Culture

There’s a question Joy Oladokun often finds herself asking when thinking about her career: “If Nina Simone had the internet, what would she do with that?” she ponders. “Like, what sort of Mavis Staples-meets-Azealia Banks tweets would we have gotten from her?” 
The High Priestess of Soul is far from the only artist the folk–pop artists finds herself ruminating on: throughout her conversation with Billboard, Oladokun drops names ranging from Big Mama Thornton to Paul McCartney to Big Freedia. But the artists she often finds herself thinking about, she says, are the ones whose names she doesn’t know.

“I think a lot of my music comes from a place of knowing that not all Black queer people got to live this long or get this far,” she explains. “It feels like I’m fighting with both the idea of progress, the reality of progress and the cost of it.”

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A career’s worth of those feelings come roaring out on Oladokun’s stunning new album Observations From a Crowded Room (out today via Amigo Records). Written and produced by Oladokun in the 15 months since her 2023 LP Proof of Life, the new record sees the singer-songwriter wrestling with her current place in the music industry and the world at large. Employing electronic flourishes to accentuate her pointed songwriting, Oladokun examines why it seems that social advancement in the music industry is always two steps forward, one step back.

The idea for the record started after a whirlwind of touring in 2023 — after running through the summer festival circuit and performing as an opening act for John Mayer and Noah Kahan’s tours, Oladokun found herself at the end of a grueling schedule, sitting by a river with her guitar somewhere in Oregon.

“I was on mushrooms,” she giggles. “I was having an emotionally hard time, then. And when the shrooms hit, I saw this moose — and right there, I just wrote the first song on the album.”

That song, “Letter From a Blackbird,” provides the central argument for the album within its first minute. “These days I sure regret how much of me that I have given/ I feel my patience running out, I hear the water sing to me,” she sings, accompanied only by a vocoder chorus of her own vocals. “Blackbird: what did you think you’d run into out here in the wild?”

Throughout the record, Oladokun contends with managing the expectations of her community (the hip hop-infused”Hollywood”), examining the history of marginalized artists (the pop-leaning “Strong Ones”) and her own desire for recognition from the industry (the fiery folk ballad “Flowers”). Punctuating those songs are brief “observations,” interludes scattered around the project that see Joy speaking directly to her audience and telling them, point blank, how she’s feeling.

While she’s become known in industry circles for her tell-all lyricism, Oladokun acknowledges that Observations is something entirely different that her past albums. “In a sort of unhinged way, Proof of Life was a democracy, and this was more of a dictatorship,” she says. “When you’re working with [other songwriters], sometimes you have to sacrifice a feeling or pull a punch just to get something through. The benefit of making this alone was just that, for 40 minutes, I could just be unfiltered. I’ll give you the choruses and hooks you can hold on to, but I also want to be as honest as possible.”

While Oladokun serves as the sole songwriter and producer on the vast majority of the album’s records, a few other songwriters appear in the liner notes — including Maren Morris (“No Country”), Brian Brown (“Hollywood”), Edwin Bocage and Theresa Terry (“Strong Ones”). As she puts it, Observations wouldn’t have been possible had she not made early connections with songwriters throughout her growing career.

“This album is the fruit of so many lessons learned, and people like Dan Wilson and Ian Fitchuk or Mike Elizando, or even like contemporary great songwriters like INK,” she says. “These were people who took time to really pour into me, and said, ‘Here’s what’s great about what you do, and here’s how we can elevate it.’”

The songs where Oladokun gets the most raw see the singer calling out Nashville, and the industry system therein that she says failed her. “Letter” opens with the thought that, if she drowned in a river, the city wouldn’t cry for her, but rather “breathe sighs of relief.” Penultimate track “I’d Miss the Birds” sees Oladokun calling out the town by name, decrying its willful ignorance of her and people like her, while “Proud Boys and their women” continue to thrive.

In the year since she wrote those songs, Oladokun’s feelings on Nashville have only calcified. “Put it in ink, Nashville should be ashamed of itself. I’ll say it as long as they don’t gun me down; this town is so full of s–t,” she says, staring directly into her Zoom camera. “It’s not even because Nazis can walk around freely — that’s a problem, but Nazis are gathering all over the states. My genuine issue is the people who only want to do enough to appear good, but will never lift a finger to actually help.”

In the eight years she’s spent living in the country music capital of the world, Oladokun says she’s watched firsthand as artists and executives praise the “progress” that the city has made socially while Black queer artists like her continue to be ignored. “I am the Ghost of Christmas f–king Past for this city. I am where I am at in my career in spite of this city. In spite the utter lack of support,” she says. “For all the f–king country girls in glitter shorts dancing around with drag queens, how many of them have offered me features or responded to even one of my f–king DMs?”

As she goes on, Oladokun catches herself and clarifies her point. “I want to separate the part of it that can seem personal, the part where it’s just, ‘Oh, people aren’t paying attention or being fair to me,’” she explains, addressing Nashville directly. “I’m not the only Black and gay talent in your city. I am one of a huge, growing faction of artists in your backyard who you don’t support, because you know what it will cost you.”

Her desire to take a breath and zoom out also happens during Observations. On the stirring soul anthem “No Country,” Oladokun looks to the various genocides occurring throughout the world — in an Instagram post, the singer named Palestine, Congo, Sudan and Nigeria as direct inspirations — and yearns for a moral imperative to protect people from harm our increasingly fractured world.

On an album that deals so much with her own personal struggles, Oladokun felt it was important to put her grievances into a larger context. “My job just isn’t that important. Like, my job is hard — but everyone’s job is hard,” she says. “It’s important for me to remember, because I as a human being never want to let this job stop me from being the best version of myself. I can’t let my tunnel vision of what my day-to-day is like distract from what I think the purpose of sharing my music is, which is to give people something to listen to in a weird world.”

That’s also, in part, why Oladokun never tries to offer big-picture answers to the problems she presents on Observations. Not only does she not have all the answers, but she points out that we all have to agree on what the problems are before we can talk about solutions. “It’s so important to name things, and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society comes from our refusal to name things,” she says. “The goal of this record was never to give an answer, but to say, ‘Ow. This hurts.’”

When Oladokun began writing Observations From a Crowded Room, she was considering quitting the music business altogether. When asked where she’s at with that internal conversation today, she shrugs. “My relationship with my job right now … there’s sort of an agnostic quality to it,” she explains. “I believe my career has a future, but it’s so rarely demonstrated in front of me of what it’s like for someone like me to do so. This is the beginning of a conversation — it’s me saying, ‘This is what it’s been like.’ And it’s a little bit up to other people to say, ‘That is what it’s like.’ I can’t be the only one trying to change the culture.”

A wry smile appears on her face: “Ask me again in a year.”