Origin stories have a way of hardening into fact long before anyone thinks to check them. For Jalen Ngonda, the Washington DC-area soul singer who has spent the past two years astonishing audiences with a falsetto voice and a sound that feels lifted straight from the Motown and Stax catalogues of the 1960s, one particular story has followed him everywhere. It was in his early biographies, on his Wikipedia page, and in virtually every profile written about him: at age 11, he discovered The Temptations through a record in his father's collection, and the rest was history.
There is just one problem. It did not quite happen that way.
"That story is a little fabricated," Ngonda says, sitting in a Sydney hotel room during a short 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, he clarifies, did not own a great collection of 1960s soul records. Growing up working-class in Wheaton, Maryland, a commuter town about 25 minutes north of Washington DC, the family listened to Prince, Michael Jackson, Tupac and Biggie. What actually happened at age 11 was more accidental and, as Ngonda concedes with a grin, probably a better story anyway.
He put on a DVD of a film he wanted to watch. Before the feature started, a trailer played for a miniseries about The Temptations. He became fixated on it, watching the preview over and over until his father noticed and brought home a cheap compilation CD of the group's hits. That discovery led him to his grandmother's collection of 1960s 45s, and from there, the obsession became total.
By the time he was 14, his mother walked into his bedroom to find him singing along to The Supremes, so absorbed in the music that he had not even heard her come in. Shortly after, he entered a school talent contest and performed Stevie Wonder's Uptight (Everything's Alright), The Temptations' Ain't Too Proud to Beg, and a duet of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's Ain't No Mountain High Enough. While classmates rapped and danced to contemporary pop, Ngonda stood conspicuously apart. Even his parents were surprised.
He taught himself guitar, piano and drums, played in churches throughout his teens, and began writing original material. At 19, he read about the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, co-founded by Paul McCartney and counting The Wombats among its alumni. He applied, was accepted, and moved to England, encountering a culture shock that extended to the weather, the food, and the pace of daily life.
He arrived with US$5,000 to last a year-long foundation course. It did not last nearly that long.
"I pissed it all away on clothes, shoes, records, an acoustic guitar and going out," he says, without evident regret. "I turned 20 and I suddenly had more money than my parents, so I had no understanding of budgeting. I felt like a millionaire."
When the course ended, he had no money for a ticket home and stayed in the UK. He played cover gigs to survive, released music independently, opened for Martha Reeves and Lauryn Hill, and eventually caught the attention of a manager who placed his songs with Daptone Records, the Brooklyn-based independent label known for Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Charles Bradley, and The James Hunter Six. In 2023, his debut album Come Around and Love Me arrived, drawing comparisons to Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, and David Ruffin.
The response from his own musical heroes was disorienting in the best possible way. Elton John named him one of his favourite acts of 2023 after catching his set at the Nice Jazz Festival, reportedly arriving to a sparse crowd and leaving to a packed one. Snoop Dogg also reached out with praise.
"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, 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."
A second album is due in June. Ngonda is unfazed by the pressure that derails many artists after a celebrated debut, and his reasoning is direct: he simply never stopped writing. "Artists struggle with that sophomore crisis because they tour so much behind their debut and they stop writing," he says. "If you do that, you lose that songwriting muscle. I just never stopped. In fact, I think they should stop calling it a sophomore album. It sounds too intense. It's just a second album. Right?"
For Australian audiences, the March tour offers a rare chance to see an artist at the precise moment his profile is building but before the rooms get significantly larger. Ngonda plays The Tivoli in Brisbane on March 2, The Forum in Melbourne on March 6, WOMADelaide on March 7, Golden Plains at Meredith on March 8, and the Enmore Theatre in Sydney on March 10. As first reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, Ngonda has been in Sydney ahead of the tour dates, taking what he describes as a proper holiday before the run begins.
There is something fitting about a singer who built his entire artistry on music made decades before he was born now finding his audience through word-of-mouth and the endorsement of legends who lived that era firsthand. The origin story, it turns out, did not need embellishment at all.