Globe-trotting Minneapolis singer Ondara settles at home for December residency

He’s originally from Kenya, has called Minnesota home for 12 years, has been spending a lot of time in England and trekked to Japan, India and Ecuador over the past year. Yet somehow the only continent where Ondara played live gigs so far in 2024 was Australia.

Maybe just as weird: The ornately voiced folk strummer decided that Minneapolis in December was the right place and time to finally play four more concerts before year’s end.

“I didn’t want to do any more shows this year, but I did want to hang out with friends in Minneapolis,” Ondara, aka JS Ondara, explained of his December residency series at Icehouse, which begins Tuesday. “That’s really what this is: a hang.”

The singer/songwriter who famously hung his hat in Minnesota out of love for Bob Dylan will be hooking up with some of his musician pals at the south Minneapolis supper club over four Tuesdays this month, including New Year’s Eve but not Christmas Eve.

More often seen as a solo act onstage, Ondara has not performed with a backing band in his adopted hometown since he played the Current’s 14th birthday party at First Avenue in 2019. He wasn’t exactly sure who’s going to be in this group for the Icehouse gigs as of a week and a half ago. Nor was he sure which songs they would be performing.

In fact, he admitted with a hint of proud recklessness, “I’m really kind of winging it.”

“It was a last-minute decision to do this. The shows will all be pretty jammy — definitely a different type of vibe than my usual show, because I’ve mostly been playing solo, which I enjoy. I wanted a different experience, though. It’s really about jamming with some friends and hanging out with people since I haven’t been around a lot.”

Ondara was back in Minnesota but still wasn’t “around” when he talked about his residency in a video call before Thanksgiving. He had holed up in a cottage in the historic riverside town of Marine on St. Croix to flesh out songs for his next album. This record has been a hard nut to crack, he confessed.

Ondara’s last LP, 2022′s “The Spanish Villager, No. 3,” was a left-curve concept album based on a graphic-novel character whom he dreamt up and even planned to perform as in concert. His tour for it was scrapped, though. Along with his pandemic-era 2020 record, “Folk n’ Roll, Vol. 1: Tales of Isolation,” the 32-year-old strummer has yet to reignite the career buzz generated by his 2019 debut for Verve Records, “Tales of America,” which earned a Grammy nomination for best Americana album and saw him tour as an opening act for Lindsey Buckingham and the Lumineers.

Turns out, the main reason Ondara kept such a low profile this year, he said, was “to try to figure out what this next record is going to be.”

“This record has been so elusive to me,” he said. “I’ve been traveling so much because I’ve been on some kind of a spiritual journey to figure out what it is. It’s going to be quite a departure. If I wanted to just make another record similar to what I’d been doing, I could’ve had it ready a long time ago. But I felt a little lost and didn’t know what to make next.”

The fact that he has settled back in Minnesota is a good sign.

“I’ve just very recently figured out what the record is, so I came here to flesh it out,” he said.

He did not want to say too much else about the album, except to call it “a different paradigm.” One detail he did let slip out: He plans to return to Kenya to record some of it. Also, he said he probably will not record any songs from it at these Icehouse gigs because “they have to be constructed differently.”

“As opposed to previously just writing the songs on guitar and then walking into the studio with a band and getting the take live,” he explained, “these songs involve more construction and layers and are going to take more time. So I won’t be able to deliver them in their most authentic forms in the configuration at Icehouse, sadly.”

He does, however, have other new songs to perform at Icehouse that are not slated for the pending album. The gigs will feature different openers, starting with Jeremy Ylvisaker and JT Bates Tuesday, followed by Courtney Hartman on Dec. 10 and Molly Dean on Dec. 17. These will be Ondara’s first performances since his Australian tour with that country’s homegrown alt-twang star Kasey Chambers in March.

“I did make a conscious decision to just kind of pull away” from playing live, he said. “I just didn’t feel like I could continue what I was doing until I knew what I wanted to do next.”

Ondara’s Tuesday run is one of two high-profile residency runs at Icehouse this month, including a Thursday night series by rock ‘n’ roll fireball Meghan Kreidler and her band Kiss the Tiger (also tied to prep for a new album). Long a haven for songwriters, jazz acts and outside-the-box performers along Nicollet Avenue’s Eat Street corridor, Icehouse survived an eviction scare this past spring and is going strong again with new co-ownership.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays, Dec. 10 & 17; 5 p.m. Dec. 31.

Where: Icehouse, 2528 Nicollet Av. S., Mpls.

Tickets: $25-$32, icehousempls.com.