‘Men are a scam!’ The trials of Danielle Ponder, the lawyer turned singer rooting for a better world — SkimNews
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- Danielle Ponder left her job as a public defender in Rochester, New York, five days before her 40th birthday to pursue music full-time, after watching her brother receive a 20-year prison sentence for a robbery when she was 16
- Ponder's debut album 'Some of Us Are Brave' (2022) led to an Apple TV+ 'Manhunt' theme song, widespread sync placements for 'Roll the Credits,' a Seth Meyers appearance, and YouTube comments mistaking her for Nina Simone
- The new album 'Everything Has Changed' documents a compound personal collapse: her brother-in-law's death, her father's dementia, and a miscarriage that left her unable to finish a collaboration with Black Pumas' Adrian Quesada two weeks before its deadline
- The track 'Blues' renders the miscarriage in stark imagery — 'Crimson colour covered me / buried bones where there were seeds' — while 'God of You' is a full-bodied ballad in which Ponder screams at a man with 'feet of clay'
- Ponder writes on her Substack about patriarchal conditioning in relationships and religion, declaring 'Men are a scam!' but also calling men 'emotionally fragile' and 'submissive' to religion, the military, and Trump
- Her latest music videos, all shot in Dakar, Senegal — where she first traveled on a life-changing school trip at 17 — feature Ponder 'radiating in opulent outfits' among models and dancers, an attempt to 'embody the divinity of being a woman'
Why it matters: Ponder's platform bridges two worlds she describes as broken — a 'billion-dollar criminal justice industry' that 'polices and nurses' instead of addressing root causes, and a music industry where women like her were taught to feel shame about pregnancy loss. By publicly naming her miscarriage in song and essay, she is explicitly trying to break that shame cycle for other women, while her Senegal-shot videos stake out a creative identity rooted in female divinity rather than the viral-chasing American model she has grown weary of.
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