J.S. Ondara: Let Me In

“God Bless America,” the final song on J.S. Ondara’s debut album this year, sounds like the plea of a man who has broken up with a lover but would like another stab at making it work. Over the ballad-tempo fingerpicking of an acoustic guitar, the 26-year-old Kenyan immigrant croons, “Will you let me in? Or are you at capacity? Will you set me free? Are you holding onto history?”

These lyrics work whether the song’s narrator is knocking on his ex-lover’s door or in line at an airport customs checkpoint. It’s not the only ambiguous song on the album, Tales Of America, where the listener is left wondering: Are Ondara’s praises and complaints directed at a woman or at a nation?

“Those songs are about both,” Ondara says over the phone. “There’s a certain way I talk about the American dream, but I think of love the same way. That ties the record together. Everyone is fond of love and fond of the American dream. They’re certainly not impossible dreams, but they’re elusive. I’ve been in situations where I wonder if I’m on the wrong track, both in falling in love and coming to America. You’re in a certain place in a relationship, and you say, ‘Wait, this is not going to work out.’”

Ondara reached that point in his relationship with music a few years ago. He had emigrated from Nairobi to Minneapolis in hopes of fronting a rock band like his favorites Radiohead. The winters were bad enough but equally chilly was the response to this new arrival who didn’t know anybody and didn’t even play an instrument. After a few years of spinning his wheels, his family said, “See? We told you — this is a bad idea.” Ondara finally surrendered, gave up performing and enrolled in college to study music therapy.

“I ended up in a dark place,” he remembers, “and for a brief moment I was doubting myself. I’d been in the same situation with love affairs, though, and I knew that if you stick with it a bit, sometimes things get better. It was then that a friend invited me to the first concert I’d ever been to, a show with Noah Gunderson. Noah’s a very powerful performer who creates this spiritual experience. I wanted to do that … I dropped out of school the next day and went back to music.”

Ondara’s love affair with America began on the packed-dirt streets of Nairobi’s sprawling residential areas. Vendors sold everything from vegetables and second-hand clothing to knock-off-brand electronics in wooden stalls and on spread-out blankets as a fine dust spread over everything. One booth sold bootleg CDs and allowed you to sample the music on a boombox’s headphones.

“It was like wine tasting,” Ondara explains. “If you liked what you heard, you could buy it. For me, my pinot noir was rock music.” He became enamored of Nirvana and Guns n’ Roses, especially the latter band’s version of “Knocking On Heaven’s Door.” As he loudly proclaimed the song’s virtues, a fellow student informed him that the song was actually written by someone named Bob Dylan. Ondara was so sure that Guns n’ Roses had created it that he bet 100 Kenyan shillings that he was right and the other kid was wrong.

“I lost the bet,” Ondara admits, “but I found Dylan. I was drawn to it, because it was so different from all the loud music I’d heard before, and because it was rooted in stories. I’d been writing story songs since I was a child, and when I found Dylan’s music, I thought, ‘Wait, maybe I can take these songs I’ve been writing, put some kind of melody under the words, and I might have a career.’ I was lost and sad at the time, but music drew me in, even though everyone around me said, ‘This is taboo.’”

Ondara thought of music as a kind of spaceship that could carry him to a different universe. And, in a way, it did. After repeated tries, he finally found a way to emigrate to America. He had relatives in several states, but he chose Minnesota, the home of his hero Bob Dylan. The cold was a shock after equatorial Kenya, and the experience of black people as a marginalized minority rather than a dominating majority was just as difficult an adjustment.

“She said there was milk; she said there was honey,” he sings about the gap between expectations and reality on his song “Turkish Bandana.” “Instead there were bills and not enough money.” But as in any love affair, there’s always the hope that the problems can be overcome and that first flush of romance can be recaptured.

“My experience in America has been like a bad romance in a way,” he says, “push and pull, falling in love and breaking up. I’m excited to be here, to express myself and make a living at it, but I’m also aware that the nation is going through a tumultuous time. I hope my background gives me something different to say than Dylan or Jeff Buckley. That’s the beauty of storytelling: every person has a different story to tell. I’m trying to give my impressions of America from the perspective of someone who didn’t grow up here.”