The Unique Voices Club #9: Thunderstorm Artis
- Alexia Rowe
- May 16
- 3 min read
Every Friday, I write a post about unique singing voices not commonly heard in mainstream music in an effort to educate emerging artists and music lovers and inspire them to embrace their own quirks. This week I'm writing on Thunderstorm Artis.
Thunderstorm Artis just wrapped up his stint this year on American Idol, finishing in the Top 5 (though we all wished it was in the finale). How I discovered this guy though was several years earlier, a few months before the dawning of the Infamous Virus Plaguing the World forced his season of The Voice into a weird Zoom-y lockdown format. I was still in college then (pre-"go on Spring Break and then not return to campus") when my parents flooded my inbox with (official) leaked videos of his Blind Audition.
It wasn't hard to figure out why. Here was this bespectacled Black guy from Hawaii playing a slower, more strummy version of the Beatles' "Blackbird" that made whoever was listening really lean into the motivational words. And it made the original sound kind of campy if you listened to it afterward. Because when he hit the round falsetto note at the end that would make Israel Kamakawiwo'ole rejoice up in heaven, that pretty much sealed the deal. We all knew from that point on that Thunderstorm was going to be a finalist.
While he didn't win that season either, you still can't deny his remarkable talent nurtured among the islandic Hawaiian landscape and a family of ten siblings with names as creative as his (a name like Spirit or PraiseJesus is particularly iconic). The family even had a band led by their Motown parents who played keys on "Thriller" and sang with Lena Horne among others. The second-oldest Ron II is a multi-instrumentalist who's played with Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac and ukulele prodigy Jake Shimabukuro. So, yeah. It's in his blood.
What influenced this Louis Armstrong-esque raspy voice that both has the ability to smoothly glide over notes with smoky accuracy and also punch with a growl came from much more than the slow-paced island life. A combination of the folk sensibilities of English singer-songwriter Passenger, and the bearing of the soul in a lot of Leon Bridges songs. For me though, besides his cover of "Blackbird" (a full version for PBS Hawai'i is embedded above), it was his performance of the original song "Sedona"(inspired by the desert town in Arizona and a song on repeat in my library) that really showed an artistry that really stood out among the more mainstream instrumentations of other contestants. Thankfully during his run on Idol he would be able to sing original songs as well as covers, most accompanied by intricate fingerstyle guitar that complemented the rough edges of his voice. Very different from the others regardless of whatever genre he chose.
His song "Stronger" (which reminds me of an African-American work song) features in an episode of Grey's Anatomy and has millions of streams on Spotify, and he has close to 300k monthly listeners. Despite it probably still being a while before he's a household name on the level of Leon Bridges (even when he performed at the Red Room last summer there were maybe 30 people in the audience), I can write this post saying that I knew of his uniqueness back before he was more widely known. And since he just wrapped up a huge milestone, it seems great timing to write him into the Unique Voices Club blog this week. Go follow him and share his music and all that, firebirds. You don't find a lot of Black folk artists these days that break the norms of convention.
And that's all for this week in the Unique Voices Club world, folks! Don't forget to subscribe to the blog to get more artists directly to your inbox when they come out. And if you're heavily invested in the education of future artists, you can join my Patreon for as little as $7 here! And I already promised Thunderstorm I'd get Lightning my ukulele fixed at some point😅. But here's a snippet of me jamming on her anyway.
Stay educated,
Alexia
