Sounding somewhere between a spiritual advisor and a guide showing us where the road diverts to doomsday, Kalu James introduced Kalu & the Electric Joint’s song “Downfall” during Weekend 2 of ACL Music Festival by quoting its key lyrics near-verbatim: “I believe that love conquers it all,” James told his audience. “In the same breath, I believe that hate will be our downfall.”
So I thought a natural question to ask him, when I caught up with him later that day, was this: How’s love doing these days?
To be clear, this was a few weeks before the Nov. 5 election, so take that caveat into account. But the answer James gave – realistic, yet resolute – didn’t sound like one that would be shaken by American voters signing off on another Trump administration.
“When we look around, it really does feel like everything is burning, from Hurricane Helene to Milton to the Middle East and Africa. There’s just a lot going on,” he said, hours after Kalu and & the Electric Joint had made their ACL debut. “It’s a lot to feel like, ‘Fuck, I can’t even, there’s no reason to try. It’s all the same, all the time.’
“Yet, I come back to the idea of a spotlight in our homes. Regardless of how clean your house is, there is a corner where, if you shed a spotlight on that, it’s like, ‘Oh fuck, this place is dirty.’ We need to be careful on where we put our spotlight, because there’s a lot of good happening in the world as well. … I always want to come back to the fact that we can do something, and it’s much bigger than just one person.”
The “Downfall” quote, and that subsequent answer, encapsulate what Kalu and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist J.T. Holt have made the Electric Joint all about: a mystical, high-minded and often sweeping amalgam of pop, soul, psych-rock and African music influences.
James, 42, was born in Nigeria, emigrated to the U.S. at 18 and entered the music business after moving to Austin in 2007. Family and heritage are both central pieces of his existence; his sister, brother-in-law and nephew all made the trip from Africa to see him perform at Zilker, where he took the stage adorned in Nigerian native attire. He grew up more well-off than others around him, but got a taste of a less convenient life during his years in boarding school from ages 9-16 – “At that time, when you flick the light on, it doesn’t come on. Same with water. Same with a lot of the basic necessities and amenities you have here in the United States.” Many of Kalu’s friends “did not have anything close to what I had,” which triggered an existential question for the writer inside him that still persists today: Why was he more fortunate than others around him?
“For the kind of person I am, that question is not something that just sits lightly,” he said. “Even [at] a very, very young age, I’m beginning to dissect myself of what I have, of who I’m surrounded by, how that opulence is in so many ways wasted, and people don’t know how the other half lives. That just never sat right with me, and it’s never sat right with me. So [as part of] singing, it just really felt like it was important to speak up for those who can’t have that conversation.”
James also had elements of the the type of childhood many music lovers his age will recognize.
“Back in Nigeria, you had Cher coming on through the radio. You had, of course, Michael Jackson, you had Prince, I mean you had it all. And I was just this kid who always had my cassette player ready to hit the Record and the Play button, to get it recorded – and then hope and pray that the DJ doesn’t say some dumb shit.”
The group’s second album, 2023’s Garden of Eden, has a transportive effect that translated ably to the Electric Joint’s ACL performance in the covered Tito’s stage tent. “Downfall” doesn’t come down to merely noting the tug-of-war between love and hate; Kalu makes it more pointed and direct than that: “The struggle is in the living/The dead have claimed their place/Amongst the living, some of us are still slaves/In a disgraced marketplace where love sells less than the taste.” In the marching, assertive rumble of the psych-soul of “Mirror,” the theme of self-determination gets calibrated to a personal level: “Our savior lives in the mirror/Looks like me, feels like you, lies like us.” With a list of influences as correspondingly diverse as the Electric Joint’s sound, James is a cosmic-sounding believer in music’s ability to heal and connect.
“I’ve never shied away from tough topics, I think just because all my heroes and people who pushed me to get onstage, like the Fela Kutis and Bob Marley and Jeff Buckley, Tracy Chapman – these are people who were saying things that are happening that are around [them], and I’ve always felt like my focus when I’m onstage is to use that for something greater than me,” he said. “And it really feels like that’s connective. I can imagine that that’s the reason why we are here, is because people are taking that like the medicine I believe it is, as it’s always been for me as well.”
The band’s first full-length album, Time Undone, was released in 2017, and contains the psych-y and reverb-drenched “Too Low to Get High,” the Electric Joint’s most dialed-up song on Spotify to date with more than 2 million plays.
Following ACL, James was preparing for a six-week trip back to Nigeria and the neighboring country of Benin, “getting to be my mother’s son” in his homeland before returning to Austin and reentering the studio, where he’ll try to work up another round of unique sounds.
“Attention and community are your biggest currencies,” he said. “So while I have your attention, I want to be able to take that and to paint a picture that’s quite different than this monotonous shit that is just the same. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. There is room for all of us. But for me, I am that ADD kid who’s like, ‘Oh fuck, let’s try this, let’s try this, let’s move on to the other thing,’ and just know that there is something for everyone.”