First impressions are huge. They can be the thing standing between you and a new job, a first date or a record deal. They can also be wildly misleading — showing what we want to see, rather than what or who is truly standing right in front of us.
Take Yola.
Many of us first met the British singer-songwriter in 2019. Her debut album, Walk Through Fire, blew us away with its soulful Americana and country blues sound, plus a story ready-made for Hollywood: Born in Bristol and raised on Shania Twain and Dolly Parton, Yola was a struggling musician until she teamed up with Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys to create her triumphant debut.
But that was just a first impression. Yola is back with a new EP, aptly titled My Way. This time around, she’s dictating the direction of her music.
“I’m not centering on anything other than my journey, because a lot of what is expected of an artist that is a plus-size, dark-skinned woman, it’s to center on anyone but herself because of the mammy paradigm of expected service … I have to aggressively center on my experience to get any level of authenticity.”
In today’s session, she talks about crafting her new sound, getting started in the U.K. electronic music scene and breaking free from what she calls “creative dictatorships.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview Highlights
On her work in London’s broken beat scene
“That era was a really important time for music in the U.K. … I feel like that’s where I cut my teeth and where I got a lot of the things that made me want to pursue music…
“There was just all of these new genres coming down and coming up, and broken beat kind of got choked out of that because you kind of had to be a badass jazzer and trained with an inch of your life to have a hope of even participating in it as a genre .. the music was mad groovy, but you kind of had to be Prince to get into it. A lot of the people, like the producers and the players, were savants. A lot of the singers were genius.
“I’d say there’s definitely a lot of, like, that kind of reggae soul in it. A lot of, like, ’80s soul aesthetic in it. But then a lot of it is rooted in jazz … It’s profoundly fluid. So when people are, like, ‘So, “genre fluid,” what is that? Why are you like this?’ I’m, like, because I’ve done been like this since 2004! Like ,I don’t have to break it to you guys, but it’s this ain’t new.”
On using more of her production background
“I’ve had, I suppose, the bargaining power to restructure everything in my team, so that I can actually use all of my skills because I spent a decent amount of my life alongside being in Bugz in the Attic, being in a production team, doing sample replays for about 16 years. So that involves a lot of production knowledge, and I didn’t really get much chance to use any of it. So you get to hear me as a producer [on My Way] as well.”
On previous collaborators stifling her creativity
“I’m coining this term everywhere I go at the moment: skinsuiting, a verb that means someone trying to put you on like a skin suit and walk your body through their dreams to live vicariously through your skill set with no thought to what you want to do or your plan for your own life. Essentially like Get Out, the movie…
“Yeah, but people are shit collaborators. A lot of the time, they don’t know that they don’t know how to collaborate. In the same way as people don’t know about consent sometimes, because they don’t know how to not be rapacious in their collaborative skills.”
On working with producers Sean Douglas and Zach Skelton on My Way
“There have been many times in my life where people aren’t looking to engage with you because they’re too busy in their own head thinking about their plan for you — more than actually looking at you to figure out what you’re thinking. So when I met Sean and Zach, they had none of that energy. None of that ‘I have a dream for your skills.’ It was, like, ‘I’m just curious about what you want to do’ …
“To be open — like, truly open — it’s one of the most revelatory feelings that you’ll get as a writer. One of the most joyful feelings. And that translates itself into the music. I think one of the things that can be really contagious about listening to music is hearing that joy caught. When you hear it, you know you can hear it.
On playing Persephone in the Broadway version of Hadestown
“It was physically agonizing and emotionally, really quite intriguing, because you have to keep digging back into the well for a new emotion on the same thing. You need a new emotion. You have to have a new emotion. You’ve got to search for it. Even if it isn’t there, you have to manufacture one. So the idea of your emotional reserves. If you’re vapid, it’s gonna be really tough for you. If you’re, like, a little bit unhinged, it’s gonna be very emotionally draining for you … If you’re somewhere in the middle, then you’ll be able to excavate something. But what it doesn’t take from your mind, it will take from your body.”
On how the Windrush generation inspired her song, “Ready”
“They came over from the U.K. to places like Barbados, where my mother was, with a promotional video to come to the U.K. and it’s shot on the sunniest day of the year — I don’t know if any of you have been to the U.K., but if you have, then you know that’s some bull…
“I smell the bait and switch from a mile off. If English people turn up on boats, don’t trust them … They did that one time. You already know what this is!
“[The song] is definitely a child of immigrants kind of song … So you get tricked out of heaven to go to rainy, cold hell. Then you turn up and people are, like, ‘go back to where you came from.’ You’re, like, ‘Oh, I’d love to.’ ”
This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.