Lonnie Holley

Lonnie Holley announces his new album, Tonky, out March 21st via Jagjaguwar, and presents the video for its lead single, “Protest With Love.” His fifth studio album (and third for Jagjaguwar), Tonky further sharpens the work present on his beloved 2023 album, Oh Me Oh My, which was hailed as one of the best albums of the year by The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Paste, The Needle Drop, and beyond. The album features guest performances by Isaac Brock, Angel Bat Dawid, Billy Woods, Alabaster de Plume, Mary Lattimore, and more.

Lead single “Protest With Love” features frequent collaborator Jacknife Lee, who also produced Oh Me Oh My, on bass, keys, synths, drums, programming, recorder, percussions, and vocals. Additional collaborators on the track include The Legendary Ingramettes on vocals, Kelly Pratt on horns and flutes, Jordan Katz on horns and Holley on vocals, of course. Holley urges listeners to “Protest with love” and “Let love be your weapon.” 

“[Holley] is an incredibly gifted storyteller with a commitment to the oral tradition, such that many listeners (myself among them) would be entirely content sitting at the feet of a Lonnie Holley record and turning an ear to his robust, expansive storytelling. But Tonky is an album as expansive in sound as it is in making a place for a wide range of featured artists to come through the door of the record and feel at home, no matter how they spend the time they get on a song.”

“The work of Lonnie Holley is, for me, a work of this kind of accumulation and close attention. The delight of finding a sound and pressing it up against another found sound and another until, before a listener knows it, they are awash in a symphony of sound that feels like it stitches together as it is washing over you. Tonky is an album that takes its name from a childhood nickname that was affixed to Holley when he lived a portion of his childhood life in a honky tonk. Lonnie Holley’s life of survival and endurance is one that required – and no doubt still requires – a kind of invention.” — Hanif Abdurraqib

Born in 1950 in Birmingham, Alabama, Holley has devoted his life to the practice of improvisational creativity. His art and music, born out of struggle, hardship, but perhaps more importantly, out of furious curiosity and biological necessity, has manifested itself in drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and sound. Holley’s sculptures are constructed from found materials in the oldest tradition of African American sculpture. Objects, already imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor, are combined into narrative sculptures that commemorate places, people, and events.

Holley did not start making and performing music in a studio nor does his creative process mirror that of the typical musician. His music and lyrics are improvised on the spot and morph and evolve with every event, concert, and recording. In Holley’s original art environment, he would construct and deconstruct his visual works, repurposing their elements for new pieces. This often led to the transfer of individual narratives into the new work creating a cumulative composite image that has depth and purpose beyond its original singular meaning. The layers of sound in Holley’s music, likewise, are the result of decades of evolving experimentation.