Pushkin. Just a year ago, it might have seemed strange for a black woman from England to record a country album in Nashville, But then Oldtown Road held down the top spot on Billboard's Hot one hundred for a record breaking nineteen weeks, and black folks started reconnecting with their country roots on Twitter. You couldn't have seen it coming. Take it from the Black kid whose first concert was Garth Brooks and was teased mercilessly for it. But Yola's having a great year, singing on stage with legends like Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, working with Brandy Carlyle and the Highwomen, even getting a shot out from Kendall Jenner on Twitter. She spent years singing with folks like the Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack and her band Phantom Limb in England, but after connecting with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, her grand artistic vision came to life, soulful country the way it used to be. This is Broken Record Season three liner notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Just a quick note here. You can listen to all of the music mentioned in this episode on our playlist, which you can find a link to in the show notes for licensing reasons. Each time a song is referenced in this episode, you'll hear this sound effect all right. Enjoyed the episode. Bruce headlam met with Yola in New York over the summer. She'd been up late the night before doing a performance at YouTube Studio and Chelsea, but she showed up anyway with two members of her band, ready to play some songs, talk about working with Dan Arbach and about how surviving a house fire inspired her to write her new album, walk Through Fire. She opened with a song from that record, right out in the Country. Well, I was right out in the country by Yola. Welcome to Broken Record. Thank you so much for coming. Oh, thank you so much for having me, And thanks to your two bandmates who came along. Yeah, this is Anthony da Costa and Jerry Brannhat. Jerry is still grimacing over that last notdy hit on Defender. I liked it. Yeah, you know, it was a it was a it was a choice. It was a choice, not an act one in the studio. Well, we know we like these. Uh, it was an emotional thing, you know. I was still I was still bleeding a little bit out on this roads yeah, I had one more little finger drop to do, right, one more thing to say. Yeah, if you do, you want to keep going because you could. If there's more to say, and the offender, please, could you guys clear the room at got some stuff to just let out? No, you wrote that song? Did you write that by yourself? Or was that? This one was co written by with myself and done our back. And we have made a habit of inviting fine gentlemen to help us write songs. Bobby Wood helped us write, and Joe Allen helped us write, and Dan Penn helped us write, and Pat McLaughlin helped us write, and so we were really spoiled rotten when it came to co writers in this case, Joel, Now, no disrespect to those other gentlemen. But you co wrote with Dan Penn. Yes, who wrote I'm Your Puppet? Yes? Do write woman? Yes, Dark End of the Street. Of course. For James Carr, I think yeah, And I haven't know, I haven't. Many gazillion other people sang that song, and obviously him and Spooner Aldham's represent rich reputation is just lifelong. So what was that like to sit in a room with Dan Penn. It was surreal, is what it was. The kids. I came into the room, and you know when you think, I swear I just saw somebody that I that I recognized just a little bit too keenly, and so you the first first you don't believe it, and then you're like, oh, okay, so that is who I thought I saw. Yeah, Now let me back up. What where was the room? First of all? So the room was easy I Sound studio in Nashville and that, yeah it is, yeah, And then what was the process of rating after that? Sit down at a table with guitars and start strumming at each other until I've started by telling a story supposed specifically in that session about house fire. I was in, okay, you tell us the story and then we'll go back to the writing room. But yeah, what was the story itself? Well, we were just thinking about, okay, so what we'll be writing about, and they were just like, so, Dan was like, tell me a bit about yourself for them. I well, I've been talking about myself quite a lot over the past few days, but I suppose I haven't talked about this. I'm wasn't the house fire recently And He's like okay something, and I was like, yeah, well, it was kind of Christmas twenty fourteen going into twenty fifteen, and I was just getting ready, getting the house ready, wrapping some presents in your houses were in Bristol, Ukka, and so I'm wrapping and I'm getting ready to wrap this present for a friend of mine. That's a bioethanol burner. And it's a bioethanol burner. It's like a table centerpiece type thing. It lets out a little heat. You know, you've got a bit of bioethanol fueling it. It's like a natural accelerant. Under then it lets out a little flame, not too dissimilar to a candle. And so I just thought, let's make sure I've just got it's in the post, let's make sure it works. And it worked just fine. I put a bit of bioweth on in there. It worked just great. Problem was that the canister that had the bioweth on it had a little leak around the kind of cap, and so when I lit it, it worked perfectly. I was like, that looks nice, okay, and then the little bit of fire catches a little drip and it catches the caister. Caister goes up. It's been dripping on my dress as I kind of moved my hands towards that, and so my dress goes up, and I'm a human torch at this point, and I'm in shock, and so the first thing I'm thinking is I need to think of something worse than being on fire, which is quite a hard thought because it's not great. And so I'm really thinking how can I get out of this situation that I'm in, especially given that I'm in shock and I'm in static shocks. I'm not really moving or doing anything useful. And so I was like, Okay, let's think of something worse, because if I got over that, I can get over this. And I thought of kind of the life I was enduring, kind of pre twenty nine, pre thirty, which was just highly misogynistic, highly i'd say, like the brand of racism that purposefully disguises itself, so of a kind of a wonderful brand of missology, noir and abuse and neglect and all sorts of things that made that part of my life just an utter misery. And I kind of thought back on that time and I was like, you know what, I'd take my life now on fire any day of the week, and I started laughing so hard. I laughed myself out of stack shock. And then I stopped, dropped and rolled and put myself out like you're supposed to. And that moment of just clearing out really felt like a moment of just being able to start again and being free. And so I told this story to Dan Penn and Dan our Back and they looked at me like I was a mad woman, and I was like, well, we could write a song about that, and we kind of got onto writing the title track of the album. That's an incredible story. Yeah, and this comes up and they say, let's turn it into a song. What was that? Like, how did you turn that into a song? Man? Well, Dan Penn's kind of doing this thing of looking up into the ether, kind of mumbling. I call it like the mumble right where you're not you haven't got a pretty disposed plan of what you're going to do, but you're just kind of searching for it. So it's a m and just like searching, and people that write this way will go mrmy mmy murm, and there's no sense to it. It's almost like babble, and then words come out of the babble, you know. And so yeah, sometimes you hear something and it's not what the person was thinking of saying, and so I think the song appeared that way. It's amazing to hear that. Dan Penn is a great song wrote. That's how he just sits down noodles and nonsense lyrics and well something merges. Yeah, but it's almost like you're looking for vowels and then there's a meaning somewhere kind of in the recess of your mind, you know. And what you're doing is you're searching for that elegant meaning in the recess of your mind. Is that of trying to muscle it with the prefrontal cortex, you know. And I think like some of like the most elegant ways of writing come from just esthetically moving through things that feel like they belong together, and moving through vows that feel like they belong together, through kind of feelings that you're searching for that feel like they need to be said. You know, Do you ever feel something blocking that even in a room with other writers, Like it depends how comfortable you are in that environment. If you feel comfortable, then like there is it's just a conversation. It's just connection. You know, it's the same when you can get so much more out of everything you do, writing it, doing a vocal, be it, playing a show. The more that you feel connect to the people that you're working with, that more you see your potential rise. And and so like that's everything that I'm trying to do with my life, certainly since is make deeper connections to people that I'm working with and make a more familial energy, and that familiar ergy always leads back to me being more productive. Like, there are instances in which I've found myself in these environments where I've surpassed what I thought I could do that day. Now, in the case of that song walked Through Fire, did you really able to finish it that day? Yeah, Like we wrote thirty songs thereabouts in a space of about five days. When we were in a song like, the flow was supernatural. We'll be back with more from Yola after this break. We're back with more of Bruce's interview with Yola. Now, people who've heard your songs on country music stations maybe wondering trying to place your accent in the Southern United States. I know, because there are around ours in my accent. If I say the word are, you can hear it are and that's also seeing it. Yeah, it's a hint of where I'm from. You see Bristol, Bristol of black Beard the Pirate. No, less, I didn't know that. Yes, he's the accent. So people think Bristolian sounds like pirates. On contrair, Pirates sounds like Bristolians. So now were you Were you born in Bristol? Yes, okay, And which for people that on a Bristol it's on the west coast coast. It's like a port town, port city, not too far from Cardiff and Whales, so it's on the west about two hours drive west of London. Tell me about growing up in Bristol. So I went to high school in Bristol, but I grew up I suppose, kind of elementary school in a small town still in the kind of postcode, but twelve miles outside of Bristol. And we were one of a very small number of people of color in that environment. And it was a very right leaning town at the time or village at the time. And so like the usual things that you kind of get used to in life of that stare when you walk into any shop and kids learning kind of the N word from their parents, and their parents having maybe the wherewithal to not say it with the kids. Not quite, but you know, everyone's saying it when you're not there kind of thing, which is very British way to be. You know, we're not very out and out with our prejudice. It's all just everything you ever try and do is kind of slightly affected slash heavily affected by people's opinions, people's assumptions of you. People's surprised that you can speak the English language clearly. And what was high school like that? While I was like the poor kid in a kind of well a borderline almost rich kid's school, not quite. I tried going to a regular school, and it costs. We just didn't have any money. We used to kind of like get food out of the supermarket bins and stuff, and my mom had like four or five jobs at any one time, and I was a latchkey kid, you know. And so it was one of those situations where it dawned on us that trying to pass an entrance exam and go to a school where you could get everything paid for might actually buy me some meals. We could actually eat without having to kind of lean on any of the neighbors to buy extra kind of avon makeup. My mum was also a n avon lady, and I'd like that anyway in which you could lean on people. It was just like the hustle was real with that woman. I mean so yeah, like anything that gave us, like maybe a little her a bit more breathing space would was seen as a benefit. And me and my sister were a stone called nerds, and so we did that entrance exams too, like I did a grammar school kind of thing. My sister went to a girls' school and we had to pass over I know, I think like ninety something percent to be able to get everything taken care of. We had to do that and also be sufficiently poor enough, and we knew we had poor covered. How did the interesting music start the birth canal? Yeah, just straight out straight out like singing and speaking well simultaneous. And so I don't have a living, living memory of not singing. And I used to dance a lot as well, and so just I had a very much like a performing arts kind of feel as just like I'm talking three and four, this is just normal for me. To what we be singing just everything like whatever was in the charts. So I could be singing like something that was like R and B like oh and I say, not rhythm and blues, but like modern R and B like Brownstone or something, and then I could be singing Elton John and then I could be singing Navana, and then I could be singing like there was no kind of continuity, and the charts weren't really like that. It was very like you could be anywhere kind of Certainly in the UK, the charts were all over the shop. You could have like Beck and be York in the charts and then just something unbelievably poppy and then something unbelievably country. It's funny because the charts here or not like that. The churches are very regulated by AR and they were like they are like that in the UK a lot more now, yeah, but in the nineties it was like a free for all, and so it kind of manufactures eclecticism, and I think a lot of people from maybe my generation specifically experienced that, having like the most crazy kind of mixtapes where you're like, oh, I really love caress One and I really love Blood, how's this school, going to go together, you don't care, you know, And so I think that gave people license to release music that maybe was a little more kind of left field. And what was the country music that got your attention? Then? Ah? Well, for me, Dolly got my attention. My mother was a Dolly fan, and so that got me early doors. Do you remember what the Dolly song was that you? Yeah, it was Joe Lene. It was the album Joelene that got me straight away. And I was like, I just loved the feel of it. I loved the groove of it and pleading nature of it. I noticed when I sang it, it didn't feel when I used to kind of sing R and B, it didn't feel natural in my body to sing. And then I'd sing Jolie and it felt more natural in my body to sing. And I was like, that's weird, and I'll just put that to a side. Let's deal with that later. That's a whole can of worms. Yeah, it was a whole can of worms. Although like, certainly when I got older, it dawned on me that that was weird. Apparently that was weird. It felt more natural to sing those songs. And I was into Aretha. I listened to a lot of Aretha's like a child. My mom was into that as well, and that really like again, like it's impossible not to be fascinated by her as a singer and as a writer and a player. But I saw more similarity between certainly the kind of the spiritual side of her music, the gospel side. Young Gifted in Black was probably the first record that I kind of got attached to because I never heard anything addressed to a black child before. And how do you sing in church? Did you go to church? I'm I'm from England. It ain't the same. It's all like all things by dam Beatif it's so stiff, there are churches that are a bit less stiff. But it isn't. It's not our green I'll tell you that right now. When because you played right in the country, which has that southern kind of American feel and the way Southerners feel about the country in wide open spaces here you grew up in the sort of suburbs around Bristol. Yeah, that whole frame of reference. Did you find in Dolly Parton and a lot of country music? What did that mean to you growing up? Because you're in a very, very different place well kind of, and so Bristol if you, if anyone that's visited Bristol, it falls away to countryside somewhat immediately. And so even though I wasn't very far outside, it doesn't take five minutes from the edge of Bristol for it to be instant countryside. And so by the time you get twelve miles out. At the time of me growing up, anyway, I was in a village that was maybe two horseshoes of houses, one of which had a shops kind of linking one horse shoe to the other, a set of shops and like you could count them on both hands. It was not a big place, and then predominantly surrounded by small farms and a high school and that was it, you know. And so my kind of growing up environment was very much kind of climbing trees and whittling and fishing and hide and seek and tall grass fields and such things that were not city kids ways of growing up. So that part of country music, the wide open spaces that made sense to you. Yeah, that was just how I grew up. You know. We didn't really have any stuff, Like I had friends that had like, you know, toys and things I had one bald, my little pony that we used to call my little skinhead. My sister will love this. Yeah, she used to eat plastic and my mum was like, your sister eats plastic, so you can't have my little pony with hair. And I'm like, it's the whole point of the thing. Why would you do this to me? Anyway, she shaves the thing's head and so and then promptly my sister starts chewing one, of course, and so I'm like, great, that's that's the only nice thing I had. Why can't we have nice things? Do you want to do another song? I'd really love to. We'd like to do that title track for you please. This one is called walk Through Fire. That was the title track off Yola's new record, walk Through Fire. We'll be back with more of an interview with Bruce after the break. We're back with Yola and Bruce. You are scheduled, I think to play at the Rieman. Yes, the Rieman, the Home of country music. That sure is what it is. What do you think that's going to be? Like, I have no idea. You are you know country music has not historically had a lot of black performers and typically the ones. I guess other than Charlie Pride have people who've made their bones and other in other like Tina Turner did did a good country album. Ray Charles of course did Sisters points. That's true, Yeah, that fairytale songs were real. Arthur crud Up, I guess back in the day staples to a degree, Huh, I guess that's true too. You've got some staples in your voice that definitely was a massive influence. Maybes helped me understand my voice because I didn't hear a lot of people that were, you know, at that gruffiness, and so I felt like a bit of a vocal weirdo. She helped me out in that way. Have you met her? Yes, we played Luck Reunion together. What was that like? Amazing? It's on Willie Nelson's ranch, and we all did like a last song and she invited her everyone up from that's been playing that stage of that day, which were all women, all singer songwriters in their own right and amazing musicians, and we got up and we sang with her, and invariably each one of us hugged her before we went off, just like just like drawn into the majesty of her kind of warmth and her kind of very natural way. Yeah, she's the saying never meet her heroes unless your heroes mayvis is right? Is the saying is it important to you that country music, mainstream country music embraces what you do? For me? I'm eclectic, and I say that word all the time because it's true. I love classic pop music as much as I love classic soul music, as much as I love classic country and classic rock music. So it's so important to make sure that I'm accepted everywhere, not just exclusively within that. I don't think sonically, when you listen to this record, that's the only thing you hear by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that it maybe pokes out more because I'm a woman of color that people are like, so country, and I'm like, yeah, what about the other things? But it sticks out that much because of who I am. You know, if I was someone else, maybe less. So when you started being a professional in music, how did you approach it? What did you do well? The first professional job I probably took was jazz gig. I had a friend in school. Actually i'd going to a different school, but I had a friend in school who had a like someone she grew up with who was also a kid and played sax, and they were kind of looking for someone to sing on this show. And they'd had their singer drop out or something, and so they just were they were looking for somebody. And I kind of got the call. They're like, hey, you know you love that you sing all the time? Do you want to come and do this show? And I was probably about fourteen time, and I was like, I'm a kid, How am I going to do this show again? I was Okay, my friends, you know, sixteen, his mom's going to be taking him. So I'd go with him and his mother and do these jazz gigs and they standards. You'd be singing or yeah, and sometimes it was standards. It's a lot of like Elephantzgerald type stuff. You know, maybe a little etta, but lots of ella. Then just maybe some kind of ad libbing type stuff. I'd done none of this before, and I was very fortunate to have a lot of talented people in the environment. We had one of James Brown's kind of famed players living locally, and so there was quite a strong jazz scene there, and some of the players from Port's Head also played kind of jazz as well. The band put his head supposed to work her up, and so there was always kind of quite certainly in Bristol you'd have players, and certainly on my UK band side, people that played jazz, and then people that played an afrobeat band, played in a English folk band, played in a bolk and folk band, played in like a country band, and played in a rock and roll band. People always had very kind of eclectic backgrounds, so you could go, hey, we need to play this with something that feels like disco, and they're like, straight in, we need to and now it feels like a country waltz, so that's fine. So like my start out in kind of jazz was probably a good fit, unbeknown to me at the time, for broadening my palette further. And then when did you start breading and performing your own work. Well I kind of moved from that too, having like a school band that did mostly rock covers, and then I started top lining. And since this was like DJ producers that I bumped into that we're looking for vocalists to write content and deliver and sync content, and so it was for me that was so explain what top lining is to be. It's like lyrics and melody, and so the DJ producer environment, certainly for a long time, I imagine it's still the same now. Was you'd have someone they'd be creating an instrumental backing track that they've been djaying for a while in clubs, and then they'd want to release it, and sometimes they'd be feeling that there was something missing, like maybe a vocal top line, lyrics and melody of some kind, and so you were there to put a song to that backing track. And so I first started with some school friends and then we got like a show at the local kind of academy, which was point about a thousand two thousand kind of capacity, depending on how they arranged it, and I was just kind of singing top lines that i'd kind of come up with and ad libbing all sorts of things. And I got picked up by DJ who we were supporting, and I started writing top lines for him and a bunch of other people. So at that time I also managed to get into a band called Phantom Limb, and in that environment, I wrote all of the top lines and it was all guitar based, and I was like, oh thank God. And because I'd kind of start at kind of fourteen. By the time I got to twenty one, I was like, thank god, you know, as opposed to, you know, feeling any kind of level of pressure or anything being the only top liner in that outfit. But we weren't necessarily the most prolific of band, But we wrote two albums, and I think that did a wonderful job for me, having an environment to at least start on the path of this journey of involving the things that I grew up listening to, my love of Elton John, my love of classic soul, classic rock, classic country music, classic pop music. I think it took longer for classic pop and classic country and maybe even some classic soul to make its way into the first record. Was it difficult to get your ideas across then it must and say, I'm influenced by Elton John? What about this in this? Yeah? Exactly, you know. And there was like a lot of kind of prejudice towards people that weren't kind of straight, white, cis gender men and in music and so like, there were all sorts of things that I was just never going to get across. But luckily I was eclectic enough that there are enough things within the straight white guy range. There's a lot of music guys you could draw. Yeah, there's loads of music like by straight white guys. I liked, you know, and like you know, so like it was it was possible to contribute and still be somewhat inspired. But I was definitely hobbled by my inability to go further. But I think still wrote some beautiful songs. I still rate those songs massively in my journey of towards what we're doing now? And that did that lead directly to your your first eph now? I took three years out kind of by week time we got through kung fuing all the isms out of my way. Certainly in that environment anyway, i'd lost all love for music. I decided to just spend time horse riding and drinking cocktails most of the time, I think. Really, I was also kind of teaching at the time and lecturing vocal biomechanics at universities. And how did you teachers? Did you is that something you learned at college? How did you learn how to work your voice? Well? I had bilateral vocal nodules, which are essentially like corns that grow on your vocal cords through resistance, invariably at the front of the voice box where the chords are closest and are not always recognized as But until you go to speech therapy as a stress related disorder, did you just notice one day that you were having trouble singing or is it speaking voice as well? Yeah, like I had, I started losing getting gaps in my range. You go from the bottom and be like, oh oh, and there's just nothing there. And when I realized that there was gaps in my range, I was like, I've never had that before. And so that whole period of my life. It dawned on me when trying to recover that there are people that knew a lot about speech therapy. There are people that knew a lot about how to stylize singing, but there weren't a lot of people that knew about the kind of muscular biomechanics of singing that were in music. There are people that did Alexander technique that knew about the kind of osteopathy of it, some people that got into the psychology of it a little bit with NLP, but certainly not to the level of sports psychology and performance psychology and neurolinguistic programming that involved the muscle therapy you needed to kind of get the muscles into the right kind of condition. Then the kind of biomechanics of what I was doing, both muscularly and with kind of the ostio side, and then eventually starting on the kind of psychological side and how that can kind of pay into how your muscles react, and on kind of doing this. I couldn't sing for a year and a half when I lost my voice, and I couldn't speak for two months, so I didn't really have a lot on when you were approached by Dan Auerbach from Black Keys about producing this album. Yeah, now you didn't know what that environment was going to be like. No, I did not. Did you meet with them and sort of suss out what you thought it might be like, Because if you're that dependent on environment, you know it could work. It could be everything and me a lottery. But that was the entirety of Maya. That's more about my vocal performance. So it's about muscular outs, as it were, Like to a certain degree, creatively, you can feel stifled too, but it's muscularly like my range can extend quite massively in the right environment and so it's more muscular than its creative. And I've been in a lot of situations, and probably the first thirty years of my life in at least a number of situations that weren't conducive to me feeling joyful, but I definitely got through, so I knew that even if it was dreadful, I'd survive. I was lucky that we had so much crossover musically that I was just like, I can finally relax that we're going to be moving creatively in the right direction. And it's not. That's not been something that I've been able to find very easily people that want to pursue this kind of crossover, the kind of gray area between classic soul and classic rock and classic pop music classic country music in the way that I want to When did you know it was a good environment? I think for me when we were talking, so we had we didn't meet up, but we had a talk on the phone, and that really felt like, I know that we're going to be creating like this sound that I've kind of been searching for ever since I was listened to my mum's records as a four year old. So when you're writing songs, do those kind of arrangements, Are they in your head while you're writing that? I think not all the time, Not all the time. I think some certainly with this situation, like you're working your way into figuring out what you want, what the song wants to be itself. I think we did a great job. Certainly, me and Dan made a point of not going in with any preconceptions of what we thought the song should be, not trying to force our own agenda onto the song. You weren't thinking this is going to have a Glenn Campbell vibe. No, you'd find it. You'd find it. It would speak to you once you'd written it, it would start speaking to you in that way. And like, maybe it ain't easier had I'd done a production of that, because I kind of had a little bit of a of a sideline kind of starting out producing, and so I delivered that pretty much fully demoed up, and that's not too dissimilar to the version that I did. Obviously weigh more money way into it. I'm like, but you know, it's structurally it's very very similar to the demo I put together. But I think just with all of the aching beauty and finesse that Dan is brilliant to adding to a song now once. So you've got this album that, in many ways was the music you had in your head growing up. Does that mean the next album become something else? Or is this a style you want to stay with? You know. I'm thinking of an artist like Katie Lang, who did first three or four albums were country, and then she did something very very different I have. Do you know what the philosophy continues. I think the philosophy is less about mimicking a stylistic and it's more out not forcing what wants to come out. I think there's one thing that hopefully comes across. It's that I'm truthing real hard all the time, and that needs to maintain. That's the thing that I feel connects me to people when I'm singing, connects people to the work when they're listening to it. I think at any point I start trying to manufacture what I think I should be doing, then I start distancing myself from that connection that I'm building now with people. Well, you've worked very very hard at this for a long time. Yeah, this must be very satisfying. It is. I've said no to a number of things that could have been lucrative a lot earlier at their hand of what I thought I could do given the right environment. And so I'm very satisfied to be where. I am very grateful to be where. I am very grateful to Dan for everything that he's given me the platform and the environment to do. And so yeah, I'm I'm a happy girl. That was Yola and her band playing some songs from a new record walk Through five produced by The Black Keys Dan Auerbach. You can check out more of your music by visiting Broken Record podcast dot com and subscribing to our playlist for this episode. You can also sign up for a behind the scenes newsletter while you're there. Head to I Am Yola dot com to keep tabs on when Yola will be heading through your town. Broken Record is produced with help from Jason Gambrel, Jacob Smith, and Milabelle. Our theme music is by the great Kenny Beats. Stay tuned for next week's episode with why Clefts John, This is Broken Record. I'm justin Richmond.

Pushkin. Just a year ago, it might have seemed strange for a black woman from England to record a country album in Nashville, But then Oldtown Road held down the top spot on Billboard's Hot one hundred for a record breaking nineteen weeks, and black folks started reconnecting with their country roots on Twitter. You couldn't have seen it coming. Take it from the Black kid whose first concert was Garth Brooks and was teased mercilessly for it. But Yola's having a great year, singing on stage with legends like Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, working with Brandy Carlyle and the Highwomen, even getting a shot out from Kendall Jenner on Twitter. She spent years singing with folks like the Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack and her band Phantom Limb in England, but after connecting with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, her grand artistic vision came to life, soulful country the way it used to be. This is Broken Record Season three liner notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Richmond. Just a quick note here. You can listen to all of the music mentioned in this episode on our playlist, which you can find a link to in the show notes for licensing reasons. Each time a song is referenced in this episode, you'll hear this sound effect all right. Enjoyed the episode. Bruce headlam met with Yola in New York over the summer. She'd been up late the night before doing a performance at YouTube Studio and Chelsea, but she showed up anyway with two members of her band, ready to play some songs, talk about working with Dan Arbach and about how surviving a house fire inspired her to write her new album, walk Through Fire. She opened with a song from that record, right out in the Country. Well, I was right out in the country by Yola. Welcome to Broken Record. Thank you so much for coming. Oh, thank you so much for having me, And thanks to your two bandmates who came along. Yeah, this is Anthony da Costa and Jerry Brannhat. Jerry is still grimacing over that last notdy hit on Defender. I liked it. Yeah, you know, it was a it was a it was a choice. It was a choice, not an act one in the studio. Well, we know we like these. Uh, it was an emotional thing, you know. I was still I was still bleeding a little bit out on this roads yeah, I had one more little finger drop to do, right, one more thing to say. Yeah, if you do, you want to keep going because you could. If there's more to say, and the offender, please, could you guys clear the room at got some stuff to just let out? No, you wrote that song? Did you write that by yourself? Or was that? This one was co written by with myself and done our back. And we have made a habit of inviting fine gentlemen to help us write songs. Bobby Wood helped us write, and Joe Allen helped us write, and Dan Penn helped us write, and Pat McLaughlin helped us write, and so we were really spoiled rotten when it came to co writers in this case, Joel, Now, no disrespect to those other gentlemen. But you co wrote with Dan Penn. Yes, who wrote I'm Your Puppet? Yes? Do write woman? Yes, Dark End of the Street. Of course. For James Carr, I think yeah, And I haven't know, I haven't. Many gazillion other people sang that song, and obviously him and Spooner Aldham's represent rich reputation is just lifelong. So what was that like to sit in a room with Dan Penn. It was surreal, is what it was. The kids. I came into the room, and you know when you think, I swear I just saw somebody that I that I recognized just a little bit too keenly, and so you the first first you don't believe it, and then you're like, oh, okay, so that is who I thought I saw. Yeah, Now let me back up. What where was the room? First of all? So the room was easy I Sound studio in Nashville and that, yeah it is, yeah, And then what was the process of rating after that? Sit down at a table with guitars and start strumming at each other until I've started by telling a story supposed specifically in that session about house fire. I was in, okay, you tell us the story and then we'll go back to the writing room. But yeah, what was the story itself? Well, we were just thinking about, okay, so what we'll be writing about, and they were just like, so, Dan was like, tell me a bit about yourself for them. I well, I've been talking about myself quite a lot over the past few days, but I suppose I haven't talked about this. I'm wasn't the house fire recently And He's like okay something, and I was like, yeah, well, it was kind of Christmas twenty fourteen going into twenty fifteen, and I was just getting ready, getting the house ready, wrapping some presents in your houses were in Bristol, Ukka, and so I'm wrapping and I'm getting ready to wrap this present for a friend of mine. That's a bioethanol burner. And it's a bioethanol burner. It's like a table centerpiece type thing. It lets out a little heat. You know, you've got a bit of bioethanol fueling it. It's like a natural accelerant. Under then it lets out a little flame, not too dissimilar to a candle. And so I just thought, let's make sure I've just got it's in the post, let's make sure it works. And it worked just fine. I put a bit of bioweth on in there. It worked just great. Problem was that the canister that had the bioweth on it had a little leak around the kind of cap, and so when I lit it, it worked perfectly. I was like, that looks nice, okay, and then the little bit of fire catches a little drip and it catches the caister. Caister goes up. It's been dripping on my dress as I kind of moved my hands towards that, and so my dress goes up, and I'm a human torch at this point, and I'm in shock, and so the first thing I'm thinking is I need to think of something worse than being on fire, which is quite a hard thought because it's not great. And so I'm really thinking how can I get out of this situation that I'm in, especially given that I'm in shock and I'm in static shocks. I'm not really moving or doing anything useful. And so I was like, Okay, let's think of something worse, because if I got over that, I can get over this. And I thought of kind of the life I was enduring, kind of pre twenty nine, pre thirty, which was just highly misogynistic, highly i'd say, like the brand of racism that purposefully disguises itself, so of a kind of a wonderful brand of missology, noir and abuse and neglect and all sorts of things that made that part of my life just an utter misery. And I kind of thought back on that time and I was like, you know what, I'd take my life now on fire any day of the week, and I started laughing so hard. I laughed myself out of stack shock. And then I stopped, dropped and rolled and put myself out like you're supposed to. And that moment of just clearing out really felt like a moment of just being able to start again and being free. And so I told this story to Dan Penn and Dan our Back and they looked at me like I was a mad woman, and I was like, well, we could write a song about that, and we kind of got onto writing the title track of the album. That's an incredible story. Yeah, and this comes up and they say, let's turn it into a song. What was that? Like, how did you turn that into a song? Man? Well, Dan Penn's kind of doing this thing of looking up into the ether, kind of mumbling. I call it like the mumble right where you're not you haven't got a pretty disposed plan of what you're going to do, but you're just kind of searching for it. So it's a m and just like searching, and people that write this way will go mrmy mmy murm, and there's no sense to it. It's almost like babble, and then words come out of the babble, you know. And so yeah, sometimes you hear something and it's not what the person was thinking of saying, and so I think the song appeared that way. It's amazing to hear that. Dan Penn is a great song wrote. That's how he just sits down noodles and nonsense lyrics and well something merges. Yeah, but it's almost like you're looking for vowels and then there's a meaning somewhere kind of in the recess of your mind, you know. And what you're doing is you're searching for that elegant meaning in the recess of your mind. Is that of trying to muscle it with the prefrontal cortex, you know. And I think like some of like the most elegant ways of writing come from just esthetically moving through things that feel like they belong together, and moving through vows that feel like they belong together, through kind of feelings that you're searching for that feel like they need to be said. You know, Do you ever feel something blocking that even in a room with other writers, Like it depends how comfortable you are in that environment. If you feel comfortable, then like there is it's just a conversation. It's just connection. You know, it's the same when you can get so much more out of everything you do, writing it, doing a vocal, be it, playing a show. The more that you feel connect to the people that you're working with, that more you see your potential rise. And and so like that's everything that I'm trying to do with my life, certainly since is make deeper connections to people that I'm working with and make a more familial energy, and that familiar ergy always leads back to me being more productive. Like, there are instances in which I've found myself in these environments where I've surpassed what I thought I could do that day. Now, in the case of that song walked Through Fire, did you really able to finish it that day? Yeah, Like we wrote thirty songs thereabouts in a space of about five days. When we were in a song like, the flow was supernatural. We'll be back with more from Yola after this break. We're back with more of Bruce's interview with Yola. Now, people who've heard your songs on country music stations maybe wondering trying to place your accent in the Southern United States. I know, because there are around ours in my accent. If I say the word are, you can hear it are and that's also seeing it. Yeah, it's a hint of where I'm from. You see Bristol, Bristol of black Beard the Pirate. No, less, I didn't know that. Yes, he's the accent. So people think Bristolian sounds like pirates. On contrair, Pirates sounds like Bristolians. So now were you Were you born in Bristol? Yes, okay, And which for people that on a Bristol it's on the west coast coast. It's like a port town, port city, not too far from Cardiff and Whales, so it's on the west about two hours drive west of London. Tell me about growing up in Bristol. So I went to high school in Bristol, but I grew up I suppose, kind of elementary school in a small town still in the kind of postcode, but twelve miles outside of Bristol. And we were one of a very small number of people of color in that environment. And it was a very right leaning town at the time or village at the time. And so like the usual things that you kind of get used to in life of that stare when you walk into any shop and kids learning kind of the N word from their parents, and their parents having maybe the wherewithal to not say it with the kids. Not quite, but you know, everyone's saying it when you're not there kind of thing, which is very British way to be. You know, we're not very out and out with our prejudice. It's all just everything you ever try and do is kind of slightly affected slash heavily affected by people's opinions, people's assumptions of you. People's surprised that you can speak the English language clearly. And what was high school like that? While I was like the poor kid in a kind of well a borderline almost rich kid's school, not quite. I tried going to a regular school, and it costs. We just didn't have any money. We used to kind of like get food out of the supermarket bins and stuff, and my mom had like four or five jobs at any one time, and I was a latchkey kid, you know. And so it was one of those situations where it dawned on us that trying to pass an entrance exam and go to a school where you could get everything paid for might actually buy me some meals. We could actually eat without having to kind of lean on any of the neighbors to buy extra kind of avon makeup. My mum was also a n avon lady, and I'd like that anyway in which you could lean on people. It was just like the hustle was real with that woman. I mean so yeah, like anything that gave us, like maybe a little her a bit more breathing space would was seen as a benefit. And me and my sister were a stone called nerds, and so we did that entrance exams too, like I did a grammar school kind of thing. My sister went to a girls' school and we had to pass over I know, I think like ninety something percent to be able to get everything taken care of. We had to do that and also be sufficiently poor enough, and we knew we had poor covered. How did the interesting music start the birth canal? Yeah, just straight out straight out like singing and speaking well simultaneous. And so I don't have a living, living memory of not singing. And I used to dance a lot as well, and so just I had a very much like a performing arts kind of feel as just like I'm talking three and four, this is just normal for me. To what we be singing just everything like whatever was in the charts. So I could be singing like something that was like R and B like oh and I say, not rhythm and blues, but like modern R and B like Brownstone or something, and then I could be singing Elton John and then I could be singing Navana, and then I could be singing like there was no kind of continuity, and the charts weren't really like that. It was very like you could be anywhere kind of Certainly in the UK, the charts were all over the shop. You could have like Beck and be York in the charts and then just something unbelievably poppy and then something unbelievably country. It's funny because the charts here or not like that. The churches are very regulated by AR and they were like they are like that in the UK a lot more now, yeah, but in the nineties it was like a free for all, and so it kind of manufactures eclecticism, and I think a lot of people from maybe my generation specifically experienced that, having like the most crazy kind of mixtapes where you're like, oh, I really love caress One and I really love Blood, how's this school, going to go together, you don't care, you know, And so I think that gave people license to release music that maybe was a little more kind of left field. And what was the country music that got your attention? Then? Ah? Well, for me, Dolly got my attention. My mother was a Dolly fan, and so that got me early doors. Do you remember what the Dolly song was that you? Yeah, it was Joe Lene. It was the album Joelene that got me straight away. And I was like, I just loved the feel of it. I loved the groove of it and pleading nature of it. I noticed when I sang it, it didn't feel when I used to kind of sing R and B, it didn't feel natural in my body to sing. And then I'd sing Jolie and it felt more natural in my body to sing. And I was like, that's weird, and I'll just put that to a side. Let's deal with that later. That's a whole can of worms. Yeah, it was a whole can of worms. Although like, certainly when I got older, it dawned on me that that was weird. Apparently that was weird. It felt more natural to sing those songs. And I was into Aretha. I listened to a lot of Aretha's like a child. My mom was into that as well, and that really like again, like it's impossible not to be fascinated by her as a singer and as a writer and a player. But I saw more similarity between certainly the kind of the spiritual side of her music, the gospel side. Young Gifted in Black was probably the first record that I kind of got attached to because I never heard anything addressed to a black child before. And how do you sing in church? Did you go to church? I'm I'm from England. It ain't the same. It's all like all things by dam Beatif it's so stiff, there are churches that are a bit less stiff. But it isn't. It's not our green I'll tell you that right now. When because you played right in the country, which has that southern kind of American feel and the way Southerners feel about the country in wide open spaces here you grew up in the sort of suburbs around Bristol. Yeah, that whole frame of reference. Did you find in Dolly Parton and a lot of country music? What did that mean to you growing up? Because you're in a very, very different place well kind of, and so Bristol if you, if anyone that's visited Bristol, it falls away to countryside somewhat immediately. And so even though I wasn't very far outside, it doesn't take five minutes from the edge of Bristol for it to be instant countryside. And so by the time you get twelve miles out. At the time of me growing up, anyway, I was in a village that was maybe two horseshoes of houses, one of which had a shops kind of linking one horse shoe to the other, a set of shops and like you could count them on both hands. It was not a big place, and then predominantly surrounded by small farms and a high school and that was it, you know. And so my kind of growing up environment was very much kind of climbing trees and whittling and fishing and hide and seek and tall grass fields and such things that were not city kids ways of growing up. So that part of country music, the wide open spaces that made sense to you. Yeah, that was just how I grew up. You know. We didn't really have any stuff, Like I had friends that had like, you know, toys and things I had one bald, my little pony that we used to call my little skinhead. My sister will love this. Yeah, she used to eat plastic and my mum was like, your sister eats plastic, so you can't have my little pony with hair. And I'm like, it's the whole point of the thing. Why would you do this to me? Anyway, she shaves the thing's head and so and then promptly my sister starts chewing one, of course, and so I'm like, great, that's that's the only nice thing I had. Why can't we have nice things? Do you want to do another song? I'd really love to. We'd like to do that title track for you please. This one is called walk Through Fire. That was the title track off Yola's new record, walk Through Fire. We'll be back with more of an interview with Bruce after the break. We're back with Yola and Bruce. You are scheduled, I think to play at the Rieman. Yes, the Rieman, the Home of country music. That sure is what it is. What do you think that's going to be? Like, I have no idea. You are you know country music has not historically had a lot of black performers and typically the ones. I guess other than Charlie Pride have people who've made their bones and other in other like Tina Turner did did a good country album. Ray Charles of course did Sisters points. That's true, Yeah, that fairytale songs were real. Arthur crud Up, I guess back in the day staples to a degree, Huh, I guess that's true too. You've got some staples in your voice that definitely was a massive influence. Maybes helped me understand my voice because I didn't hear a lot of people that were, you know, at that gruffiness, and so I felt like a bit of a vocal weirdo. She helped me out in that way. Have you met her? Yes, we played Luck Reunion together. What was that like? Amazing? It's on Willie Nelson's ranch, and we all did like a last song and she invited her everyone up from that's been playing that stage of that day, which were all women, all singer songwriters in their own right and amazing musicians, and we got up and we sang with her, and invariably each one of us hugged her before we went off, just like just like drawn into the majesty of her kind of warmth and her kind of very natural way. Yeah, she's the saying never meet her heroes unless your heroes mayvis is right? Is the saying is it important to you that country music, mainstream country music embraces what you do? For me? I'm eclectic, and I say that word all the time because it's true. I love classic pop music as much as I love classic soul music, as much as I love classic country and classic rock music. So it's so important to make sure that I'm accepted everywhere, not just exclusively within that. I don't think sonically, when you listen to this record, that's the only thing you hear by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that it maybe pokes out more because I'm a woman of color that people are like, so country, and I'm like, yeah, what about the other things? But it sticks out that much because of who I am. You know, if I was someone else, maybe less. So when you started being a professional in music, how did you approach it? What did you do well? The first professional job I probably took was jazz gig. I had a friend in school. Actually i'd going to a different school, but I had a friend in school who had a like someone she grew up with who was also a kid and played sax, and they were kind of looking for someone to sing on this show. And they'd had their singer drop out or something, and so they just were they were looking for somebody. And I kind of got the call. They're like, hey, you know you love that you sing all the time? Do you want to come and do this show? And I was probably about fourteen time, and I was like, I'm a kid, How am I going to do this show again? I was Okay, my friends, you know, sixteen, his mom's going to be taking him. So I'd go with him and his mother and do these jazz gigs and they standards. You'd be singing or yeah, and sometimes it was standards. It's a lot of like Elephantzgerald type stuff. You know, maybe a little etta, but lots of ella. Then just maybe some kind of ad libbing type stuff. I'd done none of this before, and I was very fortunate to have a lot of talented people in the environment. We had one of James Brown's kind of famed players living locally, and so there was quite a strong jazz scene there, and some of the players from Port's Head also played kind of jazz as well. The band put his head supposed to work her up, and so there was always kind of quite certainly in Bristol you'd have players, and certainly on my UK band side, people that played jazz, and then people that played an afrobeat band, played in a English folk band, played in a bolk and folk band, played in like a country band, and played in a rock and roll band. People always had very kind of eclectic backgrounds, so you could go, hey, we need to play this with something that feels like disco, and they're like, straight in, we need to and now it feels like a country waltz, so that's fine. So like my start out in kind of jazz was probably a good fit, unbeknown to me at the time, for broadening my palette further. And then when did you start breading and performing your own work. Well I kind of moved from that too, having like a school band that did mostly rock covers, and then I started top lining. And since this was like DJ producers that I bumped into that we're looking for vocalists to write content and deliver and sync content, and so it was for me that was so explain what top lining is to be. It's like lyrics and melody, and so the DJ producer environment, certainly for a long time, I imagine it's still the same now. Was you'd have someone they'd be creating an instrumental backing track that they've been djaying for a while in clubs, and then they'd want to release it, and sometimes they'd be feeling that there was something missing, like maybe a vocal top line, lyrics and melody of some kind, and so you were there to put a song to that backing track. And so I first started with some school friends and then we got like a show at the local kind of academy, which was point about a thousand two thousand kind of capacity, depending on how they arranged it, and I was just kind of singing top lines that i'd kind of come up with and ad libbing all sorts of things. And I got picked up by DJ who we were supporting, and I started writing top lines for him and a bunch of other people. So at that time I also managed to get into a band called Phantom Limb, and in that environment, I wrote all of the top lines and it was all guitar based, and I was like, oh thank God. And because I'd kind of start at kind of fourteen. By the time I got to twenty one, I was like, thank god, you know, as opposed to, you know, feeling any kind of level of pressure or anything being the only top liner in that outfit. But we weren't necessarily the most prolific of band, But we wrote two albums, and I think that did a wonderful job for me, having an environment to at least start on the path of this journey of involving the things that I grew up listening to, my love of Elton John, my love of classic soul, classic rock, classic country music, classic pop music. I think it took longer for classic pop and classic country and maybe even some classic soul to make its way into the first record. Was it difficult to get your ideas across then it must and say, I'm influenced by Elton John? What about this in this? Yeah? Exactly, you know. And there was like a lot of kind of prejudice towards people that weren't kind of straight, white, cis gender men and in music and so like, there were all sorts of things that I was just never going to get across. But luckily I was eclectic enough that there are enough things within the straight white guy range. There's a lot of music guys you could draw. Yeah, there's loads of music like by straight white guys. I liked, you know, and like you know, so like it was it was possible to contribute and still be somewhat inspired. But I was definitely hobbled by my inability to go further. But I think still wrote some beautiful songs. I still rate those songs massively in my journey of towards what we're doing now? And that did that lead directly to your your first eph now? I took three years out kind of by week time we got through kung fuing all the isms out of my way. Certainly in that environment anyway, i'd lost all love for music. I decided to just spend time horse riding and drinking cocktails most of the time, I think. Really, I was also kind of teaching at the time and lecturing vocal biomechanics at universities. And how did you teachers? Did you is that something you learned at college? How did you learn how to work your voice? Well? I had bilateral vocal nodules, which are essentially like corns that grow on your vocal cords through resistance, invariably at the front of the voice box where the chords are closest and are not always recognized as But until you go to speech therapy as a stress related disorder, did you just notice one day that you were having trouble singing or is it speaking voice as well? Yeah, like I had, I started losing getting gaps in my range. You go from the bottom and be like, oh oh, and there's just nothing there. And when I realized that there was gaps in my range, I was like, I've never had that before. And so that whole period of my life. It dawned on me when trying to recover that there are people that knew a lot about speech therapy. There are people that knew a lot about how to stylize singing, but there weren't a lot of people that knew about the kind of muscular biomechanics of singing that were in music. There are people that did Alexander technique that knew about the kind of osteopathy of it, some people that got into the psychology of it a little bit with NLP, but certainly not to the level of sports psychology and performance psychology and neurolinguistic programming that involved the muscle therapy you needed to kind of get the muscles into the right kind of condition. Then the kind of biomechanics of what I was doing, both muscularly and with kind of the ostio side, and then eventually starting on the kind of psychological side and how that can kind of pay into how your muscles react, and on kind of doing this. I couldn't sing for a year and a half when I lost my voice, and I couldn't speak for two months, so I didn't really have a lot on when you were approached by Dan Auerbach from Black Keys about producing this album. Yeah, now you didn't know what that environment was going to be like. No, I did not. Did you meet with them and sort of suss out what you thought it might be like, Because if you're that dependent on environment, you know it could work. It could be everything and me a lottery. But that was the entirety of Maya. That's more about my vocal performance. So it's about muscular outs, as it were, Like to a certain degree, creatively, you can feel stifled too, but it's muscularly like my range can extend quite massively in the right environment and so it's more muscular than its creative. And I've been in a lot of situations, and probably the first thirty years of my life in at least a number of situations that weren't conducive to me feeling joyful, but I definitely got through, so I knew that even if it was dreadful, I'd survive. I was lucky that we had so much crossover musically that I was just like, I can finally relax that we're going to be moving creatively in the right direction. And it's not. That's not been something that I've been able to find very easily people that want to pursue this kind of crossover, the kind of gray area between classic soul and classic rock and classic pop music classic country music in the way that I want to When did you know it was a good environment? I think for me when we were talking, so we had we didn't meet up, but we had a talk on the phone, and that really felt like, I know that we're going to be creating like this sound that I've kind of been searching for ever since I was listened to my mum's records as a four year old. So when you're writing songs, do those kind of arrangements, Are they in your head while you're writing that? I think not all the time, Not all the time. I think some certainly with this situation, like you're working your way into figuring out what you want, what the song wants to be itself. I think we did a great job. Certainly, me and Dan made a point of not going in with any preconceptions of what we thought the song should be, not trying to force our own agenda onto the song. You weren't thinking this is going to have a Glenn Campbell vibe. No, you'd find it. You'd find it. It would speak to you once you'd written it, it would start speaking to you in that way. And like, maybe it ain't easier had I'd done a production of that, because I kind of had a little bit of a of a sideline kind of starting out producing, and so I delivered that pretty much fully demoed up, and that's not too dissimilar to the version that I did. Obviously weigh more money way into it. I'm like, but you know, it's structurally it's very very similar to the demo I put together. But I think just with all of the aching beauty and finesse that Dan is brilliant to adding to a song now once. So you've got this album that, in many ways was the music you had in your head growing up. Does that mean the next album become something else? Or is this a style you want to stay with? You know. I'm thinking of an artist like Katie Lang, who did first three or four albums were country, and then she did something very very different I have. Do you know what the philosophy continues. I think the philosophy is less about mimicking a stylistic and it's more out not forcing what wants to come out. I think there's one thing that hopefully comes across. It's that I'm truthing real hard all the time, and that needs to maintain. That's the thing that I feel connects me to people when I'm singing, connects people to the work when they're listening to it. I think at any point I start trying to manufacture what I think I should be doing, then I start distancing myself from that connection that I'm building now with people. Well, you've worked very very hard at this for a long time. Yeah, this must be very satisfying. It is. I've said no to a number of things that could have been lucrative a lot earlier at their hand of what I thought I could do given the right environment. And so I'm very satisfied to be where. I am very grateful to be where. I am very grateful to Dan for everything that he's given me the platform and the environment to do. And so yeah, I'm I'm a happy girl. That was Yola and her band playing some songs from a new record walk Through five produced by The Black Keys Dan Auerbach. You can check out more of your music by visiting Broken Record podcast dot com and subscribing to our playlist for this episode. You can also sign up for a behind the scenes newsletter while you're there. Head to I Am Yola dot com to keep tabs on when Yola will be heading through your town. Broken Record is produced with help from Jason Gambrel, Jacob Smith, and Milabelle. Our theme music is by the great Kenny Beats. Stay tuned for next week's episode with why Clefts John, This is Broken Record. I'm justin Richmond.