The last time J.S. Ondara was in Colorado, he opened for Lindsey Buckingham, of Fleetwood Mac fame, finding himself not only in the middle of a country he had always dreamed about, but performing alongside someone he never fathomed meeting.

“It was very surreal and bizarre, but in some way,” says the 26-year-old Kenyan-born American folk singer, “that’s what my life has turned into recently: It’s just this bizarre thing that I don’t know what you make of.”

Ondara’s first release, Tales of America, begins back in Kenya with a dream. “It’s just some unreasonable, dumb vision by a kid, which somehow found its way into fruition,” he says of the record’s genesis. “So I think it’s destiny in a way.”

Ondara grew up in Nairobi listening to rock songs, building his English vocabulary with help from Axl Rose, Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke, struggling to fully comprehend the meaning behind the words. It wasn’t until high school when he was introduced to American folk, strangely enough because he lost a bet, arguing that Guns N’ Roses wrote “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” not this Bob Dylan his friend was going on about.

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