It’s still early in 2025, but “Seeds”, the opening track from Lonnie Holley’s fifth studio album Tonky, might be one of the most powerful and affecting pieces of music you’ll hear all year. Across its nine minutes, the 75-year-old artist and musician tells the tale of his formative years at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, a juvenile correctional facility that was run in conditions not far off those of a slave plantation.
It’s still early in 2025, but “Seeds”, the opening track from Lonnie Holley’s fifth studio album Tonky, might be one of the most powerful and affecting pieces of music you’ll hear all year. Across its nine minutes, the 75-year-old artist and musician tells the tale of his formative years at the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, a juvenile correctional facility that was run in conditions not far off those of a slave plantation.
Over a minimalist pulse that gently builds in intensity, accruing layers of twinkling synth, strings and choral chants, Holley remembers it all. Picking cotton in the endless rolling fields. The savage beatings that left his bed sheets stained with blood. That feeling of being all alone in the world. The music is as rousing and beautiful as the lyrical content is unconscionable, unbearable. Then, right at the moment the music peaks and slowly begins to fade, Holley pauses to reflect: “Oh I wish that I could rob my memory,” he intones. “I’d be like Midas, and turn my thoughts to gold/And one day just end up being alright.”
What strength of will and generosity of spirit does it take to turn this sort of unimaginable pain into music about love and forgiveness? It is hard to fathom, but this ability gives Holley a superhuman quality, and Tonky the sense of an almighty feat of overcoming. Holley has primarily been known as a visual artist. Discovered in the 1980s, his sculptural and installation work – originally assembled using found objects in and around his hilltop home in Birmingham, Alabama – has found its way from American folk art exhibitions to the Royal Academy of Arts in London. But in 2012, he released his debut album, and since then he’s continued to record at pace. His voice combines the powerful, righteous exhortations of a gospel preacher with the wounded emotion of an old bluesman, and he has a talent for improvising songs on the spot, the words flowing forth in long, unbroken takes.
Like its immediate predecessor, 2023’s Oh Me Oh My, Tonky was made with the assistance of Jacknife Lee, a producer and multi-instrumentalist who has played a key role in helping Holley focus his vision into something honed and coherent. The music – a mix of sleek jazz, soul and synthetic soundscaping – is polished but never bland, and comes dotted with a wealth of special guests: the harpist Mary Lattimore and the poet Saul Williams, rappers Open Mike Eagle and Billy Woods, Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock and jazz musicians Angel Bat Dawid and Alabaster De Plume. Importantly, though, all these names are folded neatly into Holley’s broader vision, supporting him as he communicates his message of love in the face of misery, the importance of faith and the promise of salvation.
Holley’s personal story is gripping enough. But a big part of what makes Tonky compelling is how he stitches his tales into a wider fabric of African-American experience. On “The Same Stars”, he envisages shackled bodies on slave ships, gazing up through the darkness at the night sky. “Kings In The Jungle, Slaves In The Field” first harks back to that prelapsarian existence in Africa, and then documents how that birthright was – and continues to be – torn away, Holley’s voice lifted on the chorus of the all-female gospel group The Legendary Ingramettes. Particularly harrowing is “I Looked Over My Shoulder”. To the serrated whine of collaborator Davide Rossi’s violin and viola, Holley dwells on the insidious effects of poverty, and its relationship to the Black experience. “People crying, quaking and breaking, falling apart/Bloody heads and skinned bodies,” he booms, and the moment is so intense that even Billy Woods’ hardscrabble rap feels like a relief from the tension.
Beyond “Seeds”, perhaps the key song on Tonky is “The Burden (I Turned Nothing Into Something)”. To the sigh of Angel Bat Dawid’s clarinet, Holley muses on the way that trauma can be generational, passed down through those we love. Framed this way, you could view both his music and art as a way to break that vicious cycle – a way to recognise and commemorate that hurt, before turning that pain into love.
The final song on Tonky is “A Change Is Gonna Come” – not the Sam Cooke classic, but an original song that hits some of the same notes. Life is filled with struggle. It can feel like adversity is piling up before us. But Holley sees a path through. “Oh, humans, can’t you feel it?” he sings. “Everything gonna be alright.” If a man who has felt the sort of pain that Lonnie Holley has felt can look to the future and still feel optimism, perhaps there’s hope for us all yet.
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