Saturday Conversation: Joy Oladokun On Hendrix, God And Mushrooms
Nashville-based singer/songwriter Joy Oladokun's stunning new album, Observations From A Crowded Room, is deceptively profound. While it is a musically engaging and chill work, it will make you both think and feel.
It is a slow burn. For instance, I listened to it all the way through multiple times, then when editing this piece, I locked in on the closing song, "Goodbye," and was left mouth agape at the simple wisdom of the song. "It's only goodbye/You know it's been said a billion times before." That is John Lennon-level stuff, the kind of writing that feels like anyone can do it, but no one has before.
The album reflects the equally engaging Oladokun, who asks do you believe in God and writes songs on mushrooms. That is Oladokun when you speak to her, candid, thoughtful and refreshingly down to earth.
Steve Baltin: Congratulations on the record, it's wonderful. It's got such a vibe to it. Nick Cave once said to me, "You always write as a writer what you're looking for." For you, was it something where you really consciously were seeking hope in this record?
Joy Oladokun: Yeah, it is such a such an accurate way to describe the way I write, to say that I'm writing what I'm looking for. Usually, I start sitting down with my guitar or at the piano and I'm starting from a place of I feel hopeless or I feel tired or I feel angry, I usually start from the negative and go looking for the positive. I think that's what this whole entire record was, I was having just an emotionally hard time and I knew that I needed to push myself and seek for the truth and for a version of this job that felt more sustainable than what I was doing maybe a year ago. I definitely was looking for hope and found it through the process of making it.
Baltin: Was there one song early on that gave you that hope? One of the songs I really loved was "Am I."
Oladokun: That's one of my favorites. It might be my favorite. It's hard to tell, it changes every week. But "Am I" is definitely one that people's responses to it have given me a lot of hope because I wrote the first two songs within an hour of each other. I was on the road, and we had a day off in Oregon and so I took mushrooms and went with my guitar by a river. To me, it's like a conversation I would have with a friend if they called me. I was just coming from a place of I feel like work has been really hard. I feel like world events, trouble in my brain. I feel like just natural life stuff, watching your parents get older, watching yourself get older, watching the world get weirder. I wanted to write something asking if I was the only person that felt a dissonance between what you think life is going to be when you grow up and what it is. I think that song gave me a lot of emotional momentum and seeing people listen to it made me go, "I might be connecting with something by not just focusing so inward on my struggles with my job but also making something that opens it up for other people to think about what they're going through too."
Baltin: Everybody feels that way, but the job of the artist is to be able to articulate what everybody else is feeling. Did you find that in writing this song, everybody was like, "You nailed it? Where are our jet packs and all the things we were promised when we were growing up?"
Oladokun: Yeah, or hoverboards that actually hover. That's the s**t we were promised. I feel like it resonates with even younger people that I play it for. Not that I'm ancient. But I'm like, "Oh, this is a dissonance that maybe starts at a certain age and maybe just doesn't go away as you get older." Just like the difference between what you think the future is going to be and what it ends up being. I think that I do try to write things to articulate them for other people, but it's something I needed so badly to articulate for myself. I think a lot of my music comes from a place of I, in myself or in my heart, feel lost or frustrated. And I need to write or find something to articulate what I'm feeling.
Baltin: Since you say you do have access to things like drum machines, which your heroes didn't, how did you use those?
Oladokun: So much. The thing that I did that I think that [Hendrix] would like is there are a couple songs on the record where I sampled audio of my friends. There's a song called "Divinity," where I'm asking the question "Do you believe in God?" All the hi hats are chopped-up versions of my friends answering the question. You can't hear their question outright but there are a bunch of different people answering that question throughout the song. And I've also done some cool weird guitar stuff, making it sound like a keyboard or like a string machine. I spent three days at Electric Lady while I was making the record and that was really important to me because I'm such a Jimi Hendrix fan and I feel like he had such a passion for music technology and recording and ownership over that process for himself and artists that he believed in. So I just try to play around and make natural things a little unnatural in his honor all the time. Like I ran things through a tape machine and poke at it.
Baltin: I am a huge Hendrix fan and especially as a songwriter, I think he's so underrated as a lyricist. What is your favorite Hendrix song lyrically?
Oladokun: "Little Wing." I resonate a lot with songs that. I have a "Life on Mars" tattoo, the David Bowie song about the girl who watched too many movies. I resonate with songs about daydreaming a lot as someone who spends a lot of time alone or prefers to spend time alone. "Little Wing" is my go -to when I'm on a flight. It's one of the first songs I put on in my headphones because there's something so beautiful about it, like butterflies, zebras, moon dreams and fairy tales. I love the Beatles, but the way they write about people thinking isn't always so poetic. It can come off a little silly, like "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" is beautiful but it comes to me as a little silly. "Little Wing," to me, captures the beauty and the floatiness of thoughts and how someone you love can lift you out of your despair and that's why I like it.
Baltin: What did you decide? Do you believe in God?
Oladokun: I think the point for me is I don't know. I often say I let myself be as religious or non-religious as I feel in a day. So today probably yeah, because the sunrise was nice. I love when people ask questions and start to make you think.
