Calgary Folks Competition: Kenya native, Ondara, continues to dissect the American Dream on third album

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On the floor, J.S. Ondara’s unique plan for conquering the music business doesn’t appear significantly nicely thought out.

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It started expectantly when the singer-songwriter, who goes by the one-name moniker Ondara, received a green-card lottery that allowed him to depart his dwelling of Nairobi, Kenya in 2013 and head to america. He selected to land in Minneapolis, MN, for no different cause than as a result of it’s the dwelling state of his songwriting hero, Bob Dylan.

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At that time, he had written journal entries however had by no means written a track. Nor had he ever carried out publicly.

Nonetheless, inside 5 years Ondara had landed a significant report deal, launched an acclaimed debut album that was nominated for a Grammy and featured a powerful roster of A-list company similar to Andrew Chicken, the Dawes’ Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith and Joey Ryan of The Milk Carton Children. He additionally opened exhibits for Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham, Neil Younger and the Lumineers.

On the telephone from his dwelling in Minneapolis, the songwriter says nobody was extra shocked about this success than his household again dwelling in Kenya. It appears that they had no concept that Ondara harboured ambitions, or possessed the expertise and ability, to grow to be knowledgeable musician in any respect — a lot much less a profitable one in America.

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“I feel they’re perplexed, attempting to determine the place I got here from,” says Ondara, who might be performing on the Calgary Folks Music Competition on Saturday and on the Edmonton Folks Music Competition on Sunday, Aug. 13. “Was I adopted or one thing? I feel all of them anticipated I’d come right here and go to (medical) college or one thing like that. Nobody noticed this coming. I needed to do that however I needed to inform my household I used to be going to med college. That was the one approach they’d let me go away. If I advised them I used to be coming right here to be a rock star they’d have thought I used to be insane and locked me in my room.”

Ondara’s journey began with romantic view of America

It appears a fairy-tale story in some ways. However, as Ondara’s semi-autobiographical songs counsel, actuality is rarely that simple.

Like many immigrants, Ondara had a wildly romantic view of America earlier than he got here right here and, like many immigrants, rapidly found that pursuing the American Dream was not so simple as he had imagined. Based on an interview with Rolling Stone again in 2019, the primary wake-up name got here when he arrived in Minnesota throughout a very frigid winter. An early journey to Dylan’s less-than-lively hometown of Hibbing, a small mining city northwest of Duluth, proved equally dispiriting. Ondara tried to kind a band, however didn’t know some other musicians so quickly started writing, performing and educating himself guitar by his lonesome.

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A part of that disillusionment and alienation may be discovered on Tales of America, his 2019 acclaimed debut. It options songs advised from the perspective of a  new American experiencing each the push of pleasure and the real-life hardships of the immigrant expertise, providing what Rolling Stone referred to as “pressing reflections on the hole between American promise and American actuality.”

It was nominated for a Grammy Award for Finest Americana album. When the pandemic triggered an abrupt finish to his tour with the Lumineers in early 2020, Ondara retreated to his Minneapolis dwelling to report the last word quarantine album as a follow-up. The all-acoustic report, appropriately titled Folks N’ Roll, Vol. 1: Tales of Isolation, solely furthered his repute as a surprising new voice in Americana. In 2022, he launched what’s actually his most formidable album up to now. Spanish Villager No. 3 is an idea album of types that had Ondara telling tales by the titular character, a disillusioned globe-trotting immigrant who yearns for sense of neighborhood and residential.

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“I wasn’t consciously pondering of a bodily character once I was writing the songs, though there may be all the time some type of unconscious voice in my artistic course of,” he says. “I feel what occurred was that in a while I gave that voice a reputation and narrative and introduced it to life in a bodily sense. I feel there are elements of me within the character, actually. But it surely wasn’t autobiographical in that sense. It was simply stream-of-consciousness. However there’s a little bit of reality in each fiction and I feel there’s a little bit of me within the character, for positive. Greater than I would really like.”

Emotional exploration of America current in songs

On A Prophet of Doom, a multi-voiced a cappella intro turns right into a rhythmic and soulful exploration of political corruption, greed and polarization in Ondara’s adopted nation. Arriving within the U.S. in 2013, Ondara obtained a first-hand take a look at the unusual political circus that adopted the ascension of President Donald Trump and his followers, displaying severe cracks and divisiveness in what he had all the time been led to imagine was a wholesome, functioning democracy.

“After I moved to America, I anticipated the democratic course of can be quite a bit cleaner right here and was shocked to search out that a few of the points we confronted again dwelling within the transition of energy and issues like that additionally occurred within the west,” he says. “That’s a part of the emotion in that track.”

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As on earlier albums, the songs are anchored by Ondara’s lovely voice, which alternates between a wealthy tenor and sharp falsetto. The latter is among the many first sounds heard on the haunting intro to opening monitor An Alien in Minneapolis, the place Ondara’s alter-ego experiences the identical sense of isolation and outsiderness as his creator did upon getting into America.

“The American empire does superb PR,” he says. “Should you’re exterior of America, I feel it’s very straightforward to have an idealized model of America and I feel lots of immigrants that transfer to America sometimes have this romantic concept of what America is. After spending a while, that will get knocked out your head fairly promptly.”

Ondara continues to evolve

Sonically, Spanish Villager No. 3 is Ondara’s most expansive album up to now. Impressed by his time with Buckingham, he started listening obsessively to Fleetwood Mac’s multi-layered Rumours and different big-sounding information similar to Dylan’s Freeway 61 Revisited and U2’s Joshua Tree.

Whereas rising up in Kenya, Ondara’s style in music got here virtually solely from the west. He found Dylan after studying he wrote Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. Rising up, Ondara had all the time thought it was written by Gun ‘n Roses, who coated it in 1991. Ondara’s early music tastes included Weapons ‘N Roses, Radiohead and Nirvana. On stage, he even does a chilling and largely unrecognizable cowl of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. However as he evolves as a songwriter, he has developed a need to include extra African types into his personal music.

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“It’s one thing I really feel like I wish to do however I don’t know tips on how to do it but,” he says. “I want to sleep on it for awhile. I simply haven’t acquired the reply from the universe or Carl Sagan or whoever brings solutions. I’m not overly nervous about it. I feel by the truth that I’m African, no matter I do is simply African in consequence. I don’t suppose I must overthink it an excessive amount of.”

Ondara performs the primary stage at Prince’s Island Park on Saturday at 5:30 p.m. as a part of the Calgary Folks Music Competition. Go to calgaryfolkfest.com.

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