Oladokun seeks to shatter the “straight white guy-ification” of folk music with a project that digs into her headspace today and carries the genre into tomorrow
Credit: Graham Tolbert
NEED TO KNOW
- Joy Oladokun says her new album helped her reconnect with herself and process personal and societal challenges
- The artist embraced vulnerability, exploring themes of hope, identity, and healing without worrying about commercial success
- Oladokun draws inspiration from her heritage and unique perspective as a queer Black artist in folk and Americana music
Joy Oladokun is laying it all on the table.
The Delaware-born, Arizona-raised, Nashville-based artist, 34, tells PEOPLE that her latest album, Hope Is a Heavy Thing, serves as a compendium of the emotional rollercoaster she has endured since releasing her 2024 album, Observations From a Crowded Room.
“I made a record because I felt like I had lost touch with who I am, and how I want to operate in this world,” Oladokun tells PEOPLE. “And I chipped away at all the excess and the false ideas in myself and in my worldview until I came away with something that felt true, visceral and real.”
The resulting effort is an album that can only be described as a personal reckoning, a space of duality where beauty and sadness can coexist in the same song, and a sanctuary where Oladokun can pour her heart out to a level of depth she has recently begun exploring.
She explains, “It felt entirely like I was going through it for catharsis. I think even the people around me will probably attest to the transformational nature of making this record, even more so than in the past, I think.”
Credit: Graham Tolbert
The need to allow the songs to speak for her feelings prompted Oladokun to take any moment of creative spark in stride, even if it hit her while speeding down the highway in a tour bus to her next gig.
“I don’t care if it sells, I don’t care if anybody picks it up, I don’t care if anybody listens to it, I just needed to make it,” she proclaims. “I needed to sort some stuff out mentally, and so I did it by making a record.”
Scratching an itch and giving in to impulse, in a positive sense, are core tenets of the album. Though she has an impressive list of collaborators under her belt, including Chris Stapleton, Noah Kahan and Adekunle Gold, Oladokun found herself looking almost entirely inward on Hope Is a Heavy Thing, and caring about who she was again in the deepest part of her soul, principally.
And for once, she didn’t have outside forces trying to make the most difficult parts of her songwriting sound more commercially viable. “There was no producer trying to accumulate a gold plaque telling me what it’s too sad to talk about,” she tells PEOPLE proudly.
Even the album’s title stems from a belief Oladokun holds at her core, that achieving hope can take more than what it appears on face value in almost any given circumstance. She looks back to her mother, a retired nurse, and the distinction between hoping for a good outcome and confronting all that comes before achieving it.
“So much of her work is balancing hoping for the best outcomes and learning how to treat when things do or don’t go according to plan,” the artist explains. “But Malcolm X was a really hopeful person who also had an AK-47. I feel like there is a sort of tension of what does it mean to want a better future, and what does that actually cost? What does it mean to want more equity and what will it actually cost us? Those are heavy topics.”
Credit: Concord Records
With all of this, Oladokun, who wants it known that she is “not selling you sadness,” is firm in her belief that people can’t just wish their way into a better world. “Everybody wants the best for everybody, but no one wants to make a sacrifice to help us get there,” she claims. “It’s a pretty idea, but it’s a heavy reality to build.”
Using those weighty, universal topics as inspiration, Oladokun looked inward. In doing so through this recording process, she confronted the ways her past was bleeding over into her present.
“I am a person who sometimes past, present and future can all try to mingle in one of those old-timey cartoon balls with the fists flying everywhere,” she explains. The collision course that her past pain and present fears were on internally is directly confronted in one standout offering from the project, which Oladokun claims is her favorite: “Toothache.”
Speaking to the genesis of that track, an airy pop-folk ballad with an infectious beat, Oladokun says, “I stopped drinking during the course of making this record. And I think that when you have this relationship with yourself that can be negative, like I hang up on my mistakes a lot. ‘Toothache’ is a song I wrote to myself being like, ‘Hey, you are actually someone who wants to do good, but whether it’s physical pain, emotional pain, your vices, those things are accumulating, and presenting themselves in ways where you’re coming off like an assh—.’ ”
She adds, “Here you are as a person starting to color your relationships, the way that you talk to people, the way that you deal with things based on your pain. And if you can’t find a way to move past that, you might end up in a worse position than you wanted to be.”
Part of finding herself again meant embracing all of the different pieces of her psyche. As a Black and queer artist working in folk and Americana, Oladokun is acutely aware of assumptions that can surround those genres, and her place within them.
“I’d be crazy to say they haven’t hindered me, although I’m not supposed to say that,” the singer reflects of her unique identity traits. “If we can find a queer person or a Black person who won’t complain, then we’re going to uplift them because that’s easier than someone who will advocate for themselves.”
She further opines, “We immediately think Bob Dylan, we don’t always think Odetta. For me, a big part of making this album was showing how my different identities have always played a part in these different pieces of music, or these different genres, or different ideas.”
Her approach was also informed by her grandmother, a tomato farmer in Nigeria.
“She wasn’t like, ‘I’m going to become Nigeria’s foremost tomato supplier,’ “ Oladokun recalls. “It was like, ‘No, I’m going to grow. I can grow these many tomatoes. This is how many it’ll take to help my family.’ “
And that powerful lesson has remained a driving force in her life as an artist. “I think I’ve really stepped into this lineage of being sort of an artisan and a craftsperson over mass-producing, or immediately shooting for what will make the biggest, loudest, most expensive result,” she says. “It feels really magical to be like, ‘Here is this. I’m a queer Black person who plays acoustic guitar, and sometimes drum machines.’ ”
Ultimately, Oladokun, who vehemently pushes back against the “straight white guy-ification” of folk music, wants it to be known that her purpose behind Hope Is a Heavy Thing is simple. “I think that this record, for me, was so much… it was just so deeply about healing myself, and getting back in touch with my why as an artist.”
She adds, “I think my most beautiful relationships and experiences have come from some sort of confrontation. The people I care about the most, I am willing to sit with discomfort with them so we an figure out how to carry on our relationship.”
While Hope Is a Heavy Thing asks big questions about society, it also contains the artist’s most personal self-reflections to date. After everything she has confronted, Oladokun states that while her definition of a good life has not changed, her approach to achieving one has.
“I think that I have always seen and sensed that part of what makes a life good is relationships. I’m not talking romantic relationships, I’m just talking friendships,” she reveals. The only difference between her present and her past, is that now she is allowing herself to pursue that joy, pun intended, and not just recognizing its value from a distance.
Hope Is a Heavy Thing is available on all major streaming platforms now.
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