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Origin stories are funny things. They get told, then passed down, then repeated, then set in stone as gospel. But what if they turn out not to be true? It’s been said again and again that Jalen Ngonda, currently stunning audiences with his soulful falsetto vocals and tracks that appear to have materialised from Motown and Stax’s hidden vaults from the 1960s, had his road to Damascus moment at age 11, when he found an album by The Temptations in his dad’s record collection.
This tale was in his early biographies, it’s on his Wikipedia page and it’s in just about every story written about him. But today he looks a bit sheepish when it is brought up and decides to come clean.
“That story is a little fabricated,” he says, sitting in a Sydney hotel room, taking a couple of weeks’ holiday before his Australian tour begins in March. “I was interviewed for my uni paper when I was 20 and I wanted to make the way I got into music sound cool. The story kept being repeated since then, and it was just easier to go with it after a while.”
His father didn’t have a great collection of 1960s records. In fact, growing up working-class in Wheaton, Maryland, a commuter town 25 minutes north of Washington DC, his father didn’t have much of a collection at all, “just some regular CDs of popular songs at the time, some ’80s and ’90s music like Prince and Michael Jackson, and hip-hop like Tupac and Biggie”.
The strange thing is that the true origin story is actually better than the one Ngonda made up. At the age of 11, he put on a DVD of a movie he wanted to watch, and before the feature started, there was a trailer for a miniseries about The Temptations.
“I became obsessed with that trailer,” he says. “I would just watch it over and over. Eventually my dad noticed, and one day he brought home a cheap CD compilation of their hits, like My Girl and Ain’t Too Proud To Beg. Then I discovered that my grandmother had loads of 45s from the ’60s, and that’s what really got me into music from back then.”
To say that the young Ngonda – he was born in 1994 – took to that era is an understatement. When he was 14, his mother walked into his room to discover him in full cry, singing along to The Supremes, so totally immersed in the music that he didn’t even notice she’d come in.
Soon afterwards, he entered a talent contest at his middle school. Most of the other kids were doing dance routines, rapping or singing contemporary pop. He chose to perform Stevie Wonder’s Uptight (Everything’s Alright), The Temptations’ Ain’t Too Proud To Beg and, in a duet with a classmate, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. Yes, he stood out from the crowd. Even his parents were surprised by what they saw and heard.
He was an introverted kid, but when he was on stage he seemed to transform.
He taught himself guitar, piano and drums, and throughout his mid-to-late teens, he played in various churches in his area. He also started writing his own songs, influenced by the music he loved from so many decades before.
At the age of 19, he read about LIPA (Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts), which was co-founded by Paul McCartney and whose alumni include Sandi Thom, The Wombats, The Staves and Circa Waves. His application was successful, and moving to Liverpool was a culture shock: “different weather, different vibe, different food, different way of life.”
He lived in student housing and had $US5000 to last him the one-year foundation course. He blew it well before the year was up.
“I pissed it all away on clothes, shoes, records, an acoustic guitar and going out. I turned 20 and I suddenly had more money than my parents, so I had no understanding of budgeting. I felt like a millionaire, and I thought ‘I’m never going to run out of money’.”
Still, he was learning so much, and being surrounded by other budding musicians, he found himself in multiple bands, playing guitar, bass, piano and drums. At the end of the year, he was meant to return to Maryland, but he had no money for the ticket.
Instead, he stuck it out in the UK. He did cover band gigs to make money, released his own music independently, eventually opened for Martha Reeves and Lauryn Hill, and attracted a manager who got his songs to Daptone, the label associated with Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Charles Bradley, Menahan Street Band and The James Hunter Six.
And that’s how, in 2023, Jalen Ngonda, who had been grinding away at music for years, became what many thought of as an overnight success with his debut album, Come Around and Love Me.
His voice drew comparisons with Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke and David Ruffin. Everyone from Snoop Dogg to Elton John sang his praises. The latter named him one of his favourite acts of 2023, after first seeing him at the Nice Jazz Festival. “He was absolutely incredible,” John said at the time. “He was on before the main act and there was hardly anybody there, and by the time he finished, it was packed.”
“When Elton John and Snoop Dogg hit me up, that was a crazy feeling,” Ngonda says. “I mean, I remember my mum had Snoop’s Doggystyle in her collection. I’m grateful that my music is reaching the ears of legends like that and they appreciate it, but I also know there are musicians much more talented than me who are struggling and just playing gig to gig, so I don’t take any of it for granted.”
Ngonda has been anxious to release a follow-up to his debut for some time, and that’s happening in June. He’s more than aware of the dreaded sophomore slump that can happen after releasing an album of songs that were gestating for years.
“But I think artists struggle with that sophomore album crisis because they tour so much behind their debut album and they stop writing,” he says. “If you do that, you lose that songwriting muscle. I just never stopped writing. It’s what I’ve been doing since I was a teenager and I’ve written hundreds of songs, so I didn’t feel that pressure.
“Songs are just your imagination set to chords and melodies and beats. You just have to have confidence in yourself. In fact, I think they should stop calling it sophomore album. It sounds too intense. It’s just a second album. Right?”
Jalen Ngonda plays The Tivoli, Brisbane, on March 2, The Forum, Melbourne, on March 6, WOMADelaide on March 7, Golden Plains, Meredith, March 8 and Sydney’s Enmore Theatre on March 10.
