She floored critics and audiences alike with her debut album, 2019’s Walk Through Fire.
Now the 38-year-old singer and actress is back for more.
Yola has no interest in lyrics with fairytale endings.
All the attention on Yola has only raised the stakes for her new album ‘Stand for Myself.'.Credit: Ford Fairchild
“I’ve had it with that kind of sentiment.
It’s not going to work out and we all know it!”
“Things don’t just happen,” the singer says.
Yola is set to play the legendary musician Sister Rosetta Tharpe (right) in Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming Elvis Presley biopic.Kevin Mazur/Getty Images; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty
“Youmakethem happen.”
For Yola, that realization didn’t arrive by calm reflection.
Listeners were even more impressed by the striking character of Yola’s voice.
“There’s history in her voice,” says Auerbach.
“It almost feels ghostly.
Her voice has an eerie familiarity yet it feels so fresh.”
Clearly, Grammy voters agreed.
In 2019, they showered her with four nominations, includingBest New Artist.
“The world knows of Yola’s vocal strength,” says Lurhmann.
I realized she had to play the part."
“She invented rock and roll and no one was paying attention,” says Yola.
“For many years I was infuriated that she wasn’t in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
While now she is in, I’m still infuriated because that’s hella late.
If I invented something, I’d want to be in first.”
“The humor machine is always going on in my mind,” she says.
Part of that, no doubt, comes from her joyous nature.
It started when she was growing up as Yolanda Quartley in a small seaside town outside Bristol, England.
“I was the token Black girl,” she says.
“The highest concentration of Black people in that environment lived in my house.”
Adding to the domestic tensions was her mother’s character.
“She had all the elements of a clinical psychopath,” Yola says.
She was like a Black, female answer to Cartman fromSouth Park.
She would say the most dreadful things in the most inappropriate moments.
That’s where I got my dark sense of humor from."
Yola’s mother strongly discouraged her interest in music, believing it unsustainable as a career.
“My tone isn’t imbued with the modern R&B sound.”
“Those voices are dying out,” she says, “so I became in demand.”
At the same time, Yola found herself stereotyped in recording sessions.
May there be no tenderness or joy in your life.
May you be perpetually screaming about surviving horror while you do a merry dance for our entertainment.
Meanwhile, you loathe your existence."
“I was always trying to jump a train that someone else was driving,” she says.
“It looked so tiny.
It felt like mockery.
Still, it took something even more personal to give her the final push.
True to character, she maintained a certain humorous detachment even while it raged.
When recalling the moment, Yola paused to display a scar on her arm.
“I never want to cover this up,” she says.
“That’s the arm I fought the fire with.
I got a hose and put the fire out myself.
That was the moment I made a final decision.”
To promote it, she began to tour the U.K. as well as the U.S.
The latter led to a crucial break.
A video of her performance at the Americana Festival in Nashville earned the attention of Auerbach.
“I never met anyone who had a better understanding of her voice.
Despite the variety of style Yola’s first album displayed, she found herself categorized as an Americana artist.
The broad range of material onStand for Myselfunderscores the inadequacy of that description.
If pressed for an alternative, she prefers to call what she does “classic pop.”
While Auerbach again produced the new album, Yola says “the dynamic flipped completely.
When we did the first record, I didn’t know Dan as a person.
It was just a case of ‘go into a room and see what comes out.’
This time he got to know me so he gave me more responsibilities.
My passion has always been for the feeling of the bass lines and the drums.
We needed a certain feel.”
“Yola was in a different frame of mind with this record,” Auerbach says.
Likewise, the new lyrics have a different tone, with a stronger political dimension.
They address something important, which is asking: ‘What are the steps beyond getting treated equally?
Do we have nuance?'”
Yola aimed to answer that last question for herself through her vocal approach on the album.
She made sure to finely calibrate her singing, the better to stress each song’s narrative arc.
To Yola, the nuances evident on the rest of the record have a broader purpose.
“Isn’t that what everyone wants?”
