Danielle Ponder left a full-time career as a public defender for music in 2021. Her second album, Everything Has Changed, is less about that decision than about what it cost.
Danielle Ponder spent years as a full-time public defender before “Poor Man’s Pain,” her entry to NPR’s 2020 Tiny Desk Contest, made the case for a different career. She left the courts in 2021. Her 2022 debut, Some of Us Are Brave, was the arrival. Everything Has Changed, her first album for Dead Oceans, deals with the bill that comes due afterward.
That framing is Ponder’s own. She has described the courage, hope and faith that carry a person toward a destination as the same force that makes them see how much has shifted in the getting there. The record traces that arc instead of announcing it. “Seasons” opens with a triumphant flourish, “Time Is a Wild Thing” turns pensive behind it, and “Made My Bed” sets the decision to walk away from law to an anthe
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