Through Fire And Physics, Yola's Still Standing

Through Fire And Physics, Yola's Still Standing




By Joshua M. Miller


Yola Carter is done going by way of the motions. With the release of her sophomore album Stand for Myself, the British-born singer-songwriter who performs spirited roots soul music as Yola makes it clear she’s comfortable in her own skin. Produced by The Black Keys’s Dan Auerbach, the confessional album reads in part like a mission statement of her journey the past eight years seeking to get back to her roots and her truest self.


As soon as her mother died in the fall of 2013, she realized she had been sleepwalking through life. “I feel that prior to my mother's passing in 2013, that I was a bit of a doormat version of myself,” Yola tells MTV News. “I wasn't really completely living in my truth or in my actual personality. I had been minimizing myself.”


From the outdoor, though, Yola’s entire rise looks like a success story. Growing up outdoors Bristol, England and living homeless for a time in London, she experienced instances of bigotry and sexism in the British music industry. Yet, her determination helped lead her to international acclaim. In 2019, she was nominated for four Grammys, including Best New Artist, for her debut album Walk Through Fire. Still, she says, “I had been staying mum about my true-life experience. I was trying to get out of that environment although to no avail, up until I saw how underwhelming the vision of a parent's casket can be.”


That sight at the funeral seemed almost phony, like a punchline to a joke that can’t “really ever define the personality of the person therein.” The concept of death had been taught to her as a big happening, although experiencing it this way felt “somewhat small,” which surprised her.


“It feels like it's an entire mockery all of drama and all of the things you swore mattered,” she says. “In a global that put us in a little bit box, and then it gets lowered into the ground, and so they may as well just be playing circus music because it seems like a joke… If you're not living and you're not self-actualizing, you're not doing what you most wish to do and extracting the most sense of joy and fulfillment from life, you're really missing a trick.”


As she rode residence from the funeral, the bass line to Stand for Myself’s rousing “Break the Bough” materialized in her head, and she started to sing it. As tears poured down, she tried her best not to crash her motorcycle. As she pulled up to her residence, the opening verse appeared, and she realized she had a song.


It wasn’t up until last year throughout the pandemic, while she was struck by a flood of inspiration, that she was able to brilliant it. The song is serious about the state of not living that had once consumed her. “That sort of a narrative of this record is one song,” Yola says, “and and then the ensuing 11 songs are the measures I took to free myself from that paradigm of thinking.”


That included taking more creative freedom in writing songs. Her time off because of the pandemic made the “process of writing the album the antithesis the method of writing the opening album.” While the songs on Walk Through Fire were written in a room with others, including Bobby Wood, Pat McLaughlin and Dan Penn, this time she handled most of them of songwriting duties herself.


“With this isolation in effect, I couldn't just be in the room and get the seed for the idea. I had to come up with the seed myself,” she says. “I had to be accountable for the lion's share of the writing of the songs.” While she got ideas satisfactorily began, she was able to get into a writing pod in Nashville with others like local staples Natalie Hemby and Joy Oladokun.


Yola noticed success writing songs through making use of a uniquely scientific method. She became “enamored with methods that physicists would use to solve problems that they were encountering in theories, in equations they were formulating.” She would stay until 5 a.M., Pour herself a glass of wine, binge listen to her preference music, and strum the guitar, all in a task to go blank in the method of “trying to de-tune my brain.” With her consciousness much less mobile, she made deeper connections between things she had experienced and noticed a usual thread between the messages she wanted to express. “[Physicists are] known for doing menial tasks or doing something that would turn their analytical brain off so that rest of the intelligence in their mind would have a chance to coalesce,” Yola says. “I attempted to employ this technique first by accident, and then I realized that a bunch of songs that I'd written previously that I was going to bring into the studio were written in the same way.”


“All my best songs were written any time While I was borderline delirious with tiredness,” she continues, though that looseness perhaps led to an eclectic combination of sounds. Sonically, the album spans influences from her mother’s record collection, modern and classic R&B, hip-hop, and pop. It plays like a mixtape, which is fitting, because the 38-year-old came of age while in the format’s early years. “You've got hip-hop artists and R&B artists sampling music from the ‘70s, from the funk era, from the disco era, from the soul era,” she says of what inspires her.


Some of her lyrics, meanwhile, seek to challenge listeners to change their mental programming that often leads to bigotry, inequality, and tokenism — all of which she encountered early on. “I think my experience, being an isolated person, an other, an isolated other, is something that anyone who's been an other of any kind could have the ability to figure out with,” Yola says. To that end, the singer hopes her music bridges the gaps between marginalized peoples, distributing a modicum of empathy. “I think that the record is as much about the requirements for tenderness in that other life as much as it is the undoing of this divide-and-conquer paradigm,” she added. “If you have been separated out, that is the problem, this old concept of bias and the thing that makes us oh so different. I think a lot of people will listen to this record and go, ‘Oh, that's my life experience, nevertheless I'm nothing like her.’ We're all surprisingly unoriginal.”


as an example, “Barely Alive,” focuses on the variation between surviving and thriving. Often our circumstances trick us into thinking they’re the same, especially as soon as cash comes into the equation. “As much as I talk about people's cognitive bias, the idea of people honestly thriving or finding a way to thrive makes people typically much less hateful,” she says. “If we can lead people into being far less hateful, we have a greater chance of leading them into moments of empathy or of kindness.”


“But if you're absolutely drowning in this effort because your life sucks,” she continued, “it's going to be very hard to tell someone about their privilege or how good they have it, or how much they require to be thinking about anyone other than the direness of their own situation. So, for me, hard cognitive bias and self-actualization come hand-in-hand.”


Perhaps her latest element of self-actualization is entering the film realm. Yola will be making her acting debut as guitar-music icon Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Baz Luhrmann’s musical drama Elvis, due out in 2022. She says it was a “truly revelatory experience” learning to be an actor and figuring out how to solo, something she’d never done. “You have to be aware of so several things whilst you're shredding the living daylights out of a guitar like Sister Rosetta Tharpe,” she said.


Before then, Stand for Myself is set to showcase all of the work she did to get here: “I feel like I've habitually been writing this record to a degree, from the point that determined I required to begin living.”









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