For Joy Oladokun, being a musician is about far more than writing and recording. It’s about building community.
The Nashville-based, Arizona-born artist — the daughter of Nigerian immigrants — has no shortage of laurels she could rest on: nominations for awards including GLAAD Media Awards and the Americana Music Honors & Awards; collaborations with heavy hitters like Chris Stapleton and Maren Morris; and previous opening slots for a diverse array of artists including Hozier, Tyler Childers and John Mayer.
Instead, Oladokun treats her work as activism, plainly addressing difficult topics in her music and intentionally fostering a community of like-minded listeners online and at her vibrant live shows. October’s Observations From a Crowded Room is the fullest realization of that ethos thus far — Oladokun made her latest in a way that didn’t jibe with the team around her, but did leave her feeling spiritually fulfilled.
“It’s been really fun to play this new record for people, to play old songs for people, and to see people, just in general,” Oladokun tells the Scene, catching up via phone during a day off from touring. “I really do mean it when I say that I just genuinely enjoy being around the people that come to my shows. It feels like a good group of people and like a good community. It feels like most of the room is there to just take care of each other and enjoy a good show, which feels really nice.”
Oladokun will bring that community to Ryman Auditorium on March 27, with singer-songwriter Medium Build opening. The show is the final performance of her headlining Blackbird Tour, which she launched in support of Observations earlier this year.
In conversation, Oladokun is warm, thoughtful and laughs easily — especially if she’s about to say something feisty. That kind of seeming contradiction is part of what makes her music so compelling, as she often tackles tough, thorny issues with bright, poppy arrangements. To boot, a fan-favorite track from her 2023 album Proof of Life called “We’re All Gonna Die,” which features an appearance from folk-pop star Noah Kahan, is peppy and buoyant, plainly acknowledging the reality of mortality with a wink and a smile.
Proof of Life set the stage for Observations From a Crowded Room, which digs even more deeply into difficult and often vulnerable themes like living on the margins, the psychic toll of sharing art as a musician, and trying to find a sense of safety and belonging in both the music industry and the broader world as a queer Black woman.
Accordingly, Oladokun wrote, produced and performed the bulk of the album by herself, and she explains that her most fruitful creative efforts often follow times of introspection. She’s recognized a cyclical nature in her creative process, noting that songs about hope tend to come from experiencing deep loneliness for a time.
Joy Oladokun
“This record was made in isolation, very much on purpose,” she tells the Scene. “Because I’d spent so much time listening to people and dealing with how to filter out certain voices so I could find my own.”
Oladokun began recording Observations From a Crowded Room in Nashville, then spent some time at famed Electric Lady Studios in New York City, and eventually finished the record back here in town. She says one of the bigger challenges in producing the album herself was resisting her tendency toward perfectionism and letting go of each song when there was still room for tinkering and tweaking.
“I think it might have been really easy for me to get in this perfectionism spiral of wanting to make it the perfect record for the perfect moment so everything goes perfectly, and everybody can be so proud of what I made,” she says.
It was difficult for Oladokun to get some of her label team on board with her approach — particularly regarding her decision to eschew working with a flashy producer in favor of helming the project herself. “It was sort of like a dogfight to get done,” she explains, “and to convince my team and people that I should make a record alone.”
After the album was released, and shortly before her tour began, Oladokun was unceremoniously dropped from her record label.
But the fight to make the album she wanted to make paid off, both for the record itself and for Oladokun. She found that the confidence she developed during the process was a greater gift than appeasing record executives ever could be.
“The trust I built with myself creatively over the making of this record, I truly wouldn’t trade for anything,” she says, adding that if she had given in to her team’s wishes, she would have done so to the detriment of her own health. “As a human, if I was going to spend another year the way I’d spent the past three or four, I felt like the next record [they would] make of mine — I don’t think I’m going to be here to hear it.”
Instead, Oladokun stuck to her guns, and her time making Observations From a Crowded Room alongside engineer John Muller ranks among the most fulfilling creative periods of her life.
“I’m so proud of the album,” she says. “I’m so proud of myself. I’m so proud of what I made. I think there is a path that my career could have taken, had I done the pop record that was maybe expected of me. And I didn’t want that, so I didn’t do that.”
Observations From a Crowded Room
One of several standout tracks on Observations From a Crowded Room is “I’d Miss the Birds.” It’s a melodic, deceptively gentle takedown of the darker side of Nashville’s culture, including “Proud Boys and their women,” “brand-new buildings” and “heroes on parade.” In stark contrast to those images, Oladokun dreams of building a home in the woods with her dog and her lover, leaving behind a town that “still isn’t big enough to love me.”
It’s both pointed and full of heart, creating the kind of stark but loving tension that brings such life to much of Oladokun’s music. It also attracted exactly the kind of unkind, unwanted attention that the lyrics decry.
“One day I woke up and a video of me singing ‘I’d Miss the Birds’ was on the very wrong side of TikTok,” she says. “A bunch of dudes were like, ‘This sucks,’ or, ‘I have a friend in the South who’s Black and gay and everybody loves her.’ It’s just totally devaluing [the music] so they can be assholes, because that’s the way the internet works. But also it opened up this sort of can of worms, where people who grew up in small towns, who live in small towns, people like me, are like, ‘Yeah, I do feel unwelcome in my city. Sometimes I don’t recognize where I live anymore.’”
Worse for Oladokun than the online trolls are the Nashville country and Americana stars who, despite espousing progressive values, don’t stick their necks out for marginalized communities, whether in their music or their actions. Higher-profile artists who tiptoe around sensitive topics (or outright ignore them) are especially egregious, as their large platforms allow them to reach more people while shielding them from the financial consequences of speaking out.
“There are a lot of country and Americana artists that should have said that shit three years ago, five years ago,” she says. “They have the money and the sponsorships. For me to have to step up and say, ‘Why the fuck are Nazis so comfortable in Nashville?’ — I had to be the one to do that. And I love playing that song every night. It’s just this fucking soft, Sheryl Crow-esque, wispy song about wanting to move away.”
Oladokun is directly referencing several appearances by neo-Nazi hate groups in Nashville over the past couple of years. Their activities while in Nashville included gathering downtown to harass and intimidate tourists and locals alike, as well as hanging hateful banners on interstate overpasses. These gatherings have constituted some of the more brazen displays of white supremacy in Nashville in recent years, and Oladokun does not mince words when sharing her disappointment that more local artists did not speak out against hatred in their wake.
“You can print this,” she says. “I find [those artists] to be absolute losers. Look at our government. Anybody more famous than me that didn’t make any effort to stop this movement and culture, I hope you’re embarrassed. I really do, from the bottom of my heart. We have such a gift of influencing people’s attention and time, and we’re not willing to use it because we want some company to send us an expensive purse. Like, you have to be a bit of a joke as a human.”
As important as the lyrics of “I’d Miss the Birds” are, the melody is just as impactful. Oladokun is a gifted melodicist, imbuing even her quieter songs with the infectious qualities of a Top 40 earworm. A self-proclaimed student of ’80s pop songwriting, her emphasis on melody is driven by her desire to make people think as much as it is to craft a sticky hook.
“I have messaging,” she says. “I have things I want to say and things that I care about. And if I can make people pay more attention by making it catchy, that’s just such an easy ask. I think there’s something really powerful about pop music and the ability to really just make something that people find undeniable. … On the record, I’m just trying to, in the most honest and pure way possible, get in people’s heads so they can think about what I’m saying.”
There are plenty of listeners who do just that, finding a kindred spirit in Oladokun via songs that can elicit so much anger from certain corners of the internet. The sense of healing and connection that fans find in her music can and often does go both ways. Those difficult feelings and experiences that Oladokun shares in her music don’t vanish after a record is in the can, and relating to fans with this music in particular has offered her a light through dark times.
“I just went from being really, really hopeless — and maybe scared and frustrated — to creative, and then into this beautiful moment of being like, ‘Other people feel this way. Other people have jobs that they don’t love, or they live in cities that they don’t feel safe in,’” she says. “It’s become another beautiful full-circle moment.”
Following her Ryman gig, Oladokun has a handful of festival dates and one-off shows on the books, including a couple of opening slots for Gary Clark Jr. and a trip across the pond to headline a show in London as part of Somerset House’s annual Summer Series of concerts. She also hopes to return to a practice from years earlier, when she would release a new song every month.
“I’m a big fan of hip-hop, and I think the frequency with which MCs release music not only plays a part in their success, but I think it shows that they have a pulse on culture and the times and are just willing to make commentary without thinking about it for five years,” she says. “I want to bring that energy into the Americana and country space.”
In mid-March, Oladokun made good on that plan when she dropped the single “All My Time,” a loose and groovy love song with quick-flowing verses and delightfully unexpected flourishes of synth and guitar. A fan of releasing music timed to holidays or otherwise special occasions, she shared “All My Time” to coincide with the start of daylight saving time.
While “All My Time” is a more playful release, Oladokun hopes to also write and share timely songs in response to current events. It’s a way to keep her skills sharp and, more importantly for her, to encourage dialogue around pressing issues.
“Look at the planet,” she says. “I think if we’re not consistently dialoguing about the world around us, and how we should be engaging with it, I think we might get further down a bad path than we already are. I think for me, as an artist — the way I want to meet this moment is, this year, I’m just going to put out some singles about things that I’ve been thinking about, or feelings that I’ve been feeling.”
Oladokun also shares that she’s writing toward a new record but doesn’t have firm plans for a new project just yet. She’d hoped to take some time off after wrapping the album cycle for Observations From a Crowded Room but can already tell that the state of the world might demand otherwise from her — and she’s ready to heed the call.
“Maybe this is where my music and my activism start to mix. Being quiet when, maybe, trans kids need hope doesn’t feel like the right option just because I want to win a Grammy someday. If I don’t win the Grammy but some kid lives 60 years longer than they thought they were going to, that’s more important at this time.”
