Yola is the latest artist to take part in Apple Music‘s Home Session series. Her exclusive session includes two stripped-back tracks – a new version of her single ‘Dancing Away In Tears’ and a cover of Soul II Soul’s classic ‘Back To Life’. Apple Music Home Session: Yola is now live. Listen in full on Apple Music here.
Yola released her second album ‘Stand For Myself’ in July 2021, the anticipated follow up to the Bristol-born artist’s acclaimed 2019 debut, ‘Walk Through Fire’, which landed her four Grammy nominations including Best New Artist. Produced by Dan Auerbach, ‘Stand For Myself’ received widespread critical praise upon its release, hailed as a genre-fluid sonic shift by critics. The album is inspired by Yola’s belief in paradigm shift beyond the mental programming that creates tokenism and bigotry, issues which have deeply impacted her personal life and professional career. Yola is currently touring with Chris Stapleton, recently performing at Madison Square Garden before returning to the UK later this year for an exclusive stripped back performance at Rough Trade Bristol. In 2022 Yola will star as Sister Rosetta Tharpe in the new Baz Luhrmann Elvis biopic.
I chose a song of my own called ‘Dancing Away In Tears’ because I felt I had to do that from the UK for a while. It wasn’t a place where marketeers knew how to get a dark skin woman off the ground. You could build your project but to grow it, you’d inevitably have to leave. I had an executive say to me that “no one wants to hear a Black woman sing rock n roll” obviously that person had no idea who invented rock n roll and how uneducated he was on the subject. But this wasn’t an uncommon theme. I had another executive later say that they wanted me to sing differently altogether when I showcased for them. My experience of Black Britishness was of being excellent, isolated and unseen, growing despite that and moving into spaces despite there being little precedent. It’s about growing your sense of self and a sense of connection to the ancestors and the diaspora, and somehow still being way too particular about the making of a cuppa. There’s an inner battle of love and loss that I think this song captures.
I remember hearing this song on the radio and it being something that really sat in my voice. I didn’t have to go far to get the tone or the feeling. Then I remember seeing the music video for ‘Back To Life’ and I saw she looked like me and was built similarly – it became important to know of artists like Caron Wheeler so I could find songs that were made for people like me. That’s how you grow as a singer.
Yola Tells Apple Music That Recording Her Home Session Was “Pure Joy”…
It was pure joy reimagining these songs for a small set up and delivering them. I got lost in the process for a while and wanted to do them again and again this way. That is my joy – finding a feeling again anew.
I really changed my approach to writing between my first and second albums almost to a polar extent. I wrote the first album in what I will affectionately refer to as “the before times”. I wrote every song but one in the studio with two other people in the space of three hours. No adjustments, finished that day. Both writers were legendary, white, male and American, and given that I was none of those things we endeavoured to find middle ground somewhere amid the Atlantic where we could be sentimental about loss and change. The second record gave me a chance to talk about being isolated while Black with Joy Oladokun to speak on being poor and manipulated by the powerful with Aaron Lee Tasjan to speak of growing past what the white normative society might have had planned for you with Hannah Vasanth. Sometimes I just sat on my own and wrote a song and just brought it to be finished, sometimes that was years before I made the album. The difference was that I was choosing my co-writers and telling my story in more depth, and simply because I could.
I hope we can do better by Black women. I hope we can promote more than a couple without them having to be competitive with each other. I hope the idea that Black women artists are somehow scarce in music dies a death. I hope the denial of our experience that leads us to just leave is overcome. Most of all I hope that the hostility we get for even speaking about our life experience dies a death too. My life is proof we have work to do. Don’t @ me!
