Yola Rises Up for a Brand-New Day

my ass handed to me for being dark more times than I care to mention, from age fve to 10, ” she says.

“We were isolated. We were sticking out like a sore thumb. ”

She knew by her preschool days that she had a powerful voice, but her mother — who she says “displayed all of the traits, bar none, of a clinical psychopath” — didn’t approve of her pursuing music. “She wasn’t 100 percent wrong that it was risky, ” Yola admits now. She sang in a rock band in high school, then continued trying to sing during her college days in London. “Her story is fascinating, ” says Hemby. “Can you imagine trying to silence a songbird like that?”

Starting in the early 2000s, both in London and back home in Bristol, Yola was hired to topline — blast at the top of her lungs — on numerous dance singles with collectives like Bugz in the Attic and 30Hz. The gigs helped her support herself when her student loan ran out, but she felt little control over her destiny. “Nothing said, ‘We’re here for you, ’” she says. “Only, ‘We’re here for you if you will serve our narrative as house diva. ’ I remember bumping into some producers in London and being told no one wants to hear a black woman sing rock & roll. Everyone was telling me to stay in my lane. ”

She and some guys she knew from Bristol formed a countryrock band, Phantom Limb, but stress and overwork took their toll. Developing vocal-cord nodules in 2007, Yola couldn’t sing for a year and a half. She recovered enough to join Massive Attack for a 2008 U.K. tour as one of their featured singers. Phantom Limb released two indie albums, but she grew disillusioned with the band’s lack of “international presence, ” money issues, and a sense that no one was listening to her. To this day, she can barely bring herself to say the band’s name. “I’m giving a lot of airtime to people who didn’t give a shit, ” she adds, referring to all of her prior collaborators. “We shouldn’t. ” (Former members of the band declined to comment or did not respond to emails.)

In the mid-2010s, she reinvented herself again, this time as Yolanda Carter — taking her revamped surname in honor of both the Carter Family and Beyoncé’s married name. Using money inherited after her mother’s death in 2013, she recruited a new team of collaborators, began steering her own career, recorded a 2016 EP of strippeddown folk country, and then appeared at the frst of several Nashville AmericanaFests. “I call that ‘Doormat Yola, ’” she says. “Once I kind of grew an adult set of boobs, I was like, ‘I’m going to do this with my strategy. ’” A mutual friend passed Dan Auerbach a video of her performing. “When I saw that video of her on the front porch in East Nashville, ” the Black Keys frontman says, “I was like, ‘How is this person not signed already?’”

Bringing her onto his Easy Eye Sound label, Auerbach produced Walk Through Fire, and suddenly people in Nashville were taking notice — certainly more than they had around 2010, when she and a bandmate visited the city to write with local songwriters but got nowhere. In the studio during the making of the Highwomen’s 2019 debut, Hemby told Carlile about Yola, and the two began watching YouTube videos right then and there. Carlile ended up calling Yola directly and inviting her to join the band. (While commitments precluded Yola’s full involvement, she sang on parts of the album and performed live with them a few times.)

For Stand for Myself, Yola brought along songs that dated as far back as 2013 — the bass line for “Break the Bough” came to her when she was riding her motorcycle back from her mother’s funeral and trying to cry and ride at the same time.

She and Auerbach were determined to switch it up musically when recording began last fall. “We talked a lot about doing things a little more uptempo, a little more driving, ” Auerbach says.

“She didn’t want to miss the opportunity, and neither did

SPEAKING OUT

“She has this platform now, and she’s not afraid to use i t, ” says Dan Auerbach, who produced both of Yola’s albums for his Easy Eye Sound label. “She wants to be a voice for her cause — and she’s not shy about what she believes in. ” I. ” The result is an album that refects her musical journey, with songs that nod to various styles of R&B and dance music. “You can hear my mother’s disco collection, our shared love of Earth, Wind, and Fire and Smokey Robinson, and my love of big, expansive songs that you’d get from Aretha [Franklin]and Ella [Fitzgerald], ” Yola says. She also co-wrote songs with Hemby, Amanfu, and Nashville singersongwriter Joy Oladokun, who remembers bonding with Yola over Phil Collins.

Yola sees the new album as a proudly autobiographical statement. “I did the track listing, and it’s part of the narrative I’m trying to tell, ” she says. “We go through the various ways in which you need to stand for yourself. ” That thread works its way through “Barely Alive” as well as the single “Diamond Studded Shoes, ” inspired by former British Prime Minister Theresa May’s insensitive comments about social-services cuts. “It’s that whole idea of how we cannot succumb to the things that divide us or the things seen to divide us, ” she says. “I can’t accept that divide-and-conquer narrative in my life as a woman of color. ”

Yola’s experiences as one of the few people of color in Americana inspired “Be My Friend, ” co-written with Amanfu. “We have had a lot of private conversations about not wanting to be the token, ” says Amanfu. “We’re happy when we get invited into the room, but sometimes the question is, ‘Are we invited to fll a quota or to be part of the story and the family?’ It’s one thing to get an invite, and another to have your own key. ”

Yola invited Carlile to participate on that song, too: “We both have an issue of being others in spaces, ” Yola says. “We’ve had to work through that. ” (Carlile heard the lyrics as “an acknowledgment of our friendship, which was really meaningful to me. ”)

Later in the conversation, Yola brings up another verse, this time from the title song of Stand for Myself. “You wanna feel nothing/Just like I was/A coward in the shadows, ” she recites. “That whole approach is: Don’t do what I did!” she says heartily. “Don’t take all that time! I didn’t start living until I was thirty. That’s what I’m asking people to do: Please, live!”