16 minute read
Y'akoto... how a return to Ghana showed the way
Photography by Jhey Too Cool
Ghanaian singer Y’akoto began her music career in Germany and made her name with the trio of thoughtful, soulful ‘Blues’ albums while in her 20s. But now she is on a red-hot streak of new releases – including solo single ‘What’s Good?’ and her collaboration with UK house music auteur Matthew Herbert ‘The Way’ – that have come since her return to Accra in 2019. In an exclusive interview, she tells FLYafrica’s Mark Edwards how embracing her roots has been an important part of the journey of self-discovery her music has taken her on.
Much like her genre-hopping music, Ghanaian-German singer Y’akoto is complex and playful as an interviewee. Talking on the phone from her Accra home, her smooth-as-silk voice nursed by a steady supply of lozenges, she can be contradictory – at one point she puts her difficulties breaking into the music scene in Hamburg, Germany, where she was born and spent most of her teens and twenties, down to being unapologetically herself – “Many people are afraid to be real. The music I made always came from me” – while going on to describe her music and much of her life as artifice. “Performing is not just when you are on stage,” she tells me. As our conversation goes deep into its second hour, I come to understand both statements have a truth to them and her garlanded career – now well into its second decade and having garnered hits, awards and a global following – has always been part confessional and part role play.
The two sides have not always been in harmony for the singer born Jennifer Yaa Akoto Kieck. She admits there have been times when she has felt a loosening of her grip on her own identity in feeding the demands of the music business, but the last few years have brought a new-found happiness in her own skin. It is telling that such contentment has coincided with the well-travelled artist – who, has spent extended time in countries such as Germany, France, Togo, Chad and Cameroon – making a home for herself in Ghana. She has lived in Accra since 2019 and has embraced the upbeat resourcefulness she sees here in her life and music. “I’m like a sponge and take in my environment,” she says. “I see the smiles on faces and people doing incredible things with nothing. It’s inspiring.”
Y’akoto celebrated this Ghanaian positive mindset in her slice-ofsunshine single ‘What’s Good?’, released in April this year. “The majority of Ghanaians are trying to survive day to day. They focus on what they have rather than what they don’t have. I wrote the song for those people.”
Everyday Ghanaians are all over the single’s accompanying video, which shows Y’akoto hanging out and dancing with street vendors whose stalls flank the disused railway tracks running through Accra’s Ofankor neighbourhood.
Y’akoto says: “I pass by that area when I’m out on my early morning runs. There’s so much life there. Children are playing and people are showing up every day to make a living. I wanted to show what I see and what I have become a part of, living in Accra.”
The video was directed by Ghanaian filmmaker Jhey Too Cool and also features the talents of frenetic local dance duo Rolie and Demzy Baye. With in-demand Nigerian studio wizard Jay Synths producing the track, ‘What’s Good?’ has been a true West African collaboration and the experience has been a revelation for Y’akoto as a black creative herself.
“It’s great to see black people doing cool things and I have loved working with these young people,” she says. “I like to feel I am playing a mentoring, supporting role and giving something back by employing these guys, but when you work with people younger than you, they can also teach you.”
Creative
Lessons learned include the 33-yearold going with the flow in trusting the creative whims of her Gen Z collaborators. She worked with up-andcoming director Akwadaa Nyame on the video for ‘Undercover Lover’, the cut most destined for dancefloors from her 2020 EP ‘Obaa Yaa’. His vision to accompany the track – a giddy paen to the thrill of new love with the sheen of classic 1970s disco – is a day-glo fantasy featuring a slightly unhinged-looking Y’akoto, many colourful costume changes and a white rabbit. The singer, who is a trained dancer and once considered it a career, seems to be having a blast. “I went with whatever he asked me to do. ‘You want me to roll down a wall and pet a rabbit? OK!”
The singer, who in the past has not shied away from tackling serious and sensitive issues in her songs, is enjoying letting in some frivolity. “Sometimes, I just want to be light and celebrate,” she says. “When you get older you learn how to put things in perspective and have fun.”
Not that it has been easy. “Working in Ghana is 10 times harder than in Germany, but I am more experienced now.” Part of the struggle is that there are not a lot of places to play live music in the country and Y’akoto is an artist that shines on stage. “I know how to perform. It’s always been my strength”, she says. If proof is needed, head to YouTube to watch her 2014 set at the Leverkusen jazz festival where she has the crowd spellbound from the moment she steps on stage.
She has got together “a wonderful band” of local musicians and recent performances in the capital have included intimate gigs at The Secret Garden – the lush outdoor venue connected to hip new restaurant Bondai. There are more shows to come before the year is out and plans in place to bring the Y’akoto live experience to more countries across Africa.
Photography by Jhey Too Cool
While Y’akoto is loving life in Ghana, when she arrived in 2019 she did not foresee quite how much of her time she would be spending in the country. The move here pre-empted the Covid pandemic by just a few months and Y’akoto just had enough time to get the masters of ‘Obaa Yaa’ – which was recorded in Hamburg with German producer prodigy AgaJon – back before travel restrictions went up. In three months, she had a distribution deal with US record company The Orchard – a subsidiary of Sony – with the resulting EP representing Y’Akoto’s first substantial release in three years and kickstarting a creative hot streak for the artist. As well as the music made here, in May she teamed up remotely with house music auteur Matthew Herbert on the delicate yet uplifting ‘The Way’, which became the lead single on Herbert’s album of lockdown collaborations, ‘Musca’.
“I saw a message he had put on Twitter saying he was looking for a new singer. I Tweeted ‘I’m the one’. We scheduled a video call in which we talked about our musical influences and that turned out to be my audition.
“I recorded my vocals in Ghana and sent it to him. I got no feedback, no validation – nothing for two months. Then I hear it’s the first single off the album. I was so happy.”
Dreamed
Y’akoto has dreamed of working with Herbert since she was 16 and saw him perform live in Hamburg, even sending him a demo of music she was working on at that time. No reply came – not surprising, she sent it to the wrong address – but Y’akoto continued to be a fan, loving Herbert’s experimental approach that has included recording the sounds of human internal organs, kitchen utensils and, on his 2005 album ‘Plat du Jour’, the collective sound of 3,500 people eating an apple. “He’s my idol," she says. "I want to achieve his freedom."
This quest for creative freedom has been a recurring theme in her songs. ‘Diamonds’, from Y’akoto’s first album, ‘Baby Blues’, is a call to all to find a liberated life. “It’s you and nobody else/ Who can crack your code to freedom,” she sings.
Fragile
Certainly ‘The Way’ presents a creative leap for Y’akoto in its spare, electro soundtrack and her fragile vocal. “It’s important for me to present different sides of me that haven’t been explored,” she says. The versatility of her voice allows her to do that, yet she tells me, “I’m not the best singer, but there is something special about me.” This is something of a humblebrag as her voice is an expressive instrument. Her first three albums, ‘Baby Blues’, ‘Moody Blues’ and ‘Mermaid Blues’ reveal her capable of exquisite jazzinspired phrasing reminiscent of Amy Winehouse, while there is a lilting lightness to her singing on tracks such as ‘I Agree’ on “Obaa Yaa’ and then that unvarnished whisper of a performance on ‘The Way’.
Accra is a new start in many ways, but it is also a homecoming. It is the birthplace of Y’akoto’s father, a renowned high life musician who performs under the name McGod, and the family brought Y’akoto to nearby Tema soon after she was born with the young girl growing up in the port city.
Photography by Jhey Too Cool
“I always said I would come back here,” she tells me, revealing that Ghana attracted her as a “source” of her heritage as it has to many members of the African diaspora in recent years.
From age 11, Y’akoto moved back to Hamburg with her family. The city is known for its influential music scenes and one of them was burger-highlife, forged in the 1970s by immigrant musicians from Ghana with a sound that infused highlife with the electronic disco beats that dominated the pop charts at that time. Y’akoto’s father was one of the more high-profile acts with a recording career and a big live following. He met Y’akoto’s mother, a German political scientist, at one of his concerts and they soon fell in love.
Belonging
Rather than the sense of belonging and freedom that enthuses her in Ghana, in Hamburg Y’akoto fed off her sense of otherness in making music. “Germany can be a dark place. I never felt like I fitted in,” she says.
The artistic youngster, who loved the attention of performing, was always looking for a new avenue for her creativity and a way to channel the isolation she felt as the “only black girl” at her school. Missing the communal upbringing of her time in Tema, the only child would spend a lot of time in her bedroom writing songs on her keyboard and recording them on cassette tape. Her musical inspirations were eclectic, taking in the r ‘n’ b of Destiny’s Child and Missy Elliott, the rock of Jimi Hendrix and the acoustic balladry of Tracy Chapman.
By the age of 12 she had started her first band, ushering in teenage years in which she played and toured in bands that ranged from a rock and reggae outfit to an electro duo – “I teamed up with the school geek,” she says – that had a minor hit with a drum machineled track called ‘Air Balloon’.
Given who her father is, it is perhaps not surprising how early her musical talent surfaced, but Y’akoto is keen to play up the role her mother played in nurturing her creativity, saying “she gets very little credit. She’s been the one constant figure in my life”. It was her mother who was there to drive her to piano lessons and to band rehearsals and who helped her creative daughter paint a mural of stars and planets on her bedroom walls.
Photography by Jhey Too Cool
Tension
There is a slight air of tension when I try to talk about her father during our interview. She tells me she “does not want to dwell on the past” and is coy about giving me his name, archly suggesting that I should have done my research, which is fair enough, but I had scoured the internet ahead of our conversation and was unable to find any mention of him, beyond that he was a musician. Ultimately it is her publicist that links me to McGod’s website.
Y’akoto does admit that “Dad and I differ a lot”, but it is clear he is still often in her thoughts. The title of the EP ‘Obaa Yaa’ echoes the term of endearment Y’akoto’s father would address her with – ‘Obaa’ means ‘lady’ and ‘Yaa’ is the Thursday-born singer’s day name – and she still remembers how it would begin answering machine messages from her father when she was away touring the world.
Talking to her, you get the impression that it wasn’t only when Y’akoto was on tour that there was distance between her and her father. She says she doesn’t blame him for not often being there to support her in her music because “the moody artist” didn’t know any different – “Dad didn’t have anyone to encourage him when he was young”. However, a track such as ‘Mothers and Sons’, from her 2014 album ‘Moody Blues’, which addresses fatherless families across the world, seems to have plenty of personal pain at its core. “I want to encourage all fathers to support their daughters,” she says.
If there was a time she felt in her father’s shadow, it is over now. “I have become a bigger artist than him,” she says, and she is well aware of how an impressive an achievement that is. “I have dropped my mic!” she laughs.
Like her father, Y’akoto has had to hustle for her career – he certainly taught her that – and from a young age the Tema girl was steeled for it. “I don’t come from a rich family so it was a case of ‘see how I can work,” she says.
Even as a teenager, her music was attracting the interest of record companies who wanted to sign her, yet few knew how to market such an experimental talent. When people had her tagged as a reggae artist, she began her dalliance with electro music. “The record companies had no-one to compare me to. There was no-one else in my lane,” she says.
Compromise
A compromise of sorts was reached with the recording of Y’akoto’s first EP, the five-track ‘Tamba’, which leaned towards the soul music that was popular in Germany. “It had a stripped-down feel that people can relate to and I had the voice naturally and the African roots,” Y’akoto says.
Its success led to the recording over the next five years of the similarly roots-inflected trio of ‘Blues’ albums that were to make Y’akoto’s name.
The first of these, ‘Baby Blues’ was released when Y’akoto was just into her twenties and while it was her big break – getting to Number 11 in the German album charts – the pressure was starting to tell. The album’s title came from the pet name, ‘Y’akoto Baby Blues’, which a former boyfriend, “who left me for a woman 10 years older than me,” had for her. She navigated that break-up by “drinking too much” and throwing herself into the recording, spending all hours in the studio. Music had become her world and the demands on her time meant the avid reader also had to abandon her university degree course in English literature. It was, she says, “a dark time”.
While Y’akoto had the strength of character to get by, she paints a lonely picture of that period and the continued commercial success that would come with the two follow-up ‘Blues’ albums.
“I was working with A-list producers, but most of them found me odd with my dark humour,” she says. Her music brought her fans across the world and she toured extensively, but when the shows were over she was alone in hotels whether in Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, Rome or LA. No wonder those answerphone messages from her father meant so much.
Y’akoto channelled a lot of these outside pressures into the songs she wrote. “Sometimes you don’t want to deal with it in your own life so you set it free in song. A lot of the artists we look up to are just trying to keep it together. Everything goes into their music. Good work needs to take stuff out of you. I will use everything my life has and put it in my art,” she says.
Music lovers responded to such soul-bearing and she became renowned for her lyrics that dealt with the intimate and specific as well as issues in the world, such as child soldiers and the refugee crisis, with empathy.
Photography by Jhey Too Cool
Concerned
Y’akoto was at the height of her fame, but the ever-adventurous artist was becoming concerned that after three thematically connected albums, a template was forming for “what people expected of me”.
She adds: “I gave my 20s to the ‘Blues’” and felt a change was required. It came with the move to Ghana and the release of material which speaks of the sense of contentment and control she has found here.
For Y’akoto, the tangent she has taken on recent material is evidence of her continued growth as an artist. She hopes that her fans will come with her on the journey, but if there are some who can’t get past their love for her earlier work, well “they can always go back to the ‘Blues’ albums,” she says. Or they could make sure they attend Y’akoto’s upcoming live shows in Accra, which will feature songs old and new.
While Y’akoto hopes fans will respect her need for growth, she is philosophical about any demands put on her. “I cannot control how people perceive me, but I can control the work I do as a musician.” As a solo artist since her teens, Y’akoto is used to being in the public gaze. “It is a brave thing to do to put yourself out there and project the person you are. You become a target,” she says.
Artists are more accessible than ever now through social media and Y’akoto “loves the idea of it” and is active on Instagram, but ensures there are “boundaries”.
Being in control of her career is crucial to Y’akoto. “The last thing I want to feel is I am a puppet”, she says. Now the adventurous artist is free to plot her future and reveal more sides to her complex and fascinating character.
Find out more
Follow Y’akoto on Instagram @yakotomusic
‘What’s Good?’ and ‘Obaa Yaa’ are available to stream or buy at all good digital music stores.
‘The Way’ is available to buy and stream on Matthew Herbert’s Bandcamp page
