OJR IS OLIVER JOHN-RODGERS, AN AMERICAN SONGWRITER AND MULTILINGUAL MULTIÏNSTRUMENTALIST.


After relocating from New York to Nashville in 2014, he self-produced a collection of demo recordings that was intended to be shopped to music publishers and record labels around the industry town.

Instead, these classic-rock-inspired recordings, which came to be known only as Nashville Demos, were released independently, and soon went on to receive widespread airplay on — and considerably high praise from — tastemaking Triple-A radio stations across America, instantly putting OJR on the national radar, with glowing interviews by NPR and Rolling Stone. When Philadelphia’s WXPN enthusiastically named OJR the next ‘Artist to Watch’ in February 2016, the American indie-radio world suddenly took note.

Little more than a year after releasing the cult-classic Nashville Demos (2015), OJR was headlining indie-radio festivals around the U.S. and doing extensive nationwide touring, often in sold-out theaters and 2000+ cap. rooms, in support of artists like Grace Potter, The Black Angels, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Railroad Earth, and Rayland Baxter, to name a few.

The continued reach of these unpretentious and ambitiously genre-fluid demos — including millions of streams on Spotify alone — is testament to the profound quality of songwriting revealed in OJR’s work.

Distinguished by the uniquely phrased, shrewd, and often-witty social commentary expressed in his lyrics, OJR deftly composes songs that hook a wide variety of music fans, with dynamic, evolving arrangements and memorably unpredictable word choices.

(Who else, after all, is singing,
“If you read every comment, you’ll never feel free / I’d ask Alexa my question, but she’s ignoring me”?)

In this regard, OJR’s musical style as a poetic indie-rocker and singer-songwriter occupies a similar sonic landscape to that of other lyrically proficient (and more well-known) contemporary artists, such as Conor Oberst, Father John Misty, and MGMT.

While his softened singing voice often draws comparisons to that of the popular ambient-pop band Cigarettes After Sex, OJR’s work is far more exploratory, deep-diving, and multidimensional — never choosing to rest on its laurels, and always casually unafraid to bounce around from influence to influence, without feeling the need to explain to anyone why.

Take “Light My Sign,” for example, the opening track on 2023’s ND4 — a sonically dense LP that’s filled to the brim with melodic hooks and jangly grooves. What begins as a fairly standard, bubbly, indie-pop ballad, sung with fuzzy falsetto vocals reminiscent of Lonerism-era Tame Impala, suddenly detours into very different stylistic territory for the song’s bridge: without warning, OJR, fueled by copious amounts of Afro-Cuban percussion the artist learned to play in concert band while growing up, is shouting “¡wepa!” over muted trumpet and timbales, before switching gears to sing the song’s final chorus not in English, his native language, but in Spanish, to match the sudden shift into Latin/world-music instrumentation.

This is but one of many bold examples to be found throughout the artist’s catalog that showcase OJR’s restlessly keen ability to turn a single three-minute song into something more like a rich, compelling, and captivating musical journey for the listener.

As an independent and multidisciplinary artist, OJR shows no regard for specializing in merely one style or self-appointed “brand,” and has spent two decades prolifically self-recording and self-releasing music in genres as disparate as country/folk/Americana, metal, psych-rock, French pop, dreampop/shoegaze, hip hop, Latin, and dance music. He has completed over 300 songs to date, the vast majority of which have not been recorded in releasable format, and, as such, have rarely been heard by anyone other than the artist himself.

As a composer, OJR has scored original music for content/digital ads by globally recognized names like Dior, Swarovski, Jean Paul Gaultier, Jimmy Choo, Timberland, and Cara Delevingne.

In addition to his career in music, he has found success as a print/editorial model, appearing in Vogue Italia, HERO magazine, and in ads for Chobani.

OJR studied creative writing and Romance languages at New York University, and has recorded songs in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Mandarin, Tamashek, and Túvērín.