truth you really needed to hear,” he said in an email interview. “The kind of advice you get from a friend that changes the course of your life.”
Oladokun thought she might become a preacher, so after high school she moved to California to attend a small Christian college. But it increasingly became impossible to look past a faith that routinely refused to make room for people like her. “I don’t know,” she said, choosing her words carefully — faith, her own version of it, is still part of her life. “I just think you’re in bad shape when you model something divine after something like capitalism.”
After college she tried living in Los Angeles, listening to songs like Kacey Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow” on repeat and reading queer Christian literature. She learned she didn’t need to forgive herself: She needed to accept herself. She got high a lot, too. There’s a lyric on “The Hard Way,” from “Proof of Life,” that describes this journey: “Jesus raised me, good weed saved me.”
Los Angeles was ultimately too fast-paced for Oladokun, who wanted to focus on writing stories rather than catering to trends, so she moved to Nashville in 2016. She released her first album, “Carry,” that same year, via Kickstarter. And while the pandemic put a halt to live music, during its quiet months she scored numerous television placements for songs from “In Defense of My Own Happiness,” which she first released on her own label named, hilariously, White Boy Records.
Oladokun doesn’t write many protest songs anymore — her existence is protest, she says — but on “In Defense of My Own Happiness,” the song “I See America” compounded brutal truths about systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and it resonated widely. (The song was chosen as a finalist for a new special merit award, best song for social change, at the 2023 Grammys.) Soon she had a record deal.
Oladokun summarizes that series of events differently: “America did a bunch of racism, so people were bored and inside and like, ‘We should listen to people we’ve been doing racism to,’ and that’s how I got a career.”
Her folk-pop strives for the broad appeal of a Mayer or Ed Sheeran, but from a point of view that’s not just another white, male face. “Joy has this weird gift of wrapping up really complex human emotions into almost comedic lyrics at times,” Maren Morris, who is both her friend and collaborator, said in an email interview. “You go from laughing to crying in an instant.”
Oladokun’s goal is to make music for everyone. “Even people I don’t agree with,” she said. “If KurtMaga696 finds my record,” she continued, imagining a listener with different politics than her own, “misses all my references to my homosexuality and comes to my show, he has opened himself up to me. And I have to open myself up to him.”
“I get scared of becoming pointed at one audience,” she added. “That’s why I push against country or Americana. I’m just a Black person who plays the guitar and grew up with a dad who listens to Kenny Rogers.”
Offers from the country world still come. At one point, she said, she turned down the opportunity to sing a duet with Morgan Wallen, the superstar who was caught on video using a racial slur. “The gay cackling that came out of my mouth,” she said. “Country music broke my damn heart.”
Therapy keeps Oladokun steady through it all, and she’s been putting the advice she gets from it to good practice lately. Before she sang at the White House last year to celebrate the signing of the Respect for Marriage Act, she kicked everybody out of the room for five minutes and stared at her reflection. She wanted to remember that she was part of something a queer kid growing up in Arizona thought they might never see.
Her therapist even pointed out recently that a line in her song “Somehow” sounds like a technique they do in session to calm anxiety and cope with the world. “I find a quiet place in my chest, and I breathe in,” the lyrics go. “Somehow things just get better.”
At Carlile’s festival, Oladokun was contemplating what she might do if none of this works out. She took mushrooms and studied the fish swimming in the man-made lagoon for hours, she screamed along with Wynonna’s set, she thanked the crowd for coming to see “a lesbian who listened to the Beach Boys and Radiohead in equal measure” during hers.
It was a festival right in Oladokun’s sweet spot, where conversations about equity, antidepressants and therapists were welcome topics onstage and off. And it made her remember that she needs to practice what she preaches: to do her best, but take plenty of time to breathe.
“I am the opposite of someone who understands grind culture,” she said before joining Rachel at the beach. “I give myself permission to not be the Rolling Stones, though I would like to be the Black Bruce Springsteen. But in the event I get too tired, that’s OK.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
