New York multi-talented artist Chris Oledude releases his powerful new single, “The Choice,” out March 29, 2026. Released to coincide with Earth Day 2026, Earth Month, and National Parks Week, the track is a thought-provoking folk-rock anthem about the decisions that define us — as individuals, as communities, and as a species sharing a planet under pressure. It is the kind of song that only someone with Oledude’s particular history — decades of activism, loss, reinvention, and an unshakeable belief in music as an instrument of change — could make.
“The Choice” began with a journey up the Hudson River on a brilliant sunny day. Standing before the white-rock Palisades, framed by greenery and the blue water below, Oledude found himself thinking about the history of that river — its struggle, its near-ruin, and its remarkable recovery. He thought about Pete Seeger, who sailed the Clearwater sloop for decades campaigning to clean those waters, and who understood that environmental change begins with human minds being moved, one at a time. He thought about choices. The song followed.
What makes “The Choice” musically distinctive is its source material. Oledude took the haunting, lullaby-like melody of the medieval hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and transformed it into something urgent and contemporary — new lyrics, new meaning, a sermon built from a carol. Influenced by folk icon Pete Seeger and progressive rock giants including Jethro Tull, Rush, Kansas, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and YES, Oledude has long been a “big sound” composer who hears his songs through orchestras and guitars alike. The track was shaped in collaboration with Berkeley-trained guitarist Zachary Staples, engineered by Mark Dann and Kat Lewis, and brought to life by a chorus of ten family members and friends whose voices give the song its communal, congregational weight.
“Writing ‘The Choice’ was a bold experiment,” Oledude says. “I had written parodies before, but I had never attempted to expand the meaning of a well-known song. Doing this sort of cemented my commitment to using every means at my disposal to make music meaningful and powerful to people.”
The story behind “The Choice” cannot be separated from the story of the man who made it. Chris Owens — known to the world as Chris Oledude — is a Black, white-Jewish, and Puerto Rican-born New York artist whose entire life has been shaped by the intersection of music, politics, and moral urgency. He grew up in a household where classical, folk, pop, funk, and protest music all had a place, harmonising with his brothers — including actor Geoffrey Owens — under the influence of his mother, the late Ethel Werfel Owens, his first music teacher, and his father, the late Major R. Owens, a librarian turned elected official.
In the 1980s, he performed on the streets of New York City, in dance bands, and recorded Anyone’s Revolution (1984), a cassette album that voiced sharp frustration with the Reagan era and caught the attention of folk legend Pete Seeger himself — who encouraged Chris to keep writing music for peace and social justice and to collaborate with like-minded artists. He went on to join the People’s Music Network for Songs of Freedom and Struggle.
For the next three and a half decades, life pulled him more toward civic and political activism than music. It was grief that brought him back. The death of his father stirred him to perform again alongside his brothers. The death of his wife, Sandra Dixon, led to a deeper reckoning — a decision to reconnect with music in a wholly new way. In 2020, reborn as Chris Oledude, he re-emerged with a renewed mission: to fuse the “old school” genres he loves — pop, funk, R&B, folk — with the urgency of the present moment.
⇒ Have you missed our review for “The Choice”? Read here.
The results have been remarkable. His song-video tribute George Floyd: Say Their Names, directed by Alyssa Dann, earned over 150 film festival accolades worldwide. His blues jam Orange Blues 24, accompanied by a stop-motion video crafted from 2,000 photographs over the course of a year, has won numerous festival awards. His 2025 release No Crowns For Clowns brought a blistering political critique to the airwaves. And his debut album Preacher Man — Vol. 1 took listeners on a journey, as he puts it, “from disturbing troubles to eternal hope,” with tracks including Rainbow Soul, Turning Tables, and We Will Get Through This winning fans across the world.
“The Choice” is the next chapter. And given everything happening in the world right now, its timing could not be more deliberate.
“At a time when war and other conflicts dominate our thinking,” Oledude says, “we cannot forget that the health of our planet and its atmosphere is the most critical issue confronting our future as human beings.”
