Get Real: Blessing Offor Turns Pain and Joy Into Art
“Nashville is really community oriented,” Blessing Offor told me, leaning back with the kind of unhurried confidence you only get from someone who’s lived in a lot of places but knows where they belong. “People tend to be a lot more open handed. And I’m sure in LA, if you got plugged into the right community, they would tell you the same thing. But I’ve experienced that in Nashville like I’ve never experienced anywhere else.” Community is at the center of Blessing’s new record Real and his overall message as an artist. It is not a clean and neat story. It is not all joy, and it is not all grief. Why choose when it can be both.
For Blessing, the past two and a half years have been exactly that. “I lost three people in my life. I lost my mom, my best friend/partner, and my sister. And at the same time, I got two Grammy nominations, did a whole tour, and traveled all over the world. All of the good, bad and indifferent of that season went into this record.” He called the record Real because it had to be. “I just want people to see someone saying the things that are uncomfortable to say. So that way maybe they can feel more comfortable at least acknowledging it, listening to it, and maybe at some point saying it themselves.” I asked how you live in those extremes, how you go from a mountaintop moment to the valley in the same breath, and he told me, “It’s the ability to kind of compartmentalize. When you experience something at 30,000 feet, and then you experience something at rock bottom… I feel a certain way, but we gotta go on stage and do this thing. Luckily I have a lot of energy, which is really good. But even that can be your own worst enemy when you don’t know how to slow down. There have been a few times where I landed in Nashville and just cleared my schedule on a Thursday because all of a sudden, I realized I was really exhausted.”
When you listen to Real, you will notice something right away. These songs don’t feel overly polished, and that is by design. “A lot of the songs are literally the vocals from the demo. So I didn’t even necessarily go back and go, ‘Let’s cut another vocal on this.’ Whatever imperfection existed on that vocal is what I kept.” Music for him was both an escape and the reality he was processing. “When something was going on, I would put it in a song. And when something was going on after I put it in the song, I still need to process it. But I wanted to make sure to get it down because I wanted this to be on the record.” He is not chasing some massive opus when he writes. “I always think, is this a good song? Luckily I have really good people around me. If I miss something, they’ll be like, ‘Hey, hey, hey — this song has a thing.’”
The collaborators on Real are as diverse as they come, from producers who have worked with Charlie Puth and Flo Rida to CCM veterans.“I’m lucky enough to work with people who let me do different music. Who don’t want me to send it down the middle,” he said. That approach goes back to his years in New York. “I say this a lot. My friends in Brooklyn… I know that if you walk up to one of those guys and you hit them with too much of the direct stuff, they’re over it. But if you can kind of walk alongside them in a way that makes it feel more authentic and more real and not just a sales pitch, they’ll listen. I just try to make music that I would like when I lived in New York, or that I would like to listen to even when I’m not trying to worship.”
We talked about the current moment where faith-driven music is getting mainstream recognition, and Blessing’s never been interested in playing what he calls the “Jesus per minute” game. “Is it a good song just because it says Jesus? Are there beautiful songs that talk about Jesus without saying Jesus? I would say yes.” He summarized a C.S. Lewis quote: “A Christian shoemaker doesn’t put crosses at the bottom of their shoes. They make the best shoes in the world.” For Blessing, that is the point. “I make art, period. My faith informs the art. I like when there’s a lyric that makes you think a little bit. That’s what the best art does, it gives you room to bring yourself into it.” That openness also makes the impact hit differently when faith comes up unexpectedly. “If you’re just coming to a Blessing Offor show, and in the middle of that show I talk about my faith… you’re not paying me to talk about my faith, and yet I do. That means I must really buy this. I want it to be something I tell you because I want to tell you, not because I’m getting a check to tell you.”
Of course, we do have to talk about the collaboration he recently experienced with Tennessee (and possibly the country’s) most celebrated artist, Dolly Parton. It is one of those “only in Nashville” stories. “I wrote a song with Josh Ronen and Joy Williams. Josh goes, ‘You know, my wife’s father works with Dolly.’ And I’m like, this is such a Nashville statement. He plays it for her, and the response was ‘Is this open? As in, can I sing on this?’” Then came the letter, handwritten, in the mail. “‘This is one of the finest songs I’ve heard in a long time, and if it’s not too much to ask, I would love to sing on verse two.’ And we were like, did she just say, ‘if it’s not too much’? Because of course she would.”
The album’s sixteen tracks range from joyful to gut-wrenching. He describes each one as “a little bit of light.” “If someone’s walking around and it’s midnight for them and they feel lost, and all of a sudden something catches their eye and it kind of looks like a little bit of light or dawn or hope, that is exactly what I want. And there are sixteen ways that can happen on this record.”
When people finish listening to the record, Blessing hopes they will walk away challenged and freed at the same time. “Why should I not be real? Why should I not be honest? Why should I not say uncomfortable things? Here it is on this record and it made me feel better. And I figure if I can do it and it helps someone, maybe then someone else will do it to help someone else.” That is the heartbeat of Real, and it is the reason this Nashville-via-Brooklyn artist can share the stage with Dolly Parton one day, play to a church crowd the next, and still make music his friends in New York would put on without skipping a track. These songs are meant to travel. Somewhere between the ache of loss and the joy of living, you will find exactly what he has been aiming for, a little bit of light breaking through.
Blessing Offor’s New Album Real is available now!
