American Songwriter Welcomes Joy Oladokun as the 2025 Lyric Contest Dream Co-Write

American Songwriter is honored to announce that Joy Oladokun is the 2025 Lyric Contest Dream Co-Write Artist.

The Grand Prize Winner of the 2025 Lyric Contest will be flown to Nashville for the “Dream Day On Music Row” prize package that includes a “Dream Co-Write” with Oladokun, a full day recording session, lodging at a premier hotel, and more.

Fans of the Arizona-bred singer-songwriter express how they feel before and after seeing one of her shows. Some say they have entered her gigs feeling depressed, unseen and scared, but they leave in a different headspace entirely — upbeat, acknowledged, more confident. Others explain that seeing people like themselves onstage—Black, queer, funny, all of the above — inspires them. With her seemingly bottomless well of melodies and conversational couplets, her inviting buoyancy and infectious guffaw, Joy Oladokun is a human mood elevator.

“I think that’s beautiful,” she says of receiving these missives.

So beautiful in fact that Oladokun decided that she wanted to get in on that action and craft an album “that was a version of what I’ve been able to give to other people for myself.”

Enter Observations From a Crowded Room, a 15 track collection of 12 songs and 3 interludes, written, produced, and largely performed by Oladokun, which build on and expand her pop-folk sonic palette with electronic flourishes and lush harmonies.

The record was created at a critical juncture in Oladokun’s life. She was assessing her perch in the world and the industry after the success of previous albums (2021’s in defense of my own happiness and 2023’s Proof of Life) garnered universal high praise, a slew of famous fans and collaborators like Sheryl Crow, Jason Isbell, Noah Kahan and Chris Stapleton, sold out headlining tour dates and opening slots with John Mayer and Hozier. It also invited scrutiny. She began questioning whether she should pursue something else.

“I think for me it was a pivotal moment of thinking, ‘I don’t know what good there is in this for me anymore. I know what it does for my management. I know what it does for the fans. But I don’t know what good this is for my heart and my head anymore,’” she recalls of the bleak place in which she began to find herself.

Then she started recording Observations From a Crowded Room.

“This album became a way for me to write things, feel things, process things,” she says. “Because, as the producer, I just had to sit with these songs for so long. It became really healing in a sense of, ‘I made this. I’m listening to an album that I genuinely love. All the sounds and bits and bobs came from me with the help of just an engineer.’ It was transformative. So it started out as, ‘I quit,’ and it has ended up as a fresh start.”

“I used music to dig myself out of that hopeless headspace and land at a place that if my career ends tomorrow, for whatever reason, I made this record, I made the other records that I’m so proud of,” she shares. “And I did it in a way that was true to me, and now in a way that feels sustainable to me.”

Since 1984, the American Songwriter Lyric Contest has helped hundreds of thousands of aspiring songwriters get noticed and have fun. Those who submit to the 2025 Lyric Contest have a chance to win prizes, including a feature in the magazine, a brand new Acoustic Guitar, and more.