Joy Oladokun

Joy Oladokun has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 from every ticket sold will go to The Ally Coalition’s work to support homeless and at-risk LGBTQ youth.

Joy Oladokun gets emails. She meets people. There are DMs.

Fans of the Arizona-bred singer-songwriter express how they feel before and after seeing one of her shows. Some say they have entered her gigs feeling depressed, unseen and scared, but they leave in a different headspace entirely — upbeat, acknowledged, more confident. Others explain that seeing people like themselves onstage—Black, queer, funny, all of the above — inspires them. With her seemingly bottomless well of melodies and conversational couplets, her inviting buoyancy and infectious guffaw, Joy Oladokun is a human mood elevator.

“I think that’s beautiful,” she says of receiving these missives.

So beautiful in fact that Oladokun decided that she wanted to get in on that action and craft an album “that was a version of what I’ve been able to give to other people for myself.”

Enter Observations From a Crowded Room, a 15 track collection of 12 songs and 3 interludes, written, produced, and largely performed by Oladokun, which build on and expand her pop-folk sonic palette with electronic flourishes and lush harmonies.

The record was created at a critical juncture in Oladokun’s life. She was assessing her perch in the world and the industry after the success of previous albums (2021’s in defense of my own happiness and 2023’s Proof of Life) garnered universal high praise, a slew of famous fans and collaborators like Sheryl Crow, Jason Isbell, Noah Kahan and Chris Stapleton, sold out headlining tour dates and opening slots with John Mayer and Hozier. It also invited scrutiny. She began questioning whether she should pursue something else.

“I think for me it was a pivotal moment of thinking, ‘I don’t know what good there is in this for me anymore. I know what it does for my management. I know what it does for the fans. But I don’t know what good this is for my heart and my head anymore,’” she recalls of the bleak place in which she began to find herself.

Then she started recording Observations From a Crowded Room.

“This album became a way for me to write things, feel things, process things,” she says. “Because, as the producer, I just had to sit with these songs for so long. It became really healing in a sense of, ‘I made this. I’m listening to an album that I genuinely love. All the sounds and bits and bobs came from me with the help of just an engineer.’ It was transformative. So it started out as, ‘I quit,’ and it has ended up as a fresh start.”

“I used music to dig myself out of that hopeless headspace and land at a place that if my career ends tomorrow, for whatever reason, I made this record, I made the other records that I’m so proud of,” she shares. “And I did it in a way that was true to me, and now in a way that feels sustainable to me.”

What was the inspiration for the title Observations From a Crowded Room?
I’m a tried-and-true introvert, and this job, as much as I love it, requires me to walk a tightrope with my social energy tank. I think I spent a lot of time last year being in rooms full of people like me, full of people unlike me, and everything in between, and then I would come back to the back room of the bus or to a hotel and just sit and reflect on what this new phase of my career in my life meant for who I am and how I’m living. I just wanted to write about my life in real time as it’s happening and dig into the ways that this job affects me, because I was starting to feel a lot of the repercussions.

There is a sense of leveling up here, musically, lyrically, vocally, as your own producer. There are more electronic burbles, psychedelic sounds, an expansion of the range of your singing voice. What was your mission statement?
I try to consider myself an artist that’s only in competition with myself. I want the next record to be better than the last, and better can mean production, can mean songwriting, can mean anything, but it’s always intentional. I feel the mark when I hit it and I feel like for this record, what it meant to be better than Proof of Life was to increase the moment to moment, present vulnerability that I could bring.

You also still love a big pop hook even as you’re experimenting with other moods.
I sort of think of myself as a carpenter of songs. I’m not making an art piece that you watch go by and don’t participate with. I’m building a table for people to use, that you interact with every day. That’s why I lean on catchy melodies, because it’s part of what helps people remember. I hope that someone goes around and sings “Am I” and starts asking themselves, “Am I the only one who’s losing the race, looking for grace?” I want people to have something musical that they can latch onto when they feel that way.

There are two tracks on the album that seem to address you potentially moving on from Nashville, “Letter From a Blackbird and “The Birds.” Do you plan on leaving?
I just wanted to be honest about what it was like to be Black and gay in Nashville in a time where everyone’s saying that they’re doing better, they’re trying to be better, where I’m the face of progress that Nashville is supposed to be making, but a lot of those people have done everything that they can to make sure that I couldn’t even get to this point.

I have thought about leaving, but if half of my music is about how we all belong to each other, then part of what I’m doing throughout this album is challenging myself to say “I have to have the uncomfortable conversations too. I have to be in a room and bring these things up. I can’t just sit in my house and smoke weed and hang out with the dogs somewhere in the woods.”

What do you hope people take away from the album?
That if they feel like feel like the world has gotten weird, that they are not alone in that. That is the overarching theme, specifically for this record. “Does anybody feel like it’s getting hotter under the sun?” I do also feel that way and I’m just opening the conversation.