For Ondara, moving out of the isolating atmosphere of COVID was a difficult process — enough to halt his scheduled solo tour set to begin in August. The Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter released his third LP, Spanish Villager No: 3 in September, but stepped back from performing to take care of his health and refine the way he wants audiences to understand his stage presence. 

Putting mental health first meant postponing and canceling several shows, including a long-awaited show at First Avenue in September. “Just wrestling with my place in America, and wrestling the establishment of the music industry, it's a difficult industry for mental health in general,” he says. “It's a difficult world to exist in as a Black person. It's a very white-dominated kind of world. There are all these layers of trauma. The path my life has taken me has collected over time, and I think at some point, it was just too much, and it was starting to unravel.”

Like many others across the music industry ­— including Justin Bieber, Arlo Parks, Wet Leg, and Sam Fender — he needed a break to process and evaluate how to move forward with performing and touring. The lack of a daily framework during the pandemic made it difficult to resume day-to-day tours.

“I'd been touring consistently for several years,” says the singer-songwriter during a recent phone conversation. “There was a flow and structure to it that was pulled out like a rug from the floor. It sounds a little weird, but when you're on the road, there's a time when you eat food, you do this, you go play, and there's a flow to it. During that period [COVID], there was no structure whatsoever. I was in limbo, just drowning and not having a steady flow to put my feet on.” 

Ondara will be performing at the Uptown Theater on Friday, Dec. 8 with opening act Cat Clyde as part of The Current’s Winter Warmup.

Relocating for the love of music 

Ondara, an immigrant from Nairobi, Kenya, has lived in the United States for almost a decade. As a child, he dreamed of playing music and immersing himself in the arts. Although all members of his family entered an immigration lottery, he was the only person to win a spot. The decision to leave his family behind was difficult.

“It was sad,” Ondara says. “I still struggle with that. I left a whole life with friends and family. Sometimes I wonder if that was the right call. It was difficult, but I was 20 at the time and ready for an adventure to go out and find my place in the world. [I] believe I am meant to be here now and it’s my destiny. It also means I can be helpful to my family back home by trying to see if I can participate in this experiment [relocation] that they started out here.”

As he acclimated to Minnesota while living with relatives, he worked assembly jobs and delivered medications to nursing homes to save money for a guitar and funds to make a demo tape. After purchasing a guitar, he began to play consistent shows at Moto-i in Uptown, and Plums in St. Paul with very clear goals – to refine his songwriting and learn how to perform to an audience.

Through airplay on The Current, the artist formerly known as Jay Smart and J.S. Ondara began reaching a greater base of listeners with songs centering his haunting tenor vocals. He released the deeply affecting Tales of America in 2019, and followed with Folk N’ Roll, Vol 1: Tales of Isolation in 2020. The reaction to those albums earned him slots opening for Lindsey Buckingham, Neil Young, and the Lumineers.

As an immigrant, he says he was met with gatekeeping in the U.S. music industry. Some people assumed his music would sound a certain way based on his appearance. “They saw something that I wasn't,” he says. “I was a folk singer and I wanted to grab a guitar and play folk songs. There’s an interesting thing in America where skin pigmentation is associated with styles of music — in a way that wasn't necessarily a thing back home [Kenya]. Where I'm from, everybody looks the same for the most part. People can gravitate towards whatever interests them. There are metal bands, folk bands, rock bands, rap artists, and they’re just Black folk. But moving to America, I found that there was tribalism around that where this kind of people are supposed to make this kind of music. Eventually, I just stuck to my guns, and I was able to do it [perform as a folk singer]. It still feels strange and lonely sometimes; not having enough people around me who look like me.”

His preconceived perceptions of America conflicted with daily reality. The emotional strain gripped him and eventually led to psychological turmoil.

“It was a very conflicting thing for my brain and my spirit,” he says. “I think that's one of the things that led to my dissociation in some way – because it was just too much cognitive dissonance, and I couldn't handle it. I think my brain and my body needed some dissociation to store all these anxieties in a different character and in a different entity outside of myself, which ended up being the Spanish Villager.”

The evolution of the Spanish Villager 

Ondara is open about ways the pandemic changed him. His heightened emotions due to anxiety caused what he describes as a split of his personality — there’s Ondara, and now a new identity: the Spanish Villager, or “SV.”

The birth of this alter ego was complicated. “It was a very haphazard process,” Ondara says. “I was wrestling with a bunch of internal demons while making the record. The result of those battles yielded the Spanish Villager. But that was after I'd written the songs, so the poetry sort of preceded the character. The character is part of me and in a way, a more radicalized part of me.”

After discovering that a small village in Spain is also called Ondara, a predominantly African name, his curiosity led to more research. He even wrote a graphic novel about the character that will be published on his website at a later date.

Spanish Villager No: 3 symbolizes Ondara’s life channeled through the title character and parallels a similar timeline format to Star Wars. “It's the third chapter of my story, and the story of the Spanish Villager,” he says. ”The graphic novel begins from chapter three somewhat in the same way Star Wars begins from episode four and catches up after that story begins.”

Inspired by writers T.S. Eliot, H.G. Wells, and George Orwell, the lyrics on the 11-song album poetically describe Ondara’s pain, healing process, and path forward through the vision of the Spanish Villager. He says Bob Dylan, U2’s The Joshua Tree, and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours all influenced the music. “Rumours was the sonic aspect of it and had a lot to do with how I made the record,” Ondara says. “It was a direct result from touring [with Lindsey Buckingham], where I just sort of became a bit obsessed with that record after that. I listened to a lot of that pretty much every day while doing the sessions for [Spanish Villager No: 3]. I think the beginning of an “Alien in Minneapolis” is very much like The Joshua Tree.”

The release of Spanish Villager No: 3 has been liberating and cathartic for Ondara, who began addressing past trauma and anxieties in 2020. The album takes listeners on a journey examining formerly repressed emotions related to the culture and politics that started to manifest during his childhood in Kenya and continued into the long, isolating months of COVID. It’s a visceral depiction of Ondara’s transitions both physically and mentally.

“I loved the arts and always felt like everyone around me, including my family and my culture, just didn't understand me at all,” he says. “I felt very claustrophobic. I couldn’t express myself or be myself. And even the efforts of trying to pursue the arts were strongly discouraged by the closest people around me, and that was very difficult. When you know, something's in your blood, and you must express it, but it's sort of being actively stifled. It's something that I carried with me into America. All my family have come around at this point, since they realize they can’t change my mind. There's a collection of traumas, you could say, that being one of them.”

Movement as healing

For Ondara, finding ways to heal through his music include lyrical storytelling, a custom-designed suit to wear when in character, and dance movements inspired by David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, and Canadian choreographer Emma Portner. During the tour pause, he carefully choreographed a performance, and audiences should expect to see him dance at his upcoming shows. Stopping the tour gave him the time to put it all together and experience how the process of movement helped his mental health.

“It's almost easier to process it [emotions] when I'm in character,” says Ondara. “In a way, that’s what [the Spanish Villager’s] purpose is. When I get into character, on stage performing, or by myself at home, I just summon the character. I feel like I can't really do it as myself. It's mental barriers that I've created for myself, or the operating system of culture has created for me one or another. If I get into character as SV, I can move around, and feel freer enough to process things and to cry, to laugh and do all those things that I like that my masculine persona isn't allowed to do.”

And when he is moving to music as the Spanish Villager, either on stage or at home, there’s a medicinal impact. Ondara hopes to help normalize being open about mental health in a way that’s contrary to his cultural upbringing and to encourage other people to face their obstacles head-on. “I feel like I am unraveling some of the pains that have accrued over time,” he says. “I feel this ball of pain in my head gradually untangling. I think in some ways, I was backed into a corner of the universe and was in a tough spot, with the only way to get out of this is to just move around more.”

Moving forward, Ondara plans to continue performing as the Spanish Villager. He believes the creation of the character has contributed to his growth as both a person and performer. “It has given me more room to be myself,” he says. “There's a bit of levity in how I interact with people and the audience, [...] using things that I previously wouldn't have done. It creates some room for me to be a person and then have this other entity, which is the publicized commodity. I think that demarcation creates a freedom for the art itself to grow in an uninhibited way, and to just be itself. When I did it, now, it wasn't very conscious, but when I do it in the future, it will be more conscious and I’m excited to see where that freedom takes me.”

Learn more about Ondara at spanishvillager.com