‘Men are a scam!’ The trials of Danielle Ponder, the lawyer turned singer rooting for a better world

“You can get everything you dreamed of career-wise, and your life can still crumble, and that is what happened to me,” says US singer-songwriter Danielle Ponder.

Five years ago, and five days before her 40th birthday, Ponder left her job as a public defender – a lawyer for those without the means to pay for one – to pursue music full-time. Ponder’s rich, church-reared voice and resonant music quickly lent themselves to cinematic moments: she wrote and performed the theme song for Apple TV+’s Manhunt and her trip-hop-infused track Roll the Credits has been used by adverts, TV shows and video games. Several comments on the YouTube video come from viewers who searched for it thinking she was Nina Simone. Her debut album, Some of Us Are Brave, came out in 2022 and was warmly received by critics, and she appeared on Seth Meyers’ talkshow. Her gamble had paid off. “But personally,” she says, “it felt like everything around me was falling apart”.

Ponder had become a public defender in her native Rochester in northern New York state, after watching her brother receive a 20-year prison sentence for a robbery in which nobody was physically harmed. She was 16 at the time. “Because of where I grew up and the experiences my family had, I was very familiar with injustice in the system,” she says. “Being a public defender just confirmed that.” She’s seen a teenage boy in a cell for not having a bell on his bike, watched a 76-year-old man on dialysis sent to prison for driving on a suspended license and witnessed women – predominantly Black women – lose access to their children, “not for abuse, but for things that are considered as neglect, which is actually poverty”.

What she saw in her job reinforced her family’s experience of prisons being “breeding grounds for violence” that don’t address the root causes around poverty and crime. “We’ve created a billion-dollar criminal justice industry, a billion-dollar nonprofit industry, to police and ‘nurse’ the community as opposed to looking at living wages, affordable housing, reparations.” She sighs wearily. “It’s a dying culture, a sick culture, that I’m at the end of my ropes with.”

Ponder poured themes of race, injustice and heartbreak into her songs, but the transition from the legal system into the music industry wasn’t smooth. She took every detail of the process as seriously as she had as a lawyer: “I had so much anxiety because I was approaching it like I was approaching someone going to prison.” And as she was starting again in her 40s – “I do feel very sensitive to time” – Ponder struggled with the pressure she put on herself: “I ruined relationships. I got consumed by my pain and my grief. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t write.”

The title of her new album, Everything Has Changed, refers to how her life crumbled after her initial success: her brother-in-law died, her father deteriorated with dementia, and she had a miscarriage. A new song, Blues, documents her compound sadness, including stark imagery of her miscarriage: “Crimson colour covered me / buried bones where there were seeds.” It’s offset by God of You, a full-bodied ballad complete with horns and Ponder belting out lyrics to a man with feet of clay – even screaming at him. “That’s a real fucking scream,” she says. “The shit I went through” – the relationship and miscarriage – “ended up being a nightmare.”

The miscarriage happened two weeks before the deadline of a song that she was working on with Adrian Quesada from blues and soul outfit Black Pumas. “I just ended up saying I had a personal loss, and I just can’t complete the song right now. Why couldn’t I say I had a miscarriage?” Ponder was battling feelings of shame. “When your grief feels shameful, then the community can’t really offer you the love that you need,” she says. And if you’re in a difficult relationship like hers, it can be that you feel “really out here by yourself”.

Ponder has also spilled candid thoughts on to her Substack newsletter, including about the patriarchal ways women are conditioned to relinquish power to men in relationships and religion. She was raised by a pastor who forbade secular music at home but she speaks lovingly of his influence on her, of “wanting people to leave feeling better than they did when they came in”. I ask her head-on if she is a woman of faith. She pauses for a while. “I have faith in my ability to survive. As women, we fail to acknowledge the power within us. As Christians or religious people, we fail to acknowledge that power, and we give it to a man.”

She says this album is the last time she wants to speak about bad relationships with men; she doesn’t explicitly swear off them, but she’s more interested in pouring her power into friendships with women. “This is where unconditional love comes from,” she says. “Men are a scam!” Just as in her songwriting, though, these strong feelings are offset with reflection. “Men are actually very emotional and emotionally fragile,” Ponder says: afraid of, and submissive to, religion, the military and Trump. “It would be a service to them for the truth to be revealed,” that they are indeed submissive and afraid. “They could stop trying to pretend so much.”

But after her years of strife, there’s a hint at Ponder’s current mindset in her latest music videos, all shot in Dakar, Senegal. She first went there on a life-changing school trip aged 17, and she finds it to be much less restrictive than the US in terms of art; less tainted by capitalism or a drive to go viral. “It just feels like hip-hop in the 80s,” she says. The videos feature Ponder radiating in opulent outfits, looking like a goddess among beautiful models and dancers. “I’m really trying to embody the divinity of being a woman,” she says – another way of saying she has faith in herself.