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YolaIt’s always been hard to categorize music, but that’s the way she likes it – and her new EP, My wayit is no different.
“I’ve 100 percent been planning this for years,” the 41-year-old singer-songwriter exclusively said. My Weekly of her new project, which dropped on Friday, January 17th. “I’m not a minimalist, I’m a total maximalist. So this is kind of giving me back time from that part of my life.”
“The Part” refers to her years as a vocalist in the London music scene, contributing her powerful pipes to the likes of Massive Attack and Bugz in the Attic. When she later went solo, many American listeners (and critics) mistakenly believed that her main influence was Americana, due in part to the country-tinged vibes of her debut album, A walk through fire. The truth is that she always dabbled in everything – and My way allowed her to tap into the fractured beat and trip hop sounds she’d been exploring a decade before anyone knew her name.
“I’ve definitely been boxed in, which I suppose has helped book me, so I wouldn’t have struggled with it too much,” she explained. “You get into scenes, even if you don’t necessarily fit into those scenes. … I had country associations and I definitely had people in the country scene driving for me. So my associations kind of brought me into that space, but musically it wasn’t my background at all.”
Yola’s second full-length album, Stand up for oneselfseemed truer to her, but the Americana label stuck even as her audience expanded.
“It was all a process of me getting closer and closer to being able to tell my story and the narrative of what my impact on music was and is,” she said. Our. “When I was a published writer and writing for people who would be in the folk kind of space, I definitely had projects that were in that kind of space. But the ones that were most successful were closer to the soul space. My role has always been in some permutation of soul music, whether it’s through dance music, whether it’s in this broken beat scene, whether it’s jazz. My approach has always been closeness to the soul, and so that has been my mission. I feel like I started it Stand up for oneselfand maybe I’ll take it to the farthest whole number in this EP.’
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Fans who have seen Yola preview some of her new songs at live shows over the past year know My way it doesn’t sound like anything she’s released before. “Future Enemies” opens with a pulsating electronic beat before building into a soaring, arena-ready chorus, while “Ready” is directly inspired by the fractured beat scene that Yola came up with during her years in the UK.
However, if those fans were paying close attention, they might be able to guess which way she was headed, as she sprinkled soul wrappers throughout her sets. “I told you exactly the plan!” she joked.
Yola’s reclamation of her narrative extended to My way cover that shows her wearing a crown and lying between two extremely muscular (and shirtless) men.
“I was talking to people about a shoot I did that was so ashy. … I was like, ‘Why are we shining a light on me like this?'” she recalled. “So I created this Pinterest folder, which was how to enlighten me and how not to enlighten me. I put all my bad, ashy photos in one, and a handful of juicy-looking, adorable photos in the other — and one had too many and the other had too few.’
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The concept was inspired by her Ghanaian and Bajan heritage, as well as her own skin tone, which she says brightened once she moved from dreary London to relatively sunny Tennessee and later to New York.
“I was really like, ‘I really need to be in my equatorial bag.’ I really need to give hydrated, give melaned, give African, give Caribbean, give my bloodlines, give where my body wants to be,” she said. “When you see that photo, you’re like, ‘Black people must have been involved,’ because it looks different. It feels equatorial to me, it’s conceived in a way that is able to understand and see my beauty without trying to bleach it, without trying to screw it up with a highlighter to make my skin tone lighter, without wanting to retouch my nose to make it straighter.”
The result is an image that is instantly iconic and fitting for a woman who made her Broadway debut last year as Persephone in Hadestown and rock pioneer incarnate Sister Rosetta Tharpe on the big screen in 2022 Elvis.
“I’m the main character. I’m being served,” added Yola. “The way I am loved is through service. I don’t serve that world, that expectation that is the lion’s share of what people expect of me. I drive a stake into the vampire’s heart and it dies. Everything that went into making this record flew in the face of all the things the world expects from someone who looks like me.”
Yola My way The EP is out now. Her Sovereign Soul the tour kicks off in Denver on May 10. Ticket sales will begin on Friday, January 24 with a fan pre-sale. Details to come here.
