YulaIt's always been difficult to define s music in terms of genre, but that's the way she likes it – and her new EP, My wayno different.
“I've been planning this 100 percent for years,” the 41-year-old singer-songwriter exclusively said. Us Weekly From her new project, which was released on Friday, January 17. So this is kind of taking back time from that part of my life.
“This Part” refers to her years as a vocalist in the London music scene, contributing her powerful pipes to artists such as Massive Attack and Bugz in the Attic. However, when she later launched a solo career, many American listeners (and critics) mistakenly believed that her main influence was Americana, thanks in part to the country sentiment of her debut album. Walking through fire. The truth is, she was always involved in everything – and My way It allowed her to tap into the broken beat and trip-hop sounds she had been exploring a decade before anyone knew her name.
“I was definitely put in boxes, which I think helped me get booked, so I wouldn't fight too hard,” she explained. “You get into scenes even though you don't necessarily fit into those scenes. … I had country connections and I definitely had people in the country scene who rode for me. So it was my connections that got me into this space, but it wasn't my musical origins on Launch.
Yola's second full album, Stand up for myselfseemed more true to it, but the Americana brand stuck even as its audience expanded.
“All of this has been a process of getting closer than ever to being able to tell my story and my narrative of what my exposure to music was and is,” she said. we. “When I was a published writer and I was writing for people who would be in that kind of folk space, I definitely had projects that existed in that kind of space. But the ones that were the most successful were closer to the soul space. My role was always in some flipping of soul music, whether Whether it was in dance music, or in the broken beat scene, or in jazz my approach was always close to the soul, and that was my mission I feel like I started that Stand up for myselfand I'm probably taking it as far as an integer on this EP. “
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Fans who have seen Yola preview some of her new songs at live shows over the past year or so know this My way It doesn't sound quite like anything that's been released before. “Future Enemies” begins with a pulsating electronic beat before building into a soaring, arena-ready chorus, while “Ready” is directly inspired by the broken beat scene that Yola emerged into during her years in the UK.
If those fans were paying close attention, they might have guessed the direction she was heading in, as she was sprinkling soul caps all over her sets. “I told you exactly the plan!” “I scoffed.
Yola's reclamation of her novel extended to My way The cover photo, which shows her wearing a crown and leaning between two muscular (and shirtless) men.
“I was talking to people about my photo shoots that were very shy. … I was like, ‘Why are we turning me on like this?’” “So I created this folder on Pinterest, which was ‘How to Light Me Up and How Not to Light Me Up,'” she recalled. I put all my bad, vulnerable pictures in one, and then a bunch of delicious, sexy-looking pictures in the other, and there was too much of it in one and not enough in the other.
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The concept was inspired by her Ghanaian and Bajan heritage as well as her skin tone, which she says shone when she moved from gloomy London to relatively sunny Tennessee and later to New York City.
“I was really like, ‘I really need to be in my tropical bag.’ I really need to give moisturizer, give melanin, give African, give Caribbean, give my lineage, give where my body wants to be,” she said. “When you see that picture, you say, ‘Black people had to be in this,’ because this looks different. It feels tropical, and it seems conceived in a way that I can understand and see my beauty without trying to whiten it, without trying to burn it off with some weird highlighter to make my skin look lighter, without wanting to retouch my nose straighter. “.
The result is an instantly iconic image, a fitting one for the woman who made her Broadway debut last year as Persephone in Hadestown and He embodies the rock pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe On the big screen In 2022 Facebook.
“I am the main character. I receive service,” Yola added. “The way I love is through service. I do not serve this world, the expectation that represents the lion's share of people's expectations of me. You put a stake through that vampire's heart and he's dying. Everything about making this record went against all the things the world expects from someone who looks like me.
Yula My way The EP is out now. Ha Sovereign spirit The tour begins in Denver on May 10. Ticket sales will begin on Friday, January 24, with pre-sale for fans. Details will be available here.
