The Jet Stone Conspiracy

A visa lottery, then Minneapolis

Jet Stone was born in Nairobi in August 1992. In February 2013 he won the United States diversity immigrant visa lottery, and at twenty he moved to Minneapolis, a city he had never seen. He taught himself guitar there and began writing and performing as Ondara, a name taken from his grandfather. The biography attached to his current project sets out the route without ornament: entry through the lottery, Minnesota first, Los Angeles later, and American citizenship since.

The Minneapolis years produced an outsider's songbook about the country he had chosen rather than the one he had left. By March 2019 he had entered Billboard's Emerging Artist chart at number 37, and the same year brought a nomination for best emerging act at the Americana Music Honors & Awards. The shape of the next six years was already visible: records written in character, long stretches of touring, then a withdrawal and a change of name.

Three records under his grandfather's name

Tales of America arrived in 2019 on Verve Forecast and was nominated for best Americana album at the 62nd Grammy Awards. The press quotes his booking agency still leads with date from that period: Rolling Stone called him an invigorating new voice in American folk music, and NPR's Bob Boilen described the writing as sincere, with observations about America that were fresh and poetic. A deluxe edition, Tales of America: The Second Coming, followed in September 2019. He opened for Neil Young in 2019, toured with the Milk Carton Kids and with Lindsey Buckingham, and opened The Lumineers' world tour in early 2020 before touring stopped altogether.

The lockdown that followed became Folk n' Roll, Vol. 1: Tales of Isolation, released in 2020 and written at speed in response to the pandemic. Spanish Villager No. 3, in 2022, was the fullest realisation of his habit of writing through a character rather than straight from himself. One song from that era, An Alien in Minneapolis, took the grand prize of the 2022 International Songwriting Competition, announced in May 2023.

Those three albums are the catalogue the new band now takes apart. Every venue listing for the Conspiracy names the same three titles as source material, which makes the project less a clean break than a second pass through work that was originally recorded with the songwriter at the centre and the arrangements kept deliberately thin.

The Conspiracy

The band came out of a gap. After the Rebirth Tour, according to the copy his promoters have used since, he travelled from continent to continent with no fixed output, and emerged under the name Jet Stone with a group behind him. Venues have been blunt about what is new here: this is the first full-band tour of his career, after roughly a decade of solo and small-ensemble shows.

The first dates ran in the autumn of 2025 — among them 5 September 2025 at the Commonwealth Room in South Salt Lake, with Noah Vonne opening. Songkick logs only five performances across the whole of 2025 and two in 2024, which marks how thin the touring had become before the band existed.

January 2026 was the real run, and it was a club tour. The Pinhook in Durham on the 10th, Empire in Austin on the 14th, Kung Fu Necktie in Philadelphia on the 16th, the Iron Horse in Northampton on the 20th, Warehouse XI in Somerville on the 22nd, SPACE in Portland, Maine on the 23rd, the Drake Underground in Toronto on the 25th, the 9th Ward at Babeville in Buffalo on the 26th with Tre Charles, Martyrs' in Chicago on the 29th, and the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis on the 30th with the Knoxville duo The Montvales. Tickets held at twenty dollars in advance and twenty-five on the door almost everywhere; the Cedar went to twenty-three advance and ran all ages with a standing floor. Toronto billed the night as folk and soul rather than Americana.

A European leg followed in the late spring: the Lower Third in London on 31 May, BIRD in Rotterdam on 2 June, and Café de la Danse in Paris on 9 June, the last show Songkick holds for him. Seventeen performances are logged against 2026 in total, and his Songkick page currently reads off tour.

Welcome to America

The album the band exists to deliver is called Welcome to America, and it is still unreleased as of 2 October 2026. No release date has been announced. The framing on his own site is the obvious one for a writer who built two records on the idea of America as seen from outside: he has now lived inside that dream long enough to meet the country in its complexity, and has become a citizen of it.

Rather than trail the record with singles and a conventional tour, he is playing it. The Jet Stone Conspiracy Presents: Welcome to America runs for four consecutive Mondays at the Moroccan Lounge in Los Angeles — 5, 12, 19 and 26 October 2026 — billed as Night One through Night Four, doors at 7pm, over-21s only, twenty dollars in advance and twenty-five on the door. The venue sits on East 1st Street in the Arts District and holds a few hundred people. The official line is that the record will be performed live there for the first time, with a collective of musicians rather than a fixed named line-up.

Those four Mondays are the only dates currently on sale. Booking is handled by Row Boat Music, which lists him as available for concerts and festivals across the United States and Canada, so the residency reads as a staging post rather than the end of the cycle.

The room, the band, the hour

These are short, dense shows. Setlist logs from the January 2026 run put the sets at eight to eleven songs; Philadelphia on 16 January ran from 8.35pm to 9.40pm, a little over an hour. Minneapolis on 30 January was eleven songs, Austin on 14 January eleven, Durham on 10 January eight.

The running order is consistent enough to be a design rather than a habit. An Alien in Minneapolis opens. Torch Song, A Nocturnal Heresy, A Shakedown in Berlin, A Blackout in Paris and A Seminar in Tokyo carry the Spanish Villager material; Lebanon, Saying Goodbye and Democracy come from the first album; A Seasonal Amnesia closes out the main body, with Lockdown on Date Night Tuesday from the isolation record appearing in Austin. New songs are worked in without being announced as such.

Support has been a single opener, always a songwriter rather than a band of comparable size: Noah Vonne in Salt Lake City, Tre Charles in Buffalo and Portland, The Montvales — who signed to Free Dirt Records in 2025 — in Minneapolis. Most venues still hedged the billing as Ondara presents The Jet Stone Conspiracy, keeping the recognisable name in the listing. The Los Angeles residency drops Ondara from the title altogether, which is the clearest signal yet of which name he intends to keep. No published reviews of the band's shows have surfaced; the setlist record is currently the only detailed account of what happens on stage.