US singer-songwriter Danielle Ponder says she has faith in her ability to survive, after a career gamble that paid off professionally while her personal life crumbled. The former public defender, who released her debut album in 2022, returns with a new record, Everything Has Changed, on 9 October via Dead Oceans.
From courtroom to stage
Five years ago, five days before her 40th birthday, Ponder left her job as a public defender to pursue music full-time. Her rich, church-reared voice quickly found cinematic uses: she wrote and performed the theme song for Apple TV+’s Manhunt, and her track Roll the Credits has appeared in adverts, TV shows and video games. Several YouTube comments on the song come from viewers who searched for it thinking she was Nina Simone.
Her debut album, Some of Us Are Brave, came out in 2022 to warm critical reception, and she appeared on Seth Meyers’ talkshow. But, as she puts it: “You can get everything you dreamed of career-wise, and your life can still crumble, and that is what happened to me.”
Witness to injustice
Ponder became 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. “Because of where I grew up and the experiences my family had, I was very familiar with injustice in the system,” she says. “Being a public defender just confirmed that.”
In her work, she saw a teenage boy in a cell for not having a bell on his bike, a 76-year-old man on dialysis sent to prison for driving on a suspended license, and women – predominantly Black women – lose access to their children “not for abuse, but for things that are considered as neglect, which is actually poverty”. Her family’s experience reinforced her view of prisons as “breeding grounds for violence” that don’t address root causes around poverty and crime.
Personal collapse and new music
The transition into music wasn’t smooth. “I had so much anxiety because I was approaching it like I was approaching someone going to prison,” she says. Starting again in her 40s, she struggled with self-imposed pressure: “I ruined relationships. I got consumed by my pain and my grief. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t write.”
The title of her new album refers to how her life crumbled after 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 the miscarriage: “Crimson colour covered me / buried bones where there were seeds.” It’s offset by God of You, a ballad with horns and Ponder belting out lyrics to a man with feet of clay – even screaming at him. “That’s a real fucking scream,” she says.
The miscarriage happened two weeks before the deadline of a song she was working on with Adrian Quesada from Black Pumas. “I just ended up saying I had a personal loss, and I just can’t complete the song right now. Why couldn’t I say I had a miscarriage?” She battled feelings of shame: “When your grief feels shameful, then the community can’t really offer you the love that you need.”
Faith, women, and Dakar
Ponder has written candidly on her Substack newsletter about patriarchal ways women are conditioned to relinquish power to men in relationships and religion. Raised by a pastor who forbade secular music at home, she speaks lovingly of his influence, of “wanting people to leave feeling better than they did when they came in”. Asked if she is a woman of faith, she pauses: “I 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.”
She says this album is the last time she wants to speak about bad relationships with men, preferring to pour her power into friendships with women. “Men are a scam!” she says, adding that men are “actually very emotional and emotionally fragile”, afraid of and submissive to religion, the military and Trump. Her latest music videos, all shot in Dakar, Senegal, where she first went on a school trip aged 17, show her radiating in opulent outfits. “I’m really trying to embody the divinity of being a woman,” she says. Everything Has Changed is released 9 October via Dead Oceans.
