Filled to the brim with relentless positivity.
Denitia (Odigie) thought about making a record that goes back to the music she heard at home, capturing the place within the songs. Growing up, she was engulfed by the country stylings of George Strait, George Jones, Reba McIntyre and Alan Jackson that her father listened to as well as Charlie Pride and Patsy Cline, favourites of her grandmother. Riding in the car with her mom, Al Green, Smokey Robinson or The Temptations would be belting out the soul hits of the day.
“My musical palette was well-rounded at home,” she recalled. “Then as a teenager I started listening to alternative rock and rap. So, around the time I picked up a guitar and began writing my own songs, I had already been exposed to loads of different music.”
Her life has never been stationary for long. She was also exposed to several areas of the country, her odyssey taking her from the small refinery town outside of Houston to college in Nashville to Brooklyn where she met musical partner Brian Marc. They formed the futuristic electro-soul duo, Denitia and Sene. Their eventual split led to some honest and cathartic lyricism on ‘Waiting’, a song from her solo EP, ‘Ceilings’, produced by Daniel Schlett – “We’re all just waiting / we’re all the same / Looking for a reason / looking for a change”.
From Brooklyn, Denitia moved to Rockaway, then holed up in the Catskills where a new iteration of her emerged on her way back to Nashville as a solo country, Americana singer – “How that road just opens right up / When you have nowhere that you feel you belong / A certain type of weightless freedom / Melancholy bittersweet unknown”. She wrote ‘Highways’, the title song to her first country album as 2021 morphed into 2022. It has a heaviness, especially coming from someone like Denitia, whose attitude is basically upbeat most of the time.
She has been in a hurry-up-and-go period of her music career recently, having released two albums in three years, touring, writing and working on syncing some of her songs into TV and movies. “That’s been one of my most prominent interests in making music: pairing my music with visuals,” she said proudly. “And it’s exciting that directors have been reaching out and have really been vibing with my songs and wanted to use them to help tell their story as I’m telling my story.”
The spark of momentum she captured on “Highways” quickly galvanized a prolific period that culminated in “Sunset Drive”, her 2024 release, which features a twelve-track collage of stirring observations from the heart. This latest batch of songs takes her penchant for dreamy acoustic guitar accompaniment and coats them with a fuller arrangement by producer Brad Allen Williams, a guitarist in Brittney Howard’s touring band, who met Denitia in Brooklyn and has been a writing partner ever since.
“When we’re having these conversations about, well, I want to do something that feels like this record from 1967″, she related in revealing her taste for vintage clothes also includes vintage music. “Brad knows what I’m talking about, and he can bring that flavor to our voices”.
Take a song like ‘Getting Over’ and how its lyrics form what sounds like a laundry list of considerations “I’m getting over getting out from under”, she sings, “Gotta find a way to the top / When you think you’re on a roll / This life will do a number / Wonder why it never stops”. She may be averse to posing a question in her music, but she certainly can’t help but search for answers.
Denitia wanted to capture the parts of herself she can’t give away when it’s only her on the stage. “I’ve met a lot of characters and a lot of people, and I’ve lived a lot of life“, she said matter-of-factly, “I feel like I have a rich story to tell as we all do. We all have these different walks of life and very specific experiences, but with universal truths and universal events that kind of tie us all together”.
She tours by herself a lot, going from place to place in a SUV (“because the view is better up a little higher”) – “You’re a little bit more inward; you have your own intimate connection with the lyrics”, she says, allowing that she finds it rewarding when people she meets are making their own connections to her songs, “I think it’s really important that people find empathy. This is a powerful feeling that maybe they’ve never felt before. Let me try to observe this and understand that other people have different experiences”. Denitia’s songs are written about things that have happened over long periods of time. Something in her life may have gone sideways, and it’s taken her time to sort it out. “I do whatever I can to avoid burning bridges”, she said with concern in her voice, “because that type of conflict or animosity is very disturbing to me. So, I do whatever I can to end situations in a way that we can all find some kind of peace, especially me. It’s a way of getting things out of your body and moving forward”. Take the song ‘Old Friend’ as an example – “I had a best friend; we were both singer-songwriters. We were very young and were so close, and then life happened. Fast forward to now, and I’m sitting in my apartment thinking, ‘Oh man, we didn’t stay in touch'”.
She feels grateful to have arrived at a good place in her life’s journey. “I think that you can feel destabilized by always moving, and maybe it’s not your choice to always be scrambling for the next purpose or the next place. But for me, I’ve found a bit of security in being a little bit of a lone wolf”. In ‘Highways’ she sings, “The road lays out all around me / and with her / I’ll never be alone”. She’s saying that there’s nothing wrong with moving on when it’s the right move to make. If you’re evolving and changing, you’re not running away. “I feel like I’ve had lots of homes in my life, and I’ve arrived at this conclusion that home is where you want it to be. I feel like the concept itself is transcendent of place and location and is more about being at peace with yourself and creating a world around you that is peaceful instead of being at odds. I do feel like I’m experiencing a version of home right now”.
‘Highways’ exists in a similar place as one of her other songs called ‘Lavender Coast’. “I started writing ‘Lavender Coast’ in 2010 on the New York subway, and I’ve been kind of carrying that song around ever since”. She recorded a version of the song for “Highways,” but it didn’t make the cut. Williams convinced her to give it another shot, and it wound up on “Sunset Drive.”
There’s a thread of fragility between both songs. The former is an image of unavoidable change while the latter is an image of respite. In Denitia’s songs, the repetitive can take different shapes. She went solo while trying to figure out what she wanted to say in her music. The pandemic provided an opportunity to assess where she was going, and the result was “Highways.” The next record was about looking back to make sure she’d picked the right road.
“Well, I think certainly for this new record, that album is really a snapshot in time of moving from one era in life to the next and all the things that come with it – hope, sentimentality, ambivalence. But it’s also about love”, she asserted, “I know that might sound generic, but it’s also about fostering love around you. I have an amazing partner and we’ve created a life together. That feels like home. And I feel as though even if we picked up and moved somewhere else, we’d just create that again”.
In her world, you can be anywhere and choose to find something desirable about the place. Her song ‘All the Sweet Tea’ represents the South and its delicious beverage, or it could just as easily be the majestic mountains of Colorado. “There’s a whole world out here; there’s a whole life to experience”, she exclaimed, “It’s all just out there waiting for us to go and live it”.
It’s been seven years since Denitia released “Ceilings” Some days, she feels totally detached from the person she was when she wrote those five songs, the anger and frustration apparent in ‘Bound to Happen,’ as she shatters all the illusions. What came next was a measure of growing more comfortable with how nonsensical the act of existing is, rather than believing each second requires an explanation or justification.
“Obviously there’s been so much change since I wrote “Ceilings”, Denitia said, “but I’m still the same person that I was then. As you get older, the experiences pile up, that’s just what happens. The pile of emotional experiences gets bigger and bigger, and you have more to sort through. I don’t know if there’s any more of an understanding, but maybe there’s just more of an acceptance that things are not going to always make sense. But right now, things are making sense in my life”.
She talks about staying grounded and keeping it real, and those phrases don’t sound like clichés. “You know, one day somebody is in your email inbox, they’re saying this and that, and then the next day it’s like something else could happen that’s like, oh no, everything’s falling apart. I can’t live on that rollercoaster, man. I want to make songs. I want to make music, and I want to have a nice life. So, in the past couple years, I’ve just really been striving to stay even and stay in the moment and be present with all of it and just celebrate the fact that I’m literally living my dream no matter what is going on from day to day.
It’s as if she’s given herself permission to let it all hang out. “For this record, “Sunset Drive”, I think it was specifically about 90% just taken straight out of my life.” The opening song, ‘Good Life,’ could be seen as a way of getting some clarity even as the character’s insecurities are boiling over – “Finally I grew up for real / Taught myself to learn to feel”.
‘Don’t Let Me Go’ is this warm, airy love song that feels like holding hands in a park mid-fall when the leaves have all just started changing colors. It’s an enumeration of the mundane joys of loving someone. With light, consistent drums and the slight twang of guitars, the song envelops the listener in a hazy autumnal atmosphere, every second of it cozy and nostalgic – “My heart is wide, no matter how I try / You’re electric with a kiss / So how could I say no to this / I’m falling off the edge into your eyes”.
When she sings about “God’s a girl / In your hands she is holding my world” in ‘Ready to Fall’ you can feel the disbelief and joy at finally finding the right partner. When she sings- “Why die to fly to heaven / Why die when I’m already gone” in ‘White Lights,’ you can sense the mistake of thinking of the future as some time when you’ll finally be happy.
“In terms of my songs,” she expressed thoughtfully, “I want my records to feel like something you can listen to on repeat. If it feels healing and it feels like something that you can listen to and a vibration that you can resonate on that is somewhat positive, if not a little bit bittersweet, that’s what I’m hoping comes across”.
