Yola joins Rissi Palmer on Color Me Country Radio on Apple Music Country for a candid interview about the current ‘moment.’ She talks about needing to be able to “take this apparent show of appreciation and make it change lives in a real way, instead of it being a show.” She also discusses her song ‘Great Divide,’ and current album, Stand For Myself. Listen to the full episode here.
Yola on the current “moment”
“I think that this moment needs to get out of its training bra and into an adult fricking- I’m not even adjacent to patting ourselves on the back yet. We ain’t done crap-a-doodle! I’m like “HAH!” That’s what I think. Some cats are still like “I talked to a Black person today, woo-dee- doo!” We ain’t there, Boo. We ain’t there, Boo. This is what just happened conversations, now publicly that we’ve been having. Me and Allie lived together. This is basically our kitchen table. We talk all the talks on the kitchen table. We are effectuating plans built around that kitchen table right now. The moment is us as isolated Black people unisolating ourselves and connecting and building the environments that allow us to grow as opposed to make us feel even more isolated. That’s what we’re doing. That’s what this moment felt like.
It felt like a movement from isolated Black people to connect to each other. To go “I’m not allowing myself to be isolated anymore. Not in the way that I have been.” And those things come from our teams sometimes. They come from the environment that says they can only one of you. I think we’re saying-We’re saying “hell no” to all of that. A number of times I’ve turned down opportunities at Opry or something “go and find someone else, not me yet.” Many times I’ve gone “call this person, call this person. You can have me another time, but not now. This isn’t the time. It’s not appropriate for me and find someone else that’s also Black. Find three other Black people and you got me the next time.” For real. I’ll go up and I’ll turn up and I’ll go “cool” and they’ll be like “thank you for doing this thing with us”and I’m like “100%. Keep it coming.” This ain’t the “you got me now, let’s go. We’re done. Chill out.” This is the “keep it coming.” And so we’re not adjacent to anything.
We’re not winning the awards. We’re getting nominated. And we need the votership to reflect what’s happening in the charts and what’s happening in press, and what’s happening in these streets that shows what’s happening in the followership and just broadly trying to razzle and dazzle them away from that cognitive bias, I don’t know if that’s the root. I don’t think it’s that they don’t think that we kick ass or take names. Cognitive bias is an absolute B word, and it’s going to take just complete restructuring of how we recognize people and how we get that recognition moving and being reflected in awards. Because it’s not like we do things for awards, but they affect your bank account and that is it.” And so we need to be able to take this apparent show of appreciation and make it change lives in a real way instead of it being a show of “okay, I don’t think I’m a biased person, please help me prove that I’m not.” It’s like “put that in my bank and then we can talk.” For real. put that in my bank. I don’t care how cool you think you are, put your money where your mouth is. Put it in my bank. Put some awards on any of these Black people’s shelves. I don’t care if it’s me. Just someone Black. I have a necklace that says “rooting for everybody Black”-because that’s my life right now. Literally, all of y’all, every single one, just somebody. More than one. Don’t you token me. Don’t give me just one time. I don’t take one anymore. Give me two, three times. Sorry. One time is offensive. The one time I’m going to have one Black winner, that’s offensive to me. Give me two, three. I don’t want to be in that situation. Sometimes you have to be. Sometimes you have to claw your way up to be able to say this. But for real, I can’t live like that. It makes me really sad.”
Yola on ‘Stand For Myself’
“So this record was like, I need to wear everything on my sleeve, I need my guts to be on the outside, I need everything to be in full view because the connective tissue between all of this is something that has raised me, and has helped me identify my particular brand of blackness. And if I can’t showcase my blackness, not yours, not some other motherfrickers, but my, you know, then we are succumbing to the monolith that does us all a disservice.”
Yola on her song ‘Great Divide’
Yola on her song ‘Great Divide’
“Great Divide’ was my exploration, one of my explorations of doo-wop on the record. And I love The Flamingos and I wanted to have a slight Flamingos moment on this record. I think that doo-wop is a meeting point of a lot of things that we hear in music today, that we associate with classic pop music, is born out of doo-wop. And so the Faraway Looks of my other record, the Dusty’s, all of this stuff, the rhythm and blues, and parts of jazz, and parts of soul music feel like they spring out of doo- wop, and for me, that’s me in my sentimentality, yearning for connection in the most kind of core way I think what the context was that I was isolated as heck, you know, I’d moved to a new country, and I’d made the move proper, as opposed to just visiting as I had. I kind of brought a bunch of stuff and decided to at least try living between both the UK and US, as opposed to just visiting here, and so the idea was to rent a little spot here and rent a little spot in the UK and just hop between them. Obviously later, I decided just to make the move all together. At this point, I was just searching for something to connect to, and I felt like I was reaching towards something here, and the more time I spent in this country, the more it felt like this was what I was reaching towards, the whole time from the UK.”
