It was like dinner and a show, except the performer didn’t quite know what she had to show off.
But like all those daredevils inclined to take the stage, inspiration hits when and where it does, and during a fateful evening one weekend several years ago Ndidi Onukwulu found a path forward.
“I had got into a really bad car accident, I was in the middle of university, and my friends and I would always have these Friday dinners and at the dinner everyone would have to share a talent,” she tells the North Shore News. “I didn’t really know what my talent was going to be, I wasn’t going to sit up there and do a monologue.”
Instead, Ndidi drew from some of her poems, but when she got up to recite them she ended up belting out her verses in a bluesy croon, much to her own surprise.
“‘Why don’t you do this?’” her friends encouraged her, noting their pal’s penchant for singing.
These days Onukwulu goes by the stage name Ndidi O. She released her fifth album, serendipitously called These Days, last month. For Ndidi, the record is something of a return to form.
“Before this I was on a major label and it was a jazz and classics label. They were trying to push me in more of a jazz direction and I was doing a kind of weird mixture of jazz, blues, folk, and when my relationship with the label ended I took some space and I started writing again the way I wanted to,” she says, noting that her latest release was put out on her own independent label.
The new album, which features a mix of R&B, pop and country, draws mainly from her longtime affection for early blues music, the music she always connected with from a young age.
“I’ve always loved the blues, the blues to me is music for working people, music for people that know pain. I understand pain, and I’ve always understood it at a young age and so it just was where I gravitated,” she says.
Ndidi alludes to experiencing violence in her biological home when she was younger. She moved around from New Westminster, to Burns Lake and Golden, B.C., and then back to the Lower Mainland again. She eventually entered foster care, to a loving family, but the awareness of her own traumas were still there. She was drawn to blues music.
“Singing people’s pain, singing my own pain, is as natural as breathing for me,” she says. “I automatically went to that. The first time I heard Howlin’ Wolf and I just hear him sing and just let go … there’s such a resonance and a pain.”
Those early experiences with blues music, the ones that were a great source of relief for her during times of trouble, are the inspiration for her current endeavours in music, where her goal is to help someone experiencing their own trials and tribulations find solace through the power of singing and music. It took some time to get there.
She moved to New York following university in a bid to make it in the “hardest place possible to make music,” Ndidi got a crash course in performing in the city’s daunting open mic circuit.
“It was really a scary experience,” she says. “Back then this is how green to music I was and the idea of performing music, is that I didn’t even know how to play with the band. I didn’t know how to really play an instrument, I didn’t know anything, so I would just go to these open mics, and I’d tell the band to stop playing and I’d sing acapella.”
In New York, Ndidi says, she found her footing, but on her newest album she feels she has perhaps finally found her voice. (Ndidi divides her time these days between Vancouver and Los Angeles.)
“The fact is this is an album I really took my time in and I made. And it’s me at this stage in my life.”
Four and a half years ago she made the conscious decision to get sober, she adds. She had bottomed out, then picked herself up again and changed her life. “I really did dust myself off and try again,” she explains.
Ndidi is embarking on a tour with Black Hen Roadshow next week alongside frequent collaborator Steve Dawson. While on tour she anticipates playing acoustic versions off her new 12-track album. It will be a welcome homecoming.
“I wasn’t even sure if I was ever going to make music again,” she says about her latest endeavour. “And then I did.”
