Joy Oladokun has crafted noteworthy art with her major label debut album, in defense of my own happiness, out June 4 via Republic Records. Leaning into cinematic melodies that embrace a pop, R&B and folk-friendly blend, the Nashville-based artist has a voice rich and lush with stories of pain transformed into power. Across the album’s 14 songs – which include fantastic collaborations with Maren Morris and 23-year-old singer-songwriter and poet Jensen McRae – the Arizona native and child of Nigerian immigrants embraces themes of bettering oneself and cleansing her soul, shedding the trials of the past while standing tall in her own grace.
You can catch Oladokun on the road this year as an opening act on Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s tour in September, in addition to appearances at Bonnaroo Festival on September 2 and Austin City Limits Music Festival on October 1. Visit Oladokun’s official website for more information. In the meantime, here are five standout tracks on in defense of my own happiness.
“Breathe Again”
Featured in season 5 of This is Us, all it takes is one listen to “Breathe Again” to become an instant fan of Oladokun, even without NBC’s endorsement. Her voice sparkles like a gemstone under the light on this gentle piano number accented by a soft orchestra. “Breathe Again” serves as a true demonstration of raw vulnerability as Oladokun shares her personal, innermost thoughts with the world. Fragile enough to bend, but strong enough not to break under the pressure, Oladokun takes a hard look at herself as she’s trapped by inner demons, yet reaching toward the light. “Breathe Again” feels like a moment of self-betterment and rebirth, making for one of the album’s most triumphant moments.
Best lyrics: “Follow me down where the waters run deep/I’ll let you drown in the worst of me/If my intentions are good why can’t I come clean”
“Hold my breath until I’m honest/Will I ever breathe again”
“I See America”
The album’s second shortest track is also among its most thought-provoking. Here, Oladokun takes an aerial perspective on the melting pot that is America. Rather than taking a stark political stand, she looks at unity from a refreshing perspective. Blending subtle observations with potent lyrics that manifest god in the form of a man on the street with a tear drop tattoo on his cheek and dirt under his fingernails, she also manages to illuminate the balancing act of human relationships. As she reprises the pinnacle mantra, “When I see you/I see us/I see America/I feel your pain/I share your blood/I see America,” it has a powerful way of manifesting in the listener’s spirit.
Best lyrics: “I feel your pain/I share your blood/I see America”
“Mighty Die Young”
With a voice like an echoing beacon in the darkness, the dynamic artist delivers a tribute to the fearless leaders who used their voices to lift up noble causes, leaving this earth with glitter in their eyes, smoke in their lungs and dust on their tongues – symbols of a job well done. In two minutes and 18 seconds, Oladokun counteracts those who’ve dealt her more than her fair share of indignity with an endless well of kindness, ending the song with the fitting proclamation and a declaration of resiliency.
Best lyrics: “I’m not mighty/I’ve only just begun/The mighty die young”
“Heaven From Here”
Alongside glimmering harmonies from duo Penny & Sparrow, Oladokun confronts mortality in this gentle piece. She sings of seeing a heavenly view through the cracks of the stained glass windows in an abandoned house once shared with the person she loved, now a relic of their faded union. With a plucked acoustic melody that evokes the feeling of rain bouncing off a window pane, the song finds her asking the universe to give her another day to enjoy life. It is as much a song about perspective as it is about pondering the mystery of life, likely to prompt deep thought in anyone who listens deeply.
Best lyrics: “Just terrified of getting older/‘Cause no one goes with you to the other side”
“Jordan”
Oladokun ends the album on a light note with “Jordan.” Despite being baptized in the sacred Jordan River only to be bound in chains, she’s soon freed by a deep love. Building a new promised land with the person who saw past the scars and turmoil to the beauty underneath, the lyrics celebrate what they’ve built together. Carried by a peaceful instrumental, Oladokun culminates the song with the declaration, “now I’ve found love, there’s no turning back” — ending her beautiful debut album with a defining statement that sets the stage for a bright future.
Best lyrics: “You loved me though I was not lovely or deserving/You kissed the curse from my lips/And taught them to rejoice again”
On YouTube, Nigerian-born, California-raised, and Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Mary Akpa leads a virtual language lesson, teaching her community how to say the name of her latest single “A hurum gi n’anya.” Those unfamiliar with Akpa’s native Nigerian language Igbo may struggle with the title at first, but when Akpa sings the words, they slip fluidly from her lips, as easy as water from a glass.
“I feel such reverence towards music for that reason,” Akpa says on a Skype call with Audiofemme. “You don’t have to understand what someone’s saying, but you can feel something. You may not be able to speak a language, but you can sing it. You can catch it so much faster. Music just has a power. It’s a spiritual or magical force or something.” There’s an Igbo term for kind of power, too: iko nsi oma.
Akpa had originally intended to translate the title to English; she worried the phrase would alienate listeners if they couldn’t speak Igbo. But the meaning behind the phrase wouldn’t leave her. “When I think about Igbo and the etymology of the Igbo language and ‘A hurum gi n’anya’ specifically, it actually means more like, ‘I see you eye to eye, and I carry you in my [heart],'” she explains. “It’s like a deeper kind of love. And when I started learning about that, I’m like, oh, that’s why ‘I love you’ always felt basic to me.”
“Don’t look away/The more I see, the more I wanna see you/Never thought I’d find beauty in the mole/Above the right side of your face/These little scars are roadmaps/Cheat codes/Only you and I know/The more I’m letting go, it’s you I wanna know,” Akpa sings in a gently beckoning tone. The line was freestyled during the writing process and Akpa was certain she’d change it during production, until a friend asked why she wanted to do so. “I didn’t realize I was betraying myself that much,” Akpa says, remembering the shame of the moment, realizing how much she disliked this very intimate part of herself. The song became a personal affirmation: “Mary, you need to see yourself. Remember to love yourself first.”
“A hurum gi n’anya” also serves as a love letter to the Black community in the U.S. that she grew up with. “There’s this beautiful awakening that I’m seeing across the diaspora, where Black people are really coming closer to African culture and traditions and really beginning to see themselves reflected – and it’s like, ‘Yes, it’s yours,'” Akpa explains. “And so I’m like, well maybe this is an opportunity for me to create some bridge. It’s the reason I wanted it to be mostly Black Americans in the video – because I wanted to sort of say, ‘Hey, this is as much your culture as it is mine.'”
To some extent, Akpa has always felt the tension of being stuck between two worlds, familiar with the oppression of growing up in a low-income, over-policed community, but also teased about her ties to Nigeria by those who mainly saw Africans depicted negatively. “I just remember seeing commercials and things about Africans and how Africans were portrayed, with flies on their face, impoverished, with animals, and just looking very not the way Africans are in normal life,” she says. Her family’s own emigration was not driven by need; her mother left a successful printing business behind to bring Akpa, aged two-and-a half, and her siblings to California at her biological father’s insistence (he was a pastor, allowed entry to do missionary work in the States).
“My mom wasn’t too keen on coming to the U.S…. So she had a really interesting love/hate relationship with America for a while,” Akpa recalls. “And I say that because I think it really impacted the way that she immersed us in Nigerian culture. We listened to Nigerian music most of the time, almost like in place of nostalgia. She was missing home.”
Akpa and her four siblings grew up eating Nigerian food, lingering on long-distance calls to their grandparents, and listening to King Sunny Adé, Jùjú music, Fela Kuti, and the Lijadu Sisters. Contemporary Christian music was also a staple due to her mother’s religious fervor, and Dolly Parton made the Akpa Top 40, too. “Apparently in the ’70s, country music was big in Nigeria,” Akpa says with a laugh. She sang in the church choir and made up little songs she would sing at home, eventually studying ethnomusicology and jazz at UCLA. Though she toured domestically and internationally and independently released her Brave EP in 2012 and followed it with 2016’s Unseen, she never felt like the term “songwriter” applied to her.
This was partly because Akpa’s writing process always begins with a guitar melody, which she dictates vocally to her collaborators in the studio. “I just found out that my grandfather, my mom’s dad, played guitar and had his own musical gifts,” Akpa says. “I’m carrying his baton. I felt that so deeply because I hear guitar melodies first – not even vocal melodies – but I can’t play them.”
Akpa has only begun to acknowledge recently that, instrument to instrument, she’s the one leading the creation of each layer, sculpting the sounds with her voice and listening closely to musicians repeat verbatim. The challenge of working in a male-dominated industry has been that her creative ideas – and the way she expresses them – often get bogged down by technical suggestions, even from those who are simply there to “hit record.” This is ultimately distracting for Akpa, who says, “I need to be able to get my thoughts out without questions.” The musicians she works with in Nigeria, while just as technically versed, can pick up on the sounds and moods she wants to convey without putting her on the spot about it, which is why she recorded “A hurum gi n’anya” there, along with several other tracks that will comprise her forthcoming LP Nnoo, expected this spring.
Nnoo represents a full-circle moment creatively. “I’m just now, as in last year, considering myself a real songwriter. I always felt like I’m aspiring to be a great songwriter,” Akpa confesses. “I felt very insecure because I don’t play instruments well. I’m still trying to teach myself rhythm guitar and it doesn’t come easy to me.” The album is a culmination of many trips Akpa has taken to Nigeria in her adulthood, the first of which was with her sister, who was in law school at the time and working with a Nigerian organization. It was an experience she’s never forgotten.
“When I went home for the first time, I distinctly remember feeling like [I was] remembering parts of myself that I’d forgotten. It was weird – it was just like ‘Oh. Right. This is why I do this,’ and just sort of seeing myself reflected so much,” Akpa says. “Nigerians are a very intense people. I always felt like I was a lot, like, why am I so expressive? When I went to Nigeria I was like, oh, okay. I understood myself for the first time.”
Each time Akpa stepped on a plane and flew back home, the reality of her experience as a Black woman became crystallized; in the U.S., she says she “felt the oppression” even in subtle ways, like how Black New Yorkers shift slightly on the subway when a police officer enters the train car. “It does infiltrate every aspect of life when you’re a Black person. People do not recognize that’s such a reality. I think it was going home that took me outside of that, to feel how unfair that reality is,” Akpa says. In Nigeria, on the other hand, she says she “didn’t feel like I had to watch what I was doing all the time. I felt free. I felt like I could just exist for the first time in my life.”
This was part of what inspired last year’s stand-alone single “Black Body,” an opus on the Black experience in America set atop Akpa’s signature guitar sounds; it’s a striking piece that showcases her unique ability to weave thoughts together, speaking almost in the style of a beat poet, while instruments play in and out of frame. The trumpet acts as an echo, sweetly repeating her as she sings, “You call me angry/Say I pull the race card/Shaming me with stigma/But you take it too far.”
She had recorded the song in 2015 but shelved it, and it looked like the same would happen to Nnoo; despite feeling inspired and in charge during the recording of the album, Akpa was flooded with doubts afterward – those old feelings of being caught between two worlds resurfaced, and she was worried the no one else would be able to relate to her songs, or even understand where she was coming from. She had left New York City and returned to California, closing the door on the album to find clarity.
But in February 2020, after 25-year old Ahmaud Arbery was murdered for “jogging while Black,” Akpa suddenly found her email full of requests, asking about “Black Body.” It wasn’t long before she was digging back into her music files, revisiting “A hurum gi n’anya” and the rest of Nnoo.
Listening back, Akpa realized that “A hurum gi n’anya” held the message she needed to hear most to push through her self-doubt. “I’m such a lover. I love love. And I’m always like ‘I wanna show you all this love,’ but I wasn’t showing myself love,” she says. “Even just thinking I wasn’t a good songwriter. Even just not acknowledging myself as a producer. All the ways I wasn’t showing up for myself because I wasn’t really giving myself the love that I try to give other people. And that was a huge wake up call for me.” As she prepares to release Nnoo, she says the album “brought me closer to myself… it showed me me.”
Akpa brought back more than music from her trips to Nigeria. In 2015, she met up with her mother, who was also visiting Nigeria – the first time they’d been there together since Akpa was a toddler. They walked the same path her mother walked while in labor with her, thirty minutes from her business (where she had just closed another deal) to the midwives’ compound where she was born. They visited her mother’s old school and met a group of girls who would alter Akpa’s life permanently. While her mother spoke with the principal, Akpa found herself surrounded by girls on break, inundated with questions (“Why isn’t your hair plaited?” “Why aren’t you married?”). The principal asked her to speak at the morning assembly the next day; for two weeks after, she went back to the school daily to have one-on-one meetings with each of the girls. She talked with them about going to college, her life as a musician, her experience with sexual assault, and more. “I’m just like hyperventilating, crying after [each session], just realizing these girls are so bright,” Akpa says. “When you really get them talking they have so many ideas and it felt like I couldn’t just be like, ‘Okay, bye!’ after that.”
Akpa partnered with singer-songwriter Ayo Awosika to found Naija Girl Tribe, a nonprofit working toward a brighter future for Nigerian girls. Their first workshop was held in October 2016, and since then, Naija Girl Tribe has mentored over 500 girls so far, and is “truly the best thing I’ve done with my life, these last four years,” Akpa says. “Our long term goal is to create resource centers around Nigeria so girls have access to computers, to libraries, to mentor matching, any resources that they might need so they can host their own workshops and programs. We want to create a space for them to activate to do whatever they want to do.”
The next step will be setting up internships or some equivalent, so the girls can “start getting their hands on whatever work they wanna do, so they can see that it’s actually possible for them to do it,” Akpa says. “Honestly, these girls are brilliant. One of them wrote out this plan for how she would restructure the Nigerian government when she was fourteen.” Due to the pandemic’s travel restrictions, Akpa is working alongside Awosika on a series of virtual workshops tackling tough subjects like rape, alongside lighter events like an IGTV LIVE event with singer Kaline.
Right now, Akpa is stuck at home in New York City, still dreaming of Nigeria lingering off in the distance. Today, she’s shared a playlist of songs that evoke the mood of “A hurum gi n’anya” – great for those who need a boost, or need to feel seen and loved. Soon, she hopes to return to Nigeria to tape a live recording of Nnoo with the original musicians who worked on the album. It’s just one of many bridges she plans to build between the two cultures that have shaped her.
On her catchy new single, Nigerian hip-hop/afro-pop artist Bella Alubo sings about being the “Loneliest Girl in the World” — a position many people under quarantine can relate to right now. But for some people in the midst of the pandemic, loneliness is the least of their worries. That’s why Alubo donated her single to Red Hot, which uses music to raise money for various charities, mainly to raise awareness in the fight against AIDS/HIV and related health and social issues.
Alubo has released two albums since 2017 – her debut EP re-Bella and last year’s Summer’s Over, which feature a wide array of Nigerian guest talent. “Loneliest Girl in the World,” along with four other songs all written and performed by Nigerian women, is part of an EP called Kele•le. Revenue from the project will be used to provide relief for people affected by COVID-19. We talked to Alubo about the importance of the EP, not just for helping victims of the global pandemic but also for shedding light on Nigerian women and their music.
AF: What inspired the song “Loneliest Girl in the World”?
BA: I usually feel lonely, and I’m sure it’s something a lot of people around the world feel, not just creatives. Especially when you have to work on something and you are focused on your dream and things are not looking the best. At that point [I wrote the song], I just started my Masters [in Public Health]. Back then, I was in London. I was living upstairs of my apartment complex, which was quite tiny, and the tiny space forces you to think a lot. I think my bank account then was literally red. I don’t know, I just felt like it wasn’t a good day for me at all.
AF: What does it mean to you to be on the Kele•le EP?
BA: It’s a difficult time for the whole world, and there are some people out there who can’t afford a lot of things. People shouldn’t be in such vulnerable positions in the first place. Really, if we can help in any way, it will go a long way. Right now, the help I have to offer is my music, my talent, my time through sharing what I create. And with COVID-19 coming without anybody expecting it, obviously this help is much needed. Especially in vulnerable societies.
Sometime creatives, like myself, may not be able to contribute financially to a level that would be impactful, but when organizations like Red Hot, who are using something that we can give, like our creativity and music, to help the world around us, I feel like that such is a such a creative avenue for artists to give back. It’s helping me give back in my own way, right now. Before I can become super rich and can do more, hopefully by God’s grace.
AF: Why do you think it’s important to spotlight Nigerian female artists?
BA: Because it’s pretty much affirmative action. The industry, like all other industries, is male-dominated. It would be nice to see women more. Women need visibility. Women need for people to take note of their art. There are a lot of talented women, and the only reason they aren’t making money is because they don’t have visibility. So, projects like the Kele•le EP are not only giving back to society, but it’s contributing to creating visibility for talented women.
AF: How would you like to change people’s perception of Nigerian culture?
BA: Not just changing perception of non-Nigerians but also perceptions of Nigerians. Obviously outside Nigeria, even though we’re known for being smart, creative, and resilient, sometimes we’re also known for not-so-great things. I’d like for people to see more great sides of Nigerians, better representation of our country, more achievements, young people being more innovative and proactive within their fields. Within our country, I’d like us to get rid of negative aspects of our culture. Obviously, patriarchy has to go, as it shouldn’t have existed in the first place. Sexism, tribalism, classism, all of that has to go because it’s unethical. I’m hoping our culture gets more ethical with time.
AF: What battles are Nigerian women in particular fighting right now?
BA: If you follow Nigerian Twitter, there has been a lot of outing of alleged sexual predators, alleged rapists, alleged abusers, alleged harassers; I’m actually so glad we are having this conversation. About a few years ago, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. People would probably feel like they need to be ashamed that things happened to them, if people were raped or sexually harassed.
We need to facilitate a culture where we encourage victims to speak up, as victims don’t always feel they can speak up as we have these conversations. A lot of women have been abused. A lot of women have to bottle it down. It ends up creating issues in their lives, issues with their trust, mental health. Nobody should have to feel like someone can treat them badly and not pay the consequences of their actions.
Younger men are getting educated. Men who have done wrong things in the past are getting educated. Obviously, ignorance is not an excuse, and men or even women who are guilty of such crimes are paying for their crimes; our system really needs to be on that. Someone was telling me a story about a judge asking a lady, “What were you doing at his house at night?” And this is a judge who needs to uphold the law. It’s a lot. It’s really a lot. It’s quite depressing if you think about it. We need to fight, we need to not back down, we need to stand our ground, we need to use our voices because we shouldn’t allow anyone to silence us.
Musician, poet, and artist Edoheart grew up in Nigeria with music all around her. “My parents went to music shows, there were just parties around, there would be traveling musicians,” she remembers. “As a kid, I started to develop rhythm and a sense of harmonies.” When she moved to Detroit, she began listening to hip-hop and top-40 pop, which inspired her to write her own songs. She studied poetry and visual art in college and began collaborating with producers, until she realized she could do it better herself and began producing her own music.
Although she speaks in an American accent, Edoheart makes a point to sing in pidgin English as a nod to her culture of origin. “There’s a spiritual dimension that feels unlocked when I am in my accent,” she says. “The other thing I’m bringing is this sense of theater that is so, so, so Nigerian. I’m really given to telling stories and inhabiting characters, even if just lyrically.”
Her latest EP, For the Love, follows 2019 full-length Okada 8000 and features a variety of genre-defying songs that span both light and dark subjects. “Rogie (Oh No),” a love song with dynamic percussion and electronically altered vocals, begins the EP. The fun, uplifting “Seesaw” sounds like the backdrop to a summer party, with whimsical, humorous lyrics like “One foot in, one foot out / but she don’t like cucumber.” In the flirtatious “Do Me,” she sings, “You are so crazy / won’t you do me do me do me.” In “I Will Be There,” she sings a promise of friendship: “Anytime when you want me / I go come running / for the sake of the love.”
“Original Sufferhead,” the latest single off the album, is a bit darker than the rest. The title is borrowed from a Nigerian phrase for “a person who has been staked out for suffering,” she explains. “It is their job, responsibility, position — suffering is just heaped on their head. Then there’s the word ‘original’ in front of it because there’s an authenticity and a de-facto-ness to their level of suffering, kind of like it’s God-ordained.”
Edoheart wrote the song as a reflection on the seemingly endless hardships thrown into her life path, including several miscarriages and an illness in her family. “That song is about my life being so fucking hard, and I just keep going through it, keep pushing past it,” she says. She cried during her first recording of the track and tried recording it several more times, but she ultimately kept the first version because it sounded the most authentic.
“Original Sufferhead” is Edoheart’s most Shazammed song and one people tend to relate to when she plays it. “It’s a universal song,” she says. “Sometimes, we find that you’ll say the most honest, bare-bones thing about yourself, and so many people will be like, ‘Oh, my God, me fucking too.'”
The video was meant to visually represent a journey from darkness to light, as Edoheart starts off in the basement of a record store, climbs her way up to the main floor, then finds her way outside as she sings, “Let me tell you I’m a fighter / let me tell you I’m a struggler.”
All in all, she hopes the album spreads compassion and unity in a world that’s often divided. “There is so much hate, there is so much ‘how dare you have a different perspective from me?'” she says. “And yet if we hear somebody say, ‘I have to fight and struggle to stay alive because I’m sad,’ or ‘I had it rough’ or something, so many of us are like, ‘Oh, my God, me too.’ There’s this gulf between all of us having literally similar experiences, similar emotions, and yet because we belong to different political parties, because we have different skin colors, because we come from different parts of the world, we allow this rhetoric of us vs. them, this oppositional binary, white vs. black — these things are such fallacies.”
Edo, the Nigerian people Edoheart comes from and takes her name from, actually means “love,” she adds. “I hope that simply by being an Edoheart, by being somebody who loves to think about love and made an EP about love, that people are like, ‘Yeah, let’s talk about that. How do we achieve that? What does it mean to build a society that’s based upon love?”
