\u201cYou can get everything you dreamed of career-wise, and your life can still crumble, and that is what happened to me,\u201d says US singer-songwriter Danielle Ponder.<\/p>\n
Five years ago, and five days before her 40th birthday, Ponder left her job as a public defender \u2013 a lawyer for those without the means to pay for one \u2013 to pursue music full-time. Ponder\u2019s rich, church-reared voice and resonant music quickly lent themselves to cinematic moments: she wrote and performed the theme song for Apple TV+\u2019s Manhunt and her trip-hop-infused track Roll the Credits has been used by adverts, TV shows and video games. Several comments on the YouTube video come from viewers who searched for it thinking she was Nina Simone. Her debut album, Some of Us Are Brave, came out in 2022 and was warmly received by critics, and she appeared on Seth Meyers\u2019 talkshow. Her gamble had paid off. \u201cBut personally,\u201d she says, \u201cit felt like everything around me was falling apart\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ponder had become a public defender in her native Rochester in northern New York state, after watching her brother receive a 20-year prison sentence for a robbery in which nobody was physically harmed. She was 16 at the time. \u201cBecause of where I grew up and the experiences my family had, I was very familiar with injustice in the system,\u201d she says. \u201cBeing a public defender just confirmed that.\u201d She\u2019s seen a teenage boy in a cell for not having a bell on his bike, watched a 76-year-old man on dialysis sent to prison for driving on a suspended license and witnessed women \u2013 predominantly Black women \u2013 lose access to their children, \u201cnot for abuse, but for things that are considered as neglect, which is actually poverty\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u2018I\u2019m trying to embody the divinity of being a woman\u2019 \u2026 Danielle Ponder. Photograph: Faith Joyvon<\/p>\n
What she saw in her job reinforced her family\u2019s experience of prisons being \u201cbreeding grounds for violence\u201d that don\u2019t address the root causes around poverty and crime. \u201cWe\u2019ve created a billion-dollar criminal justice industry, a billion-dollar nonprofit industry, to police and \u2018nurse\u2019 the community as opposed to looking at living wages, affordable housing, reparations.\u201d She sighs wearily. \u201cIt\u2019s a dying culture, a sick culture, that I\u2019m at the end of my ropes with.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ponder poured themes of race, injustice and heartbreak into her songs, but the transition from the legal system into the music industry wasn\u2019t smooth. She took every detail of the process as seriously as she had as a lawyer: \u201cI had so much anxiety because I was approaching it like I was approaching someone going to prison.\u201d And as she was starting again in her 40s \u2013 \u201cI do feel very sensitive to time\u201d \u2013 Ponder struggled with the pressure she put on herself: \u201cI ruined relationships. I got consumed by my pain and my grief. I couldn\u2019t focus, couldn\u2019t write.\u201d<\/p>\n
The title of her new album, Everything Has Changed, refers to how her life crumbled after her initial success: her brother-in-law died, her father deteriorated with dementia, and she had a miscarriage. A new song, Blues, documents her compound sadness, including stark imagery of her miscarriage: \u201cCrimson colour covered me \/ buried bones where there were seeds.\u201d It\u2019s offset by God of You, a full-bodied ballad complete with horns and Ponder belting out lyrics to a man with feet of clay \u2013 even screaming at him. \u201cThat\u2019s a real fucking scream,\u201d she says. \u201cThe shit I went through\u201d \u2013 the relationship and miscarriage \u2013 \u201cended up being a nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The miscarriage happened two weeks before the deadline of a song that she was working on with Adrian Quesada from blues and soul outfit Black Pumas. \u201cI just ended up saying I had a personal loss, and I just can\u2019t complete the song right now. Why couldn\u2019t I say I had a miscarriage?\u201d Ponder was battling feelings of shame. \u201cWhen your grief feels shameful, then the community can\u2019t really offer you the love that you need,\u201d she says. And if you\u2019re in a difficult relationship like hers, it can be that you feel \u201creally out here by yourself\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ponder has also spilled candid thoughts on to her Substack newsletter, including about the patriarchal ways women are conditioned to relinquish power to men in relationships and religion. She was raised by a pastor who forbade secular music at home but she speaks lovingly of his influence on her, of \u201cwanting people to leave feeling better than they did when they came in\u201d. I ask her head-on if she is a woman of faith. She pauses for a while. \u201cI have faith in my ability to survive. As women, we fail to acknowledge the power within us. As Christians or religious people, we fail to acknowledge that power, and we give it to a man.\u201d<\/p>\n
She says this album is the last time she wants to speak about bad relationships with men; she doesn\u2019t explicitly swear off them, but she\u2019s more interested in pouring her power into friendships with women. \u201cThis is where unconditional love comes from,\u201d she says. \u201cMen are a scam!\u201d Just as in her songwriting, though, these strong feelings are offset with reflection. \u201cMen are actually very emotional and emotionally fragile,\u201d Ponder says: afraid of, and submissive to, religion, the military and Trump. \u201cIt would be a service to them for the truth to be revealed,\u201d that they are indeed submissive and afraid. \u201cThey could stop trying to pretend so much.\u201d<\/p>\n
But after her years of strife, there\u2019s a hint at Ponder\u2019s current mindset in her latest music videos, all shot in Dakar, Senegal. She first went there on a life-changing school trip aged 17, and she finds it to be much less restrictive than the US in terms of art; less tainted by capitalism or a drive to go viral. \u201cIt just feels like hip-hop in the 80s,\u201d she says. The videos feature Ponder radiating in opulent outfits, looking like a goddess among beautiful models and dancers. \u201cI\u2019m really trying to embody the divinity of being a woman,\u201d she says \u2013 another way of saying she has faith in herself.<\/p>\n