Yola has talked about her mother’s diverse record collection: That’s how she got into everything from rock to country to funk. Although the country-soul sound she perfected brought her a breakthrough in the U.S. and a 2019 Grammy nomination for Best New Artist, it was soul music that started her journey.
Growing up into hip-hop and R&B, she remembers D’Angelo’s “Cruisin'” introducing her to the world of Smokey Robinson, finding out about Roy Ayers Ubiquity through Mary J. Blige, and discovering the funk/soul band Dynasty while listening to Camp Lo’s “Luchini AKA This Is It.”
“My classic soul tastes came from ’80s and ’90s hip-hop and R&B that sampled from the soul music canon,” she said. “After that, we had a big neo-soul era internationally and that hit big in the U.K. as well. Part of my identifying as loving soul music came from that. A lot of the things that I got into musically, outside of the purview of my mother’s record collection, is what led me to the jobs that I then sought to do when I moved from Bristol to London for my first official, I’m-out-of-high-school music jobs.”
Yola launched her career in London, where she learned different skills as a musician from doing sample replays for a production company, working songwriting sessions, and as a part of the broken beat scene with the collective Bugz in the Attic.
She would also provide vocals for electronic group Massive Attack and folk-rock band Phantom Limb. With her skills as a vocalist and songwriter, she was able to move into different sonic spaces with ease. Even though that work brought her to stadium stages, there was still more that she could do — and wanted to do.
Diving back into the country-soul sound, and starting to write it herself, became part of Yola’s grieving process after her mom died in 2013. In 2016, known at the time as Yola Carter, she released a self-produced EP, titled Orphan Offering, landing festival gigs and creating some buzz as a solo artist in the Americana scene.
She explored her rootsy side while writing and recording in Nashville with producer Dan Auerbach, releasing her debut album, Walk Through Fire, which earned Yola her first Grammy nominations. Two years later, she would expand her sonic canvas even further, leaning more into disco, pop and funk on her follow-up, Stand for Myself, which would earn her a Grammy nomination for Best Americana album.
Once she established herself in the Americana scene, she landed a spot on Broadway, playing Persephone in Hadestown, and a big screen role, playing Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. The film portrays Elvis Presley as a man controlled by competing interests, and it made Yola reflect on her own experiences in the music industry.
“I always liken it to the movie, Get Out, where people want to step into your skin and ride you around like a skin suit while you’re in the upside down,” she said. “Honestly, that’s been a lot of my life. That’s been a lot of people that look at me … You can see the fangs dripping and the eyes glistening with anticipation as to how they can take my body for a ride. Consent be damned.”
She continued: “I have no doubt that doing this movie and pondering upon all of this and playing Sister Rosetta, who was very much the antithesis of that and charting her own course and, as a result, gifting to the world rock ’n’ roll and adding flavors to the canon that would have meant that rock ’n’ roll was either entirely different or didn’t exist all together. To truly innovate or to even express and give authenticity, you have to be able to curb the hand of control.”
Yola found herself inspired by how some of her artist peers outside the Americana scene used their freedom: watching Childish Gambino headline a festival and call back not only to his love of Parliament-Funkadelic on Awaken My Love but the music that she made when she was just starting out. And then she revisited the influences she’d put aside when her mom died.
“Today, 10 years since she passed away, I went into the studio to start recording My Way and put my foot on the path of direction away from grief as a quarter of my process into a new life. It felt really good to step back to where I started, professionally speaking, and start looking at why I was drawn to that scene and why I was drawn to that music.”
Her fans haven’t been surprised at this “sonic shift” because they’ve been experiencing it with her at her live shows.
“You’ll notice that some of the covers that I was doing are freakishly similar to what I’m doing now, three-plus years ago,” she said. “I was covering Yarbrough and Peoples’ ‘Don’t Stop the Music.’ I was covering Anita Baker’s ‘Sweet Love.’ I was covering René and Angela’s “I’ll Be Good,” Chaka Khan, you name it. I’ve been unsubtle signposting the entire time.”
The old electronic soul touchstones of her past influences come through in the base lines and drum patterns she came up with on the EP’s first single, “Future Enemies.” Without lyrics, she took the melody, ideas for the bass line and her voice notes to Los Angeles to producers Sean Douglas and Zack Skelton. It was a collaborative effort with the trio, in which they became co-writers, producers and mixers. Yola called working with them “one of the most joyful musical experiences in her life.”
Yola has chosen to chart her own path, and the new EP called, appropriately, My Way is her tribute to that. She calls this her era of agency and having some say as to how her life goes: the idea of being collaborative and not being used, and staying true to the music that started this journey back in London.
“I’ve had to make a choice between the industry and the fans, and what a lot of people do is they choose the industry,” she said. “They choose to pigeonhole themselves and say, ‘I’m all in this and I’m just this,’ and then the environment of the industry, in that regard, rewards them for pigeonholing themselves. I chose to go exactly against that, and as a result, maybe, I have yielded less from the institutions of the world because of me being truly authentic to myself. But my fans know I don’t lie.”