Danielle Ponder on leaving law for music, and surviving what came after

Danielle Ponder spent years representing people who could not afford a lawyer, working as a public defender before stepping away from law to build a career in music. Five years ago, just days before turning 40, she left that job to pursue songwriting and performing full-time.

Ponder's voice, shaped by singing in church, lent itself naturally to cinematic, emotionally resonant music. She wrote and performed the theme song for Apple TV+'s Manhunt, and her trip-hop-inflected track 'Roll the Credits' has since been used in advertisements, television shows and video games. The song's reach has been wide enough that some YouTube commenters, encountering it for the first time, have mistaken her for Nina Simone.

Her debut album, 'Some of Us Are Brave', released in 2022, was well received by critics and helped raise her profile further, including an appearance on Seth Meyers' talk show. By most outward measures, the gamble of walking away from a stable legal career had paid off.

Success and personal struggle

But Ponder says the professional success masked a difficult personal period. She has spoken about facing a miscarriage, anxiety and other hardships even as her music career took off. 'You can get everything you dreamed of career-wise, and your life can still crumble, and that is what happened to me,' she said, describing the gap between how her career looked from the outside and what she was experiencing privately.

Her account reflects a tension increasingly discussed among artists and professionals who switch careers later in life: that achieving long-held ambitions does not necessarily protect against separate, unrelated crises. Ponder has continued to perform and record despite these challenges, describing her ability to keep going as a kind of survival instinct built over years of representing some of society's most vulnerable people before she ever stepped on a stage.