It was the end of summer when Yola – or Yolanda Quartey, as she was then – fell behind on her rent. Her flatmate got sick and had to move out; Yola was 21, a young singer still finding her feet in London’s cut-throat music industry. When her landlord required her to leave, she was confident she would find someone to stay with until she landed her next job. “I knew it was going to be fine,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “If I could just hold on a teeny bit longer.”
It wasn’t fine, though. The friends and colleagues she called were all very sorry, but taking her in wasn’t convenient. “The rejections were all very gentle, very reasonable, but ultimately I was on my own,” she says. “Then I ran out of credit on my phone, so I couldn’t call anyone.” Yola spent the next few nights sleeping on the streets.
More than a decade later, the ebullient singer-songwriter is releasing her debut album, Walk Through Fire, at the age of 35. She shrugs off her spell of homelessness with characteristic good humour. “There’s a bush in Hoxton Square, and I made a big old hole in it,” she remembers. “I was begging for food in my artsy harem pants and people were saying: ‘What are you doing here?’ And I was saying: ‘It all went wrong, my friends suck.’”
Yola’s personality fills the room, just as it fills her record – a buffet of country-soul and break-up songs, backed with fiddle, mandolin, Wurlitzer and more, and produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys on his own Easy Eye label. It isn’t just the big, blunt end of Yola’s powerhouse voice that impresses – although that gets an immediate outing in the chorus of the opening track, Faraway Look. Its real magic lies in its depths of emotion and experience, and a dynamic range that can move from comforting whisper to full-on war cry within the space of a couple of lines.
It’s a voice many will have heard without knowing it. Since she was 18, Yola has been lending her vocals (and her writing skills) to numerous artists’ tracks, from Katy Perry party songs to Will Young pop ballads and Chase & Status dance tracks; she has toured with Bugz in the Attic and worked with Massive Attack.
Only in the past couple of years, however, has Yola begun to make the music she always wanted to. “I never got to put my ideas out there because I was always the young girl in the band, and who was going to listen to her? It was always: hush, just do the singing.” When she launched her solo career in 2016, the response was instant: back-to-back honours in the Americana Music Association awards, and a warm welcome to Nashville, a city that has embraced her music so quickly that it has become her second home. It has been a life-changing affirmation for a woman who says that, as a young black woman growing up in the West Country, she always struggled to belong. The lyrics to Faraway Look – “Are you haunted and wanting more?” – are a telling summation of a woman who has been waiting and hoping for a breakthrough.
Yola doesn’t remember her Ghanaian father, who left before she was two. Her mother was of the “late Windrush generation”: a psychiatric nurse who emigrated on a one-way ticket from Barbados in the 1970s. Yola is certain she regretted it: “There’s a whole generation of people that did. It was the worst bait and switch. ‘You don’t want to be in Barbados! It’s really beautiful in Milton Keynes!’”
Yola’s mum was a practical, stoic woman who moved her family to the overwhelmingly white town of Portishead because she imagined a better life for them there. But work was hard to come by and Yola recalls her mum buzzing around on her motorcycle between dozens of different jobs. As well as nursing and care work, she was the Avon lady, and worked at the supermarket. When money was tight, she would plunder the bins behind the store for food that had been thrown out.
“The hustle was real,” says Yola. “We knew we were too poor for Santa. We used to get bath products for Christmas – end-of-line vibes, for a quid or so, that was the treat.” As almost the only black kid in town – aside from her older sister – Yola was never allowed to forget her otherness. “People might have seen us every day but they were still suspicious. They’d keep an eye out as you walked down the aisles to check you weren’t shoplifting stuff. I got used to being placatory and over-nice.”
Music was a place she could feel she belonged. Her mother’s record collection – Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Dolly Parton, Elton John – was a refuge and she was soon besotted. As a four-year-old, she told her mother she was going to be a singer when she grew up. “But because she was so practical, that was a fictional concept to her.”
Yola’s mother forbade her from pursuing her music, so when she was in her teens, Yola’s rehearsals and gigs became secret affairs, disguised as sleepovers with friends. She tried university, dropped out and, after her London crisis, returned to Bristol, where she became the frontwoman of a country-rock band called Phantom Limb.
They disbanded after eight years in what she describes as “fraught” circumstances, and the sense that her band members never took her seriously still interlaces her conversation. “I used to have throat tension before each show,” says Yola. “I lost my voice because of stress.” Now she is finally singing music she loves, she says, she has regained the ability to sing some of the high soprano notes she had lost.
After a lifetime of feeling like an outsider, Yola believes she has finally found her people – in Americana, and Nashville, and Auerbach. The album was a collaborative process, with contributions from country and bluegrass icons including Vince Gill, Stuart Duncan and Ronnie McCoury – not to mention the hottest guitarist in Nashville right now, Molly Tuttle.
Yola’s joy at joining that community is evident; being a black woman in a traditionally white genre is no big deal, she says, and her songs aren’t strictly country, in any case. But she is sensitive to race and colour issues in the music industry. “I feel I’ve got to represent right, because there’s not many darker-skinned women doing what I do,” she says. “Try and think of a female artist who’s darker than Kelly Rowland who’s fronting a band. It’s hard, isn’t it?”
Yola chose the album title Walk Through Fire because of an experience she had when her kitchen caught fire four years ago, and she stood outside watching her house burn. She found herself laughing, as she realised that, even in that moment, her life was better than it had ever been.
“I also realised how many houses I had to go to,” she says. “Everyone was saying: ‘You’ve got to come and stay with me!’”
• Walk Through Fire is out on 22 February on Easy Eye Sound/Nonesuch. Yola tours the UK in May and June
