Yola at Home

The pandemic forced U.K.-born artist Yola to move closer to her recording studio in Nashville. Now, with a Grammy nomination for her latest album, “Stand for Myself,” and a role in Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming movie “Elvis,” she’s making a name for herself on the global stage.

Story by C.H. Hooks

The concept of home has been explored plenty in the American South. We talk about the importance of returning home and reconciling with our roots. But what about the people who move half a world away and make the decision that the South is now their home? 

Yola’s latest album, “Stand for Myself,” is not simple to peg. It’s nominated for a Grammy for Best Americana Album, a style that borrows from soul, country, R&B, and blues, but the album also dwells occasionally in classic pop. Yola is a product of experiences and influences. Her mother was a nurse brought to the U.K. from Barbados, and her father was Ghanaian. She was raised in Bristol, England, but has previously found herself homeless. Now, her music style and her life have become somewhat borderless and Yola has found a home in Nashville.

This conversation has been edited for clarity. 

Many, myself included, felt part of a massive game of musical chairs in the first wave of the pandemic. The music stopped, and we made decisions about where to be as everything shut down.

Yolanda Quartey, known by her stage name, Yola, was in the process of writing and recording a new album in 2020 when borders began to close. She’d made the move from Bristol to Nashville to be near Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound recording studio with the idea that she would split time between places. With the full shutdown, she chose to make Nashville her home.

I spoke with Yola while she was on a brief trip back to the U.K. She talked with me on her final day of work before taking a much needed Christmas break. Her show in Bristol had just been canceled due to multiple omicron infections among staff at the venue, but she was in good spirits. 

Yola is a conversationalist, and her voice is resonant. It feels like she’s on the verge of laughing, and often does — but there is also sincerity, with an experienced seriousness regarding her work and her world lying just below the surface. She is a thinker, and her laugh is infectious.

C.H. Hooks: So does Nashville feel a little bit more like home for you at this point? 

Yola: It does, yeah. I do split my time between the U.K. and the U.S., but yeah, I feel drawn to the U.S.

C.H.: Awesome, we’ve converted you.

Yola: You bloody have, you know. You've converted me. You know, with the power of your optimism and your fuck, yeah mentality that’s really contagious. I was talking to [James] Corden and he said the same thing; he goes, “The infectiousness of the fuck, yeah mentality is … ” — I paraphrase — “the thing that you won’t be able to get enough of. Mark my words as another Brit.” He’s not wrong, you know. It’s contagious; I can’t help it, I want a bit more.”

C.H.: I’ve bounced around a lot, but I’ve always ended up coming back to the South because it is a little bit more wild and there is a little bit more of that fuck, yeah mentality.

Yola: It’s a vibe, and I feel like you can do more. You feel like you can try more, you can try more things that you might not even think to try. It really kind of allows you to dream. Even despite all the absolutely batshit craziness that occurs here as well. … But that’s the nature of this place, I’ve come to understand. You can have the worst things in humanity and best things in humanity and the most mediocre things in humanity and everything in between. All of those permutations, depending on where you are at any one time and who you are, no doubt. And so, yeah, it’s an interesting lottery that can be quite fun. 

And that’s the challenge. It’s like, do you wanna run the gauntlet? You might die, but you might also utterly thrive. Or do you want to live somewhere where you can just about survive? I was homeless [in the U.K.], and it is possible to fall off by accident and the machine not quite pick you back up, but you can pick yourself up. But there’s definitely, for Black women, an ingrained ceiling that is lower than it is for Black men or white women. And so low that if you ever try and pop your head above it, back in the day it would be like, “Why did you expect anything more than this bare minimum that you’re getting?” 

But we’re just further along this conversation and we’re far more outwardly spoken about it in the U.S. Here in the States, I found it was like, you talk about a lot of stuff, and so you'd figure out whether you’re gonna deal with it or not relatively quickly. And that allowed you to make a decision on who you have in your team and who you work with. Of course, in some situations, you can’t avoid all the douchebags in your life … but it allows you to at least inform how you’re gonna move forward to involve increasingly less douchebags in your life and diversify the writers that you write with and the people that you play with and all of these things, you know. It gives you the intel instead of denying that any of it is even a problem.

With “Stand for Myself,” Yola distanced herself from being distinctly country. It’s still there, but the album feels like an embrace of a much larger sound, perhaps a discovery and a claim of ownership of her own personal sound. In a broader sense, it is also a reclamation of a genre of music.

Yola: It’s a story that’s important, and I love being part of that rise. The kind of things that I come out with in spaces that might not have had conversations like this, like The Guardian or in top-flight press, and talking about things that were important — about ownership as diaspora, to contemporary music of all [kinds] and having a hand in all genres of contemporary music … at their birth, at their naissance. And so, yeah, it feels as though all of that banging my head against the brick wall and forcing the hand at this narrative is finally paying off. 

C.H.: And really it’s about kind of going back in some ways and reclaiming music.

Yola: Yeah, it really is, and I’m playing Sister Rosetta Tharpe in [Baz Luhrmann’s] “Elvis” [movie]. And this is another opportunity and moment to reclaim the story of rock ’n’ roll and its creator, Sister Rosetta Tharpe. I think people have been very shy to give her the full title as the creator of rock ’n’ roll. Even though she was the first person to distort a guitar, the first person to bend the string and to shred in that way that we now take for granted as rock ’n’ roll. This was her stylistic invention that gave birth to a whole genre; it gave birth to a whole movement and scene on Beale Street of people that were influenced by her: Elvis, B.B. King, and Little Richard. The kind of idea of the matriarch, of her being the leader of the vanguard of this sound and this scene, and the creator and the innovator is something that has been glossed over, probably because of segregation, and then, obviously, just appropriation. We can’t divorce ourselves from the things that we’ve created, and so it feels like a job of the diaspora to claim all of the stuff again, and to tell these stories through as many lenses as possible.

C.H.: How does it feel for you to be a significant part of being able to bring that to life? 

Yola: Well, it feels like I'm tapping into something foundational. I'm half Ghanaian by heritage, half Bajan by heritage. My Ghanaian side is Ga, a tribe known for millennia, no less, for their extreme artsiness, [as] the seat of the artistic enlightenment of West Africa in the Middle Ages. The Ga are just known for the art, broadly, [and] music, very specifically. And so it feels that that’s the thing that connects us, this connection of musical innovation of the diaspora, and that’s what I felt when I was growing up listening to Sister Rosetta. It feels like this wonderful honor to continue to tell her story, to amplify her story. It’s the most important thing I can do as a lover of rock ’n’ roll, as a musician, and a guitar-player musician at that.

C.H.: It almost feels like you were truly born for this role after spending so much time, especially your COVID years, in Nashville, and especially in singing country music; now, of course, acting as well. When you go back to the U.K., do people notice a difference in your inflections and in your accent? 

Yola: No. Too long’s gone by for that, love. They don’t care. (Laughs.)

C.H.: You don’t throw a “y’all” in there every now and then, or something like that? 

Yola: Do you know what? I've said it maybe half a dozen times in my life so far. And every time, it’s felt disgusting. It doesn’t quite work in my accent. But sometimes it’s the most accurate interpretation of what you’re trying to say to an American person. And so that might be the half dozen times that I’ve said it and been like, “Well … it’s still not right, no. I’m sorry.” No, but I just, I can’t pull it off. That’s all it is. You guys, it’s made for your accent, but it’s not made for ours. No, I’m still having to translate myself to Americans. We sound insane. I understand this. And yeah, I just have to mitigate what I can.

C.H.: Do you feel like you’ve found that support and that community that you’ve wanted [in Nashville/America]? 

Yola: Yeah, I do. And it's a tough thing. I think it’s always a work in progress, but I feel I’ve got some really great foundations here, because we’re blunt. We speak on stuff. And so you just get to tackle stuff a lot quicker and get to know who your people are or who your people aren’t a lot quicker. They’re not doing a brilliant job of hiding their cognitive bias or secret loathing of you.  Or they think they're really clever, but they’re not clever in comparison to an English person, because it’s like training with weights on being a Brit, mate. You reckon you can hide your deviousness? You got no idea. You guys can’t do devious like Brits do devious. We invaded 90 percent of the planet and we still convinced the 89th percentile that we weren’t douchebags. 

I’ve been training with weights on as a Black woman over there. In the U.S., it’s like you took the weights off. And people are like, “Is it because they like your accent?” Partially. That disables their cognitive bias for a couple minutes so that you can say something intelligent. And they’re like, “Oh crap, that’s who you are.” Even though we might benefit from the ability of our accents to disable cognitive bias for five minutes or stun them out of doing that whole “Hey, girl” and doing their special accent, that doesn't apply to you ’cause they don’t know what the trope is for Black British people. If they did know, it would be even weirder in an American accent. They wouldn't know how to do it, which is a saving grace, ’cause that means that they have to just talk to you like a regular human being, and that could be troubling for people that weren't planning on doing that. But that evaporates when we get outside of the borders of America. In the U.K. I don’t have accent privilege or light-skin privilege, but here at least I can use my accent to jolt someone into listening to me.

That’s something that has helped. And I try and weaponize that to pay it forward as much as possible. I have told people that I’m not gonna do an event, or I’m not gonna do a festival, or I'm not gonna do a thing unless they get two other, three other, Black people first.

You take what privileges you have, especially when you’ve grown up with none of it until, literally, like 18 months ago, or whatever it is. (Laughs) Society has got a real beef with dark-skinned women, and so you're coming hard for anyone that’s gonna try and visit that on any of your diasporic freaking brothers and sisters.

C.H.: But I’m sure along those same lines, it hasn’t felt like this forever. I’m sure you didn't want to wait for success this long.

Yola: No, mate. (Laughs)

C.H.: But I’m sure at the same time, on some level, it’s gotta feel like now you’ve been steeled in some of these ways; you’ve been prepared to be able to factor in some of this change and to be that person and to be able to own that. Maybe it has come at the right time.

Yola: I think you’re 100 percent right. There was nothing in my life that I wanted to continue on with regards to the habits I had created in my 20s. I think a lot of people have that. I call it the “29 panic,” when you realize 30 is coming and you realize that there are a bunch of things in your life that are hella unsustainable. You make big old cuts, you’re like, “Right, you can’t be in my life anymore. Sorry, buddy. It’s an emergency, 30 is coming. (Laughs) I can’t be a loser, bye.” And so you make some life cuts, people don’t make the grades.

You start going, “OK, that’s not sustainable. This has always stressed me out.” It was like, I need to be a functional adult and I need to have people who won’t just watch me die and go, “Oh, that’s a shame.” And I don't think I was getting that in my life. I was in this perpetual state of service. I think I had been trained by the environment I was in to think the only thing, the only worth I had, was in service of other people, predominantly white men. And so it was a really important thing to get this sense of the depth of really engaging with my life into my practice. That has been continually happening through my creative life and sonically as you get through both my records. You can feel it gathering pace, and my sense of writing, the depth of my lyrics, gathering pace. You can hear a lot more about my personal experience in a specific way in this second record.

C.H.: This album is super-contemplative; it feels like the first album, “Walk Through Fire” was more solidly country, but also almost like a short story of how you arrived. And “Stand for Myself” feels much more substantive, like you’ve sat down to write a novel.

Yola: Yes. Big time. So to make the most direct comparison to back up exactly what you’ve just said is that every song but “It Ain’t Easier,” on the first record, was written in three hours, and finished in three hours, in the standard Nashville writing session with two people I’d never met before. There was lots of stuff that I deal with on this record that I probably couldn’t have dealt with on the last record. There was more opportunity because I had had time to meet people who maybe I had more in common with. So I could then explore those things. Things that are specific, like “Break the Bough,” about the death of my mother and her background. And the imagined idyll of what her heaven would be like. 

She used to love “scrumping” mangoes — stealing mangoes from trees. If you were on a school walk home, you did not have mangoes on your tree. And so she had things that were in her dream world. She loved playing cricket when she didn't have a bunch of arthritis, and she worked in the sugar cane field, and she would always stuff sugar cane in her backpack and, “OK, one for you, one for me.” And so in my kind of ode to her, I wanted to kind of write on that very kind of specific environment. I was doing this in Nashville, and so I had to explain to [songwriter] Liz Rose some extremely complicated concept of Windrush and how people from Barbados were tricked into moving into really miserable parts of England under a false marketing scheme. Where they just told everyone that “it was really lovely, and the weather was darling all the time, and it was identical to Barbados. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to live there.” It’s not. I'll just break it down for you now. I don't know if any of you have been to England. It's not Barbados.

So I wanted to finish off the song, and it didn’t need loads, but it needed just about enough that I was gonna have to really get into some detail. It’s been interesting translating these experiences to people that have no living memory of it. So they went to the colonies, and they created a false marketing project to get them to leave basically “paradise” to come and work in basically “not paradise,” healing people that hated them. It’s a big story. It’s a very party song, but the lyrics are very intense.

Silently break the bough
Fall into the deepest sleep
Dream of mangoes on the tree
Sugar cane and shoeless feet
Silently break the bough
Forget every distant memory
Every foe you dreamed to kill
Every emotion you never let spill

Songs that were older, like “Break the Bough,” “Diamond Studded Shoes,” “Stand for Myself,” “Whatever You Want” — they were all pre-“Walk Through Fire.” Then there were ones that I wrote in lockdown that I wanted to get finished up by starting and getting the main vibe with them. And then songs that we created in the room at the time. I was able to call on people like Joy Oladokun, who is also a dark-skinned woman, plays the guitar, and has had many a conversation about being “other.” She additionally is queer and has another layer that I don’t have. But we’re able to talk on how that reflects on our life and how we used to really minimize ourselves. It’s the idea of being barely alive, like we’re surviving, not thriving, and then this whole record takes you through these steps that I took to get to the point of thriving. And that’s really the narrative. Everything that I was writing was about my process of becoming. And so, inevitably, it became almost a concept album.

C.H.: And it works. The connective tissue, the fabric, is there to hold it all together and should complement your story. 

Yola: Hey, thanks.

C.H.: You’ve had a huge year. You're Grammy-nominated, you’ve toured extensively, and you have your solo tour coming up in the spring. What is it that you hope for in 2022? What is it that you hope to see or hope to do or hope to accomplish? 

Yola: Well, I'm nominated for Best Americana Album and Best American Roots Song, with “Diamond Studded Shoes.” I love being a six-time Grammy nominee, but I’d really like to convert one … that’s something that I cross my fingers for. The “Elvis” movie comes out in June, and so I’m really hopeful for just how that’s all gonna be received. I really think people are gonna love it. 

I think just being on the tour. I’ve got two nights at the Ryman in March, and this tour that starts February 8 in Boston. I’ve got big hopes for that tour and being able to connect with people again, and that’s something that we just haven’t been able to do for such a long time. I’m literally going everywhere, I’m not gonna be resting. I’m doing this for you guys.

C.H.: Please take care of yourself.

Yola: I will, I will do as best I can to take care of myself as is humanly possible. I’m like, if it’s unsustainable, it’s not going to lead to us doing anything that’s positive, because then you’ll be just learning this unsustainable thing. I feel like we’ve been learning this as time has gone on and getting gradually better at the things that are both high-performance and high-achieving but sustainable and healthy and progressive in the ways that we want to be progressive as well. 

There’s a lot you can always do as an artist to kind of put your foot down in areas that you need to put your foot down in. People need to learn where your lines are. You need to learn your boundaries in these ways. And so for me, it’s a lot more relaxing.

When you have boundaries … you start getting this thing back in your life called time and a life. And then that’s when you interact with life and you interact with humans. That’s where your ideas come from. If you extricate your artists completely from humanity, you will extricate them from the potential of their best ideas. You need to find balance so that the ideas can keep coming, and the people that are most productive are the people that are most connected.

C.H. Hooks is the author of the forthcoming story collection Eye Teeth (June, 2022) and the novel Alligator Zoo-Park Magic (2019). His work has appeared in publications including The Los Angeles Review, American Short Fiction, Four Way Review, and Tampa Review. He has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar and Contributor at Sewanee Writers' Conference, and attended DISQUIET: Dzanc Books’ International Literary Program. He teaches at Flagler College.

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