NASHVILLE — Pleasure Oladokun was sitting in her yard, stoned and scrolling Twitter when a Christian pastor appeared in her feed. Because the little one of Nigerian immigrants who raised Oladokun and her sisters within the church, she’s no stranger to non secular doctrine and, as a queer particular person, no stranger to feeling as if it’s being weaponized in opposition to her. Nonetheless, she couldn’t look away.

“These guys at all times pop up and I’m like, ‘What are you doing right here?’” Oladokun, 31, mentioned on a January afternoon, seated at her eating room desk carrying a Nirvana T-shirt, an electrical mug and a weed vape inside attain. Then she set free amusing — a definite, cartoonlike factor good for defusing uncomfortable conditions. “And they’re at all times saying one thing silly, as a result of that’s an choice to them.”

Oladokun didn’t wish to battle on-line, although — she’d performed loads of that. She needed prayer. The phrases to “Someone Like Me,” the primary tune she wrote for her new album, “Proof of Life,” arrived in an explosive spurt: “Can anyone say a prayer, can anyone mild a candle for any person like me?” In her residence studio, with its partitions lined in Beatles and Beyoncé posters, she shortly laid down the majority of the tune. “It felt like the start of one thing,” she mentioned.

In 2021, working principally from residence in Nashville because the Covid pandemic raged on, Oladokun went from a comparatively unknown songwriter to at least one signed to a significant label: Her streaming numbers and profile had skyrocketed because of key placements on tv exhibits like “This Is Us” and “Gray’s Anatomy,” and a grant from YouTube for Black creators. “In Protection of My Personal Happiness,” Oladokun’s major-label debut (and third album total), featured a collaboration with Maren Morris, and instantly she was making the late-night rounds. Along with her conversational songs about non secular trauma, psychological well being and navigating the world as a Black, queer particular person, she was a salve for a time when hope felt scarce and probably the most pressing, efficient music acknowledged life’s ache, and didn’t simply dish out poisonous positivity.

“Proof of Life,” out April 28, pushes one step additional: How can we keep hopeful in a world that feels needlessly merciless? Can one make area for love, pals and success whereas nonetheless appreciating the little issues — or addressing greater ones, like local weather change? Oladokun appears for solutions in an emo-punk anthem in regards to the inevitability of demise known as “We’re All Gonna Die” and an autobiographical reminder that even darkish days flip vivid titled “Holding the Mild On.”

“No person simply feels joyful when somebody tells them to really feel joyful,” Oladokun mentioned. “No person stops worrying when somebody tells them to cease worrying,” she continued as she modified the report taking part in within the background from Haim to Fleetwood Mac after a puff on her vape. She’s massive on brutal honesty, and remedy (which she insisted her report label pay for). “It speaks to who got here out of the pandemic with just a little extra success,” she mentioned of the post-lockdown musical panorama. “All of them wrote issues that have been very particular and private, and never involved with generalities. Generalities are the small discuss of music.”

Oladokun was talking shortly after a visit to Mexico, the place she appeared at Brandi Carlile’s Ladies Simply Wanna Weekend competition, and her canine, Joni, was sporting a baby’s bib she bought as a memento. “She’s fairly ridiculous for taking it,” Oladokun mentioned, giving Joni a pat. Issues like that make her giggle when onerous days come.

That morning was an excellent one, although: She discovered she’d be opening for John Mayer on his spring area tour. She had deliberate to purchase a ticket as a fan. “I wasn’t even going to tug the loophole factor and ask my agent,” she mentioned and laughed.

Oladokun has lived for 3 years on this cozy East Nashville residence along with her fiancée, Rachel, a music publishing govt. A shelf of mugs contains one which reads “Don’t inform me to remain calm, I’m a Jewish mom”; one other encompasses a image of Prince. The one that almost all precisely displays Oladokun’s method proclaims (with an expletive), “I did my finest.”

“My solely intention,” she mentioned, “is to make music to assist myself course of on a regular basis life, and to assist different individuals course of on a regular basis life.”

Rising up within the small, predominantly white farming city of Casa Grande, Ariz., the place her mom and father, a nurse and a pharmacist, had moved from Delaware after emigrating from Nigeria, the younger Oladokun was anxious and hyper-aware that she was totally different. She suspected most individuals at her church thought homosexuality was a sin. “I had this sense very younger that one thing was improper with me,” she mentioned.

Her mother and father have been strict and tv was forbidden on college days, however on the weekend her father would let the kids get misplaced in music movies he’d taped. She found Inexperienced Day and Paul Simon, however it was whereas watching Tracy Chapman carry out at Wembley Stadium for Nelson Mandela’s seventieth birthday that Oladokun felt, for the primary time, the “transcendent” energy of a Black girl holding a guitar, taking part in people music. It modified her life.

Oladokun began writing on the guitar as a method to talk with pals. Because of this, her songs are conversational and confessional, and her hooky however profound melodies flip her lyrics into mantras.

Jim James of My Morning Jacket, who toured with Oladokun in 2022, sees her in the identical vein as John Prine and Invoice Withers. “She has a approach of speaking one-on-one with the listener on this seemingly informal approach whereas delivering the deepest fact you actually wanted to listen to,” he mentioned in an electronic mail interview. “The type of recommendation you get from a good friend that adjustments the course of your life.”

Oladokun thought she may turn into a preacher, so after highschool she moved to California to attend a small Christian faculty. However it more and more turned unimaginable to look previous a religion that routinely refused to make room for individuals like her. “I don’t know,” she mentioned, selecting her phrases fastidiously — religion, her personal model of it, remains to be a part of her life. “I simply assume you’re in dangerous form whenever you mannequin one thing divine after one thing like capitalism.”

After faculty she tried residing in Los Angeles, listening to songs like Kacey Musgraves’s “Comply with Your Arrow” on repeat and studying queer Christian literature. She discovered she didn’t have to forgive herself: She wanted to simply accept herself. She bought excessive rather a lot, too. There’s a lyric on “The Exhausting Manner,” from “Proof of Life,” that describes this journey: “Jesus raised me, good weed saved me.”

Los Angeles was finally too fast-paced for Oladokun, who needed to give attention to writing tales fairly than catering to traits, so she moved to Nashville in 2016. She launched her first album, “Carry,” that very same 12 months, by way of Kickstarter. And whereas the pandemic put a halt to dwell music, throughout its quiet months she scored quite a few tv placements for songs from “In Protection of My Personal Happiness,” which she first launched on her personal label named, hilariously, White Boy Information.

Oladokun doesn’t write many protest songs anymore — her existence is protest, she says — however on “In Protection of My Personal Happiness,” the tune “I See America” compounded brutal truths about systemic racism within the wake of George Floyd’s homicide, and it resonated extensively. (The tune was chosen as a finalist for a brand new particular benefit award, finest tune for social change, on the 2023 Grammys.) Quickly she had a report deal.

Oladokun summarizes that sequence of occasions in another way: “America did a bunch of racism, so individuals have been bored and inside and like, ‘We must always take heed to individuals we’ve been doing racism to,’ and that’s how I bought a profession.”

Her folk-pop strives for the broad attraction of a Mayer or Ed Sheeran, however from a standpoint that’s not simply one other white, male face. “Pleasure has this bizarre reward of wrapping up actually complicated human feelings into virtually comedic lyrics at occasions,” Maren Morris, who’s each her good friend and collaborator, mentioned in an electronic mail interview. “You go from laughing to crying instantly.”

Oladokun’s aim is to make music for everybody. “Even individuals I don’t agree with,” she mentioned. “If KurtMaga696 finds my report,” she continued, imagining a listener with totally different politics than her personal, “misses all my references to my homosexuality and involves my present, he has opened himself as much as me. And I’ve to open myself as much as him.”

“I get fearful of changing into pointed at one viewers,” she added. “That’s why I push in opposition to nation or Americana. I’m only a Black one who performs the guitar and grew up with a dad who listens to Kenny Rogers.”

Affords from the nation world nonetheless come. At one level, she mentioned, she turned down the chance to sing a duet with Morgan Wallen, the celebrity who was caught on video utilizing a racial slur. “The homosexual cackling that got here out of my mouth,” she mentioned. “Nation music broke my rattling coronary heart.”

Remedy retains Oladokun regular by all of it, and she or he’s been placing the recommendation she will get from it to good follow recently. Earlier than she sang on the White Home final 12 months to rejoice the signing of the Respect for Marriage Act, she kicked all people out of the room for 5 minutes and stared at her reflection. She needed to do not forget that she was a part of one thing a queer child rising up in Arizona thought they could by no means see.

Her therapist even identified not too long ago {that a} line in her tune “Someway” appears like a method they do in session to calm anxiousness and address the world. “I discover a quiet place in my chest, and I breathe in,” the lyrics go. “Someway issues simply get higher.”

At Carlile’s competition, Oladokun was considering what she may do if none of this works out. She took mushrooms and studied the fish swimming within the man-made lagoon for hours, she screamed together with Wynonna’s set, she thanked the group for coming to see “a lesbian who listened to the Seashore Boys and Radiohead in equal measure” throughout hers.

It was a competition proper in Oladokun’s candy spot, the place conversations about fairness, antidepressants and therapists have been welcome subjects onstage and off. And it made her do not forget that she must follow what she preaches: to do her finest, however take loads of time to breathe.

“I’m the other of somebody who understands grind tradition,” she mentioned earlier than becoming a member of Rachel on the seaside. “I give myself permission to not be the Rolling Stones, although I wish to be the Black Bruce Springsteen. However within the occasion I get too drained, that’s OK.”