FEATURE: Spotlight: Yola — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Yola

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I was convinced that I…

had included Yola in my Spotlight feature before. I have had a look through the archives and cannot find anything! No matter. She has been recording music for years, though I feel she is still being discovered by people and not quite at the mainstream. Yola is a Bristol- born artist now based in the U.S. She received four nominations at the 62nd Grammy Awards (2020), including the all-genre Best New Artist category. I will come to her 2019 debut album, Walk Through Fire, soon enough. There is so much fascinating detail and story when we think of Yola. I want to bring in some interviews where we discover more about a tremendous artist with one of the most powerful voices in modern music. The first article I want to bring in is from Rolling Stone. They spotlighted Yola in 2019. Having a big fan in the form of The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach (who produced the album), it is clear Yola is a very special artist.. There are a few segments from the feature that are particular highlights:

“Yola was at home in Bristol in December of 2015 when she realized her kitchen was beginning to fill up with flames. “I was walking around burning like a human torch, and my first instinct was, ‘Ahhh!’” says the British singer-songwriter, who had accidentally set a new kitchen appliance on fire “But instinct two was laughter, because I was thinking, ‘What’s worse than this?’ And the thing that was worse was the life I had just managed to get myself out of.” The title track, which she wrote with Auerbach and legendary R&B songwriter Dan Penn, became the most obvious way for her to address the direct split head-on. “Fire is like an instant cleanser,” she says. “You immediately are propelled into a new environment of awareness, so there’s no doubt how bad something is, and how extreme it is, and why you need to get away.”

“I started with the idea of a tardy breakup record,” she says, “the idea of putting some things to bed. Saying goodbye to that past version of myself and the relationships inherent in that period of my life.”

The title track, which she wrote with Auerbach and legendary R&B songwriter Dan Penn, became the most obvious way for her to address the direct split head-on. “Fire is like an instant cleanser,” she says. “You immediately are propelled into a new environment of awareness, so there’s no doubt how bad something is, and how extreme it is, and why you need to get away.”

Both the song and the album, she adds, are about “the hurt before the walk and the hope you feel after it.”

The 35-year-old artist, born Yolanda Quartey, has spent the past decade or so shifting between various behind-the-scenes roles as a singer in Bristol and London. By the time she turned 30, she says, her central musical outlet, the Bristol-based band Phantom Limb, had become a toxic environment, a white boys’ club (“like True Blood, except guitars”) in which her own work and art was devalued and trivialized.

“There’s a lot of that patriarchal dominance in Bristol,” she says. “The word ‘feminist’ was a dirty word, and you couldn’t say it. It was this forceful, endless, exclusively white bro-athon, and that paradigm permeates people who are otherwise lovely.”

Back home in England, Yola’s musical skills were being limited exclusively to her vocals, so in order to begin making space for her musical departure from the Bristol scene, she began writing her own music.

“I got to this point of realizing that I could create something for myself by just being a singer-songwriter, like bloody everyone else,” she says. “It wasn’t that revolutionary. And the C, D and G chords really aren’t that challenging.”

Her first attempt was her 2016 EP Orphan Offering, which introduced the singer as an up-and-coming singer-songwriter fusing roots in a new way, but the record’s songs didn’t have enough distance from the Bristol scene the singer had only just begun leaving. “The E.P. was about the agony of the situation,” she says.

Over the next few years, Yola plotted her next move, slowly assembling a team around her as she carefully plotted how she wanted to introduce herself to the world as a solo artist. After making a splash in the Americana scene with Orphan Offering, that meant turning down several high-profile offers to serve as a backup singer, a role that she feels has become one of the only ways in which dark-skinned women of color are given opportunities in music. “Try to think of somebody in pop who is my shade or darker who is a woman,” she says. “It takes work to think of someone. Doing backing vocals becomes this job that people try to coax you into doing all the time as a woman of color. It’s to the point where I’ve been places as the artist where people assume I’m doing backing vocals”.

I think that Yola has progressed as an artist since she started out. Walk Through Fire is a huge statement. With some fantastic singles release last and this year, there is going to be demand for another E.P. or a follow-up to Walk Through Fire. Stand for Myself (her latest single) is one of the best of this year so far.

I am eager to get to an album review. There were some great interviews conducted in 2019. For those who were not conscious of Yola and who she was, one had an opportunity to bond with a tremendous artist. The Guardian sat down with her. Her early life and family situation is especially complex and compelling:

“Yola doesn’t remember her Ghanaian father, who left before she was two. Her mother was of the “late Windrush generation”: a psychiatric nurse who emigrated on a one-way ticket from Barbados in the 1970s. Yola is certain she regretted it: “There’s a whole generation of people that did. It was the worst bait and switch. ‘You don’t want to be in Barbados! It’s really beautiful in Milton Keynes!’”

Yola’s mum was a practical, stoic woman who moved her family to the overwhelmingly white town of Portishead because she imagined a better life for them there. But work was hard to come by and Yola recalls her mum buzzing around on her motorcycle between dozens of different jobs. As well as nursing and care work, she was the Avon lady, and worked at the supermarket. When money was tight, she would plunder the bins behind the store for food that had been thrown out.

“The hustle was real,” says Yola. “We knew we were too poor for Santa. We used to get bath products for Christmas – end-of-line vibes, for a quid or so, that was the treat.” As almost the only black kid in town – aside from her older sister – Yola was never allowed to forget her otherness. “People might have seen us every day but they were still suspicious. They’d keep an eye out as you walked down the aisles to check you weren’t shoplifting stuff. I got used to being placatory and over-nice.”

Music was a place she could feel she belonged. Her mother’s record collection – Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Dolly Parton, Elton John – was a refuge and she was soon besotted. As a four-year-old, she told her mother she was going to be a singer when she grew up. “But because she was so practical, that was a fictional concept to her.”

Yola’s mother forbade her from pursuing her music, so when she was in her teens, Yola’s rehearsals and gigs became secret affairs, disguised as sleepovers with friends. She tried university, dropped out and, after her London crisis, returned to Bristol, where she became the frontwoman of a country-rock band called Phantom Limb”.

Although she has not performed live a lot during the pandemic, she was certainly busy and well-travelled through 2019. It is no surprise that people wanted to see Yola after she put out Walk Through Fire. The final interview I will quote is from PAPER. Not only do we learn details about Walk Through Fire. As a Black woman in America during a time of political turmoil, Yola’s experience must have been quite tough:

“For as many timeless tearjerkers as there are, Walk Through Fire is suffused with a defiant spirit like on its title track or on "It Ain't Easier." When making the album, Yola learned to play guitar and did so onstage before she was "ready," defying how she's long been told that "ladies shouldn't [play guitar]." Yola cites Dolly Parton, Ella Fitzgerald and Mavis Staples as examples of women whose lives have encouraged her to rebel against these types of expectations.

She's similarly outspoken, and a Black woman singing roots-based rock music during a political moment in America confronting its own hideously racist origins. "I will not be stopped by views that I should be in a role of service because I look how I look," she says. "Not when I have this much to say."

Now, there's no stopping Yola. She's only had a week off touring in the last six months. Just the other night, she was in Boston, and weeks before, she was buying expensive shoes in Milan. She wore them onstage the other night, and strummed her guitar before a packed house. Very intentionally, she closed by singing Aretha Franklin's recording of "You're All I Need to Get By." Franklin, another one of Yola's heroes, sang just about everything, regardless of genre.

Artistic flexibility and a desire to help others connect to their history is now what's most important to Yola — beyond seeing fans wear her merch or sing her lyrics back in sold-out venues, or being occasionally stopped in the street by people who thank her for being herself. For someone who never quite fit anywhere, those experiences are undeniably validating and something she'd now like to pay forward.

"I knew I was always going to be fighting to highlight the relationship of people of color to all of these genres of music," Yola says. "And I'm going to want to talk about the erosion of Black people in rock 'n' roll music, considering Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Big Mama being main creators. This career is about having an arc, and a long enough time to explore it all, instead of just being a one trick pony. That's what drew me to music: a need to tell that story in many ways. The story of where I come from... where we come from”.

I shall wrap things up in a bit. It has been enriching reading about Yola and her career. I think we will see a lot more albums and years of music from her. I feel she is one of the most promising rising artists – though some would say that she is already established.

Just before finishing up, it is worth introducing a positive review for Walk Through Fire. It was one of my favourite albums of 2019. Glide Magazine provided their take on a hugely impressive and stirring debut album:

“The debut full-length album from Yola, titled Walk Through Fire showcases her phenomenal vocals over lush retro-pop and light soul/country arraignments. Produced by Dan Auerbach with songs co-written by Yola, Auerbach, Bobby Wood, Pat McLaughlin and Dan Penn the album is a throwback to Nashville’s 60’s sound even going so far to recruit Wood who played piano with Elvis and Dave Roe who played bass with Johnny Cash.

Auerbach has been wading in these waters for a few albums now (his own Waiting On A Song, and Shannon Shaw’s Shannon In Nashville) but he has not worked with a vocal talent like Yola before as she luxuriates in the opulent musical surroundings. The opening song “Faraway Look” is a stunner, with her vocals soaring into the stratosphere around dynamic orchestral strings, harpsichord, crisp drumming and Broadway level drama. The gauntlet is thrown down directly at the start and while the following songs are all strong, nothing tops this dynamite performance.

A pleasant shuffle “Shady Grove” is more restrained vocally but chock full of surrounding instrumentation before the first single “Ride Out In The Country” delivers a sunny easy groove. The Nashville pop country of “It Ain’t Easier” fits Yola perfectly as her low key head shaking humming is just as affecting as her heartfelt straining pleas and falsetto flights which follow; a gorgeous tune.

While Yola is a survivor, the songwriting stays more surface level on the slow twang of the title track, never catching fire. “Keep Me Here” talks about flawed relationships but musically piles on the schmaltz, overdoing it towards adult contemporary while “Rock Me Gently” seems to be caught between genres and never fully coalesces. These are minor quibbles though and don’t detract from the overall strength of this debut record.

“Love All Night (Work All Day)” gloriously melds gospel vocals with easy countrified 70’s Los Angeles sound, throwback “Lonely the Night” feels like a ‘20’s jazz song spectacularly redone and the production rich “Deep Blue Dream” stays warm and enveloping. Yola shines on all tracks, she is the rare singer who doesn’t feel the need to display her powerhouse voice to its maximum affect each time out; sure she can blow the songs away with her pipes but displaying restraint and intimacy can be just as exciting.

The sweet brightness of “Love Is Light”, complete with dazzling rising horns, wraps up the impressive first offering from Yola as she announces to the world’s stage that she is a talent to be noticed immediately. Working with Auerbach and company fuses the robust production and instrumentation with her vocal charms making Walk Through Fire a rousing success on all fronts”.

If you have not discovered Yola yet then go and follow her on social media. I do think we will get another album pretty soon. I hope that she gets to tour and can do some U.K. dates along the way. There are few artists who have a voice like Yola! Such a tremendous artist with a long future ahead, there is no reason to overlook such a talent. Walk Through Fire is a stunning debut, though I can hear Yola growing even more confident and powerful. She is taking her music…