On the Rise
Denitia

An Opry debut like this is an honor every country musician dreams about, but few ever realize. Denitia, however, is one of the lucky ones.

In late June, Denitia Odigie — who releases music mononymously as Denitia — made her first appearance on the Opry stage, cementing her place as one of country’s rising stars. Her inauguration at the institution came after years of writing, touring, collaborating, and even weaving between genres before landing on that “just right” tone for her artistic output. As the saying goes, it takes years to become an overnight success. But chatting with her as the release of her second country LP, Sunset Drive, approaches, it’s clear that those years of preparation have made Odigie ready to meet this moment. “I’m just so stoked to be a part of the legacy,” she says with a humble hint of disbelief.

Odigie’s own legacy began in a small town in Texas, an hour outside of Houston. There, the culture was country. “We would go to the rodeo, we were wearing the clothes… We were just really steeped in it,” she says. “It was very working class, solid values, going to church, strong community. And so, my first musical obsession was country music.”

In the mornings as her family got ready to shuttle off to work and to school, country stations played from a little A.M. radio her grandmother kept in the bathroom. Amongst her friends, everyone obsessed about the latest country hits. In her spare time, she picked up guitar so she could play along with the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s country rock songs that she held so dear. With an upbringing like this, that singing and songwriting became the centerpiece of Odigie’s life seems almost an inevitability.

When the time came to go off to university, taking a place offered to her at Vanderbilt was a no-brainer. For one thing, the Nashville institution ranked among the most prestigious in the country. For another, it brought Odigie not just to one of music’s major global hubs, but to the mecca of country. “I wanted to be around music. I had the bug already,” she says, reflecting on that time. “After I graduated from Vanderbilt, I started to write songs, play shows around Nashville, touring in the Southeast, and really try to find my sound and figure out what it means to be an artist. I was kind of mining from my background in country music, but also my background in the church and the folk music that I was discovering in college. So, my sound at the time was coming out as a blend of folk soul with a little bit of indie rock.”

Odigie stayed on in Nashville for a little while but quickly relocated to Austin, back in her home state and in another one of the great American live music cities. She also up a short residency in the Lower East Side of New York, which brought her frequently up to the East Coast and connected her to the scene of the city. But though she was making progress on her artistic goals, she still felt restless.

Around that same time, Odigie signed on to a songwriters’ tour with a group of industry friends from Austin. Coincidentally, the final stop on the run was New York. Naturally, she just decided to ask the touring company to “drop her off” there, with no return to Austin in sight. “I was like: ‘You guys just leave me, I have a place to stay, I’ll just go there and take it from there.’ I just packed what little things I had at the time and made that move to New York.”

Buoyed by past connections from Tennessee, Texas, and her previous residence in the city, Odigie’s creative network began to balloon. Through friends of friends, she got in touch with an artist collective in Brooklyn — a group of around 10 musicians, filmmakers, and artists — which had a DIY studio installed in the living room in an old Victorian home. There, she began to explore taking total creative control over her records, learning to self-produce tracks and collaborating with anyone who happened to wander through the house.

“That was a really integral part of my artistry,” she says of her meeting the group. Perhaps most significantly, her time in the collective ended up leading to her first breakout project. “I linked up with a rapper who had been hanging around that house and making records with those guys, and he was doing really, really well as a rapper. And he said, ‘I have these songs, and I don’t sing. Do you want to sing these songs?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ That little side experimentation turned into my main project for about five years.”

Called Denitia and Sene, the group focused on pop, R&B and experimental music. As the group took off, all her other pursuits took a backburner. “It was an inspiring time,” she reminisces. “But all the while, I knew that when I picked up my guitar and started to write songs, the songs would always just flow out of me and it felt like my zone, my groove.” So while she found belonging with the collective, she eventually realized it was time to part ways. Seeking to preserve her artistic momentum, Odigie made a strategic pivot out of Denitia and Sene towards her own solo project.

Odigie’s turn to country wasn’t instantaneous. Her first couple solo EPs remained in the funk-pop-R&B space she had dominated in her group. But the pull back to the genre of her youth and her legacy grew consistently stronger. By 2020, when the world stopped, it was unavoidable. The abundance of time on Odigie’s hands forced her to consider who she was as an artist really. “I found myself reaching for what felt like home to me,” she says, earnestly, explaining that her artistry was what kept her sane in a period when the world around her was anything but. Her quarantine passed with a series of late nights alone in her home writing and writing and writing. And the songs that came out of that prolific period were, undoubtedly, markedly, country. That collection, she tells me, went on to become her first, spectacular country record, Highways, released in 2022.

The artistic pivot was also paired with a personal one. After a brief COVID-induced stint in upstate New York, Odigie finally made the move back South to Nashville, where she now resides.

Admittedly, Odigie’s return to country comes at an opportune time. The genre’s listenership globally is at an all-time high. Both megastars like Beyoncé and indie darlings like ROLE MODEL are releasing country-folk projects. Acts like Zach Bryan and Noah Kahan are filling stadium after stadium. But for Odigie, her creative rebirth was perhaps the farthest thing from trend-chasing possible. Rather, it was her unabashed return to herself. “It’s really just something that’s coming from inside,” she says. “It feels like part of my purpose in my role is to help people connect to something within themselves … I want to make music that I love that moves people while I’m just being visibly and authentically myself. My role when it comes to the context of country music as it is today is to just be real and make music that I’m in love with. And I’m excited in being rooted in the things that I love about traditional country music, having my feet on the ground with those things, and then expanding.”

Part of that expansion has meant carving out a place in country for communities that have previously been overlooked by its industry epicenters. Notably, Odigie has performed as a member of the Black Opry, a collective of Black artists in country, Americana, blues, and folk that started in 2020 as a touring revue and songwriters’ circle. Founded by country fan Holly G, the collective’s stated mission is to create a home for Black country artists and fans, building a place for those who have been disregarded by the genre’s mainstream for far too long. “We have a joke amongst us that even before we meet each other, it feels like we’re meeting cousins. It’s family,” Odigie says of her experience with the group. “There’s so many things that we don’t have to explain to each other as black artists that make country music. There’s a lot of love.”

“I feel like we’re moving the needle little by little on illuminating that we exist and that people like us have been here for a while. The reasons why you don’t see some Black artists getting played on the radio or being on TV or whatever is not for lack of talent. From there, people can start to understand and draw their own conclusions.”

But just as much as Odigie extends her energy and effort to advocating for those underserved by the country establishment, she also firmly grounds her project in universal truths she wants to reach and be relatable to all. “With my various intersectional identities — being Black, being a woman, being queer — it’s been really important for me, and something I’ve been intuitively drawn to do, to simply exist as myself,” she explains. “I don’t like to go out of my way to separate myself when it comes to marketing, because I believe the kind of diversity I long for the world is just seeing people for who they are.”

Her latest album, Sunset Drive, was recorded in that spirit. It finds its roots in the non-negotiable fundamentals of country: solid storytelling, acoustic guitar, and the soothing sounds of the pedal steel. It opines on winding roads, loves gone by, and coming out on top after being down and out.

The record’s lead single, “Back to You,” exemplifies these traits to a tee. It’s an excellent piece of songwriting, one likely to stand the test of time and hold its own against the giants of its genre. “It’s one of my favorites that I’ve ever done,” Odigie says. “I was really interested in exploring the corners of where I would like to go with this Americana sound and pushing the limits a little bit.”

In Odigie’s mind, both “Back to You” and Sunset Drive more broadly are marriages of her musical experiences to date. While the record grounds her ever more firmly in her country roots, she has allowed herself not to be defined by the confines of the country establishment. She pulls from indie, from pop, and even from her time creating in R&B to build an album that is truly breathtaking.

As all great country is, it’s expansive in mood. In other words, it’s great driving music. The mark of any good country album is how it holds up not just on the technicals but in how it feels on the road and on the dance floor and when played over time spent with family and friends. Sunset Drive hits all those marks. Odigie deservedly knows this. “It’s great driving music,” she jokes. With Sunset Drive, Odigie has made an expansive record for an expansive moment. After everywhere she’s been and all she has managed to accomplish, the road to the next level seems to be finally, rightfully opening for her.