The name Yola is not to be confused with YOLO, but if her moniker were to be an acronym, it might stand for You Only Live Awe-Inspiringly. The British-born singer has been expanding her horizons rather widely since being nominated for best new artist at the 2020 Grammys, particularly in the acting realm, starting with a small role in Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” movie and now moving up to a lead part on Broadway as Persephone in the long-running, Tony-winning smash “Hadestown.” Her presence in musical theater is introducing a different audience to a singer who has gained a reputation in a few short years of fame as one of the greatest and most magnetic singers working today. She and the Broadway stage have turned out to be a match made in Hades, or heaven, take your pick; catch Yola in the production before she takes her final bow Oct. 20.
Meanwhile, her career as a recording artist has not been put on hold for long by this detour. This past spring, she did delay the release of a new EP and a tour promoting it, upon being offered the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take a top role in a Broadway hit without having ever acted on the stage before. But the EP, “My Way,” finally has a firm release date, on Nov. 15, and has been preceded by a single, “Future Enemies,” that presages new directions Yola is taking now that she says she is assuming greater control of her musical destiny. Recording now for S-Curve after an initial solo stint with Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye, Yola is picking a lane that is less Americana and more soul — specifically, a hybrid of the genres she came up being a part of in her early career in Britain — although fans she’s already turned into lifetime converts won’t likely be daunted by any gear-shifting.
In Variety‘s Q&A with Yola about the Broadway role and new music, her sharp intellectualism came into play in talking about Strong Black Women stereotypes, how the dilemmas Persephone faces in the underworld mirror those those faced by many powerful women up above, and how the new song “Future Enemies” offers a blueprint for ghosting suitors or acquaintances that come bearing glaring red flags. (The following interview has been edited for space and clarity.)
How have you settled in to your stage debut, getting your feet wet in such a high-profile role?
Well, the thing that really no one ever tells you is that when you debut on Broadway, you drop a dress size and your muscles will forever ache, because you’re just doing so much physically, so it’s kind of like boot camp. Having to dance for two and a half hours to five hours a night (on days with two shows) is a very different life physically for me.The way that you are timing your breath isn’t just for a full lung for the length of the phrase, it’s for a full lung for the cardio you’ve got to do as well as the phrase you’ve got to say. And so these are things that you don’t necessarily think of when you start Broadway. But my dear friend Celisse, who has a background in Broadway, was giving me the lowdown a little bit, so I was training in the gym for a month before the mongth of rehearsal started, to make sure that I could hit it. It’s hardcore.
It’s really endlessly entertaining, though. It reminds me of touring in a way, because every show that you do on tour, you are finding your interpretation that night. And you know me — when I’m on tour and I’ve got new music, I’m gonna tell you the story behind the song. So my storytelling arc didn’t feel like as much of a departure.
Physically, for the first month, I couldn’t really walk outside of the show. The first month, I had to get a car everywhere. Because the only energy I had left in my legs was needed to be expended on stage — or going up and down from my dressing room, which was on the top floor of a four-story building with a basement, so five stories, and it’s a walkup, not an elevator situation. You’re doing 10 flights multiple times a day, up and down, and you just have to be used to that, along with the way that the stage moves. We have a rotating stage, with turntables, and it goes up and down into the basement. So there’s a lot of choreography that you have to do on a moving floor. I managed to not faceplant the first time I did it, and so I was proud of myself. But the thing that really just ties it all together and makes you commit every day to punish and deliver and go further than you ever thought you could is how beautifully it’s written by Anais Mitchell.
And you are in good company.
The cast are insane. I never thought I was gonna be in a cast with Stephanie Mills (as Hermes), who was just such a hero. I love her kind of ReGroove music from back in the day, the ‘70s and then ‘80s, and obviously she was in “The Wiz” in its iconic debut era. We’ve got people from music backgrounds like me and Stephanie — who also has a theater background; she’s definitely a hybrid — and then acting backgrounds in Maia Reficco (as Eurydice) and Jordan Fisher (as Orpheus). So there’s a lot of people that come in from both sides for this very music-forward show. The band’s on stage, so when you are doing your numbers, it really has gig energy.
Evan Zimmerman
What makes you different, as a Persephone?
They’ve had Black Persephones, but I don’t think they’d had one particularly of my human shape. And because I was a first plus-size Perseophone, all of the choreography that I was doing was very much planned for slight-of-frame people. And there’s a couple things that I adapted to make sure that it was a good fit for me, but by and large I’m doing the same thing. What I really love about the company is that it’s a really diverse cast, with lots of different shapes and sizes and heights and builds and hues and backgrounds and cultures. Because this is based on mythology, a roof is blown off the humanity of it all. I’m playing a god, and so I can interpret that in any kind of way. So that gives you a level of freedom that you would normally only find in a role that you are debuting, as opposed to reprising.
Persephone is the most uninhibited character in “Hadestown.” When they had the announcement for your casting, you said something about how, as a sober person, you appreciated the chance to play someone who was not, to tap into that.
You know, I do drink. I just don’t absolutely slog it like my character does!
The overall arc of the show is tragedy, but there is a lot of comedy to the role of Persephone, especially early on. When you’re doing a comedy and tragedy, you’ve got the things that make the world go around.
Yes. Well, this is the delicate balance I have to strike, because it’s a tragedy. As Persephone, I’m dealing with essentially a 5,000-year-old relationship that has hit a little bit of a rut. The amount of history and connection that you have cannot be matched by any being in existence, so there’s a profound level of sadness to that rut having been formed. And so to play the comedy of it when you know you are drowning in sorrows, that’s really when you are reinventing what you are doing every day. You have to play with people so that every interaction is authentic. But you can’t live entirely there, because the gravity is so immense as Persephone.
Like, my movements govern everybody’s experience of the world of reality. So if I decide to go and spend time with my husband, the plants die and people can’t harvest anything, and if I decide to stay there for too long, then people don’t have access to spring and summer and all of the things that make life return to the planet. So if I’ve been away for too long, people do suffer, and it is kind of my fault, and that guilt has to find somewhere to live. Then, outside of the guilt, because you are the personification of life-giving, naturally occurring things, one of the most natural occurring things is your connection to your husband. And when that falls on hard times because I have to leave to keep the world turning, I can’t not be connected to this person that I’ve loved for 5,000 years-plus. So you have to embody how that tears you apart as a person, who you are and the duty you have to your partner. And the way that you make that not too depressing is levity.
So there’s a lot of crying and a lot of worry on my face a lot of the time. But I cut that with my comedy — and I have a proclivity for comedy, so it comes very easily. Mercifully, I’m also highly emotional, so it turns out to be a perfect fit that I get to be both my emo side and my clown side. I couldn’t have picked a better world for myself if I’d actually picked it for myself.
Had getting a gig in musical theater ever been part of your plan at all?
No, I did not grow up a theater kid. I didn’t know anything about theater at all. I was in the process of writing and producing, and getting a new deal, and a lot of restructuring of my team, and moving so I could live between Nashville and New York and take advantage of being in both spaces. So I was getting ready to release (new music) and then this came in, and I realized, there’s probably not another time in my existence that I’m gonna be able to do this.
It reminded me of when I was in “Elvis” (as Sister Rosetta Tharpe). You don’t normally get to debut in an Oscar- nominated movie with an AMAs-winning soundtrack, just like you don’t normally get to debut in a Tony-winning musical. That’s not normally people’s first job, and it’s not normally one that you get a reach-out for, as opposed to having to audition for. So I decided to take a little time out and see whether I could do it, and see how it would deepen my grasp when I return to do what I normally do. Doing the same thing for a long time doesn’t always give you the best perspective. It’s just wonderful training for when you go back into touring, because there’s no way you are not hardened. I definitely have a high-maintenance body and a high-maintenance voice, and doing work like this in the most kind of structural way is really great for core stability. It’s unbelievable, the healthy effects it’s having on me, mind and body. … And I like taking on things that are kind of terrifying.
Have you developed a favorite part of “Hadestown” for yourself?
Oh my gosh. My favorite part of the show to watch is just before I come on at the end of the first act. There’s something so mind-blowingly beautiful about Orpheus’ journey down to Hades that I love watching it. The Fates are questioning: Who the hell does he think he is, to be mortal and going between realms, willy-nilly, like he’s a god? It’s not just the storytelling and the quality of the cast and the music and the arrangements, but the set design and lighting design. It would be very easy to be super bright, but they use low light really, really intelligently. Because our set is on two floors, the Fates get to be positioned a certain way in the dark, and these lanterns have this really ghostly effect, and then we have these moving lights that descend frop the ceiling and have choreography that the workers move. Then the whole set opens wider to another set, so you get another set of turntables. and so there’s just something really, really super beautiful about that part of the show.
But the part of the show that I love to act the most is the lead-up to “Doubt Comes In.” We’re having like an argument and, on this expanded set, I’ve got to walk on the turntable with the rotation at enough speed that it looks like I’m going around double-time. And then, when the time calls for it in the choreography, I’ve got to turn the other way and walk like I’m walking on a treadmill. There’s something super fun about catching the movement of the turntable, and that interplay with me and Hades, played by the epic Phillip Boykin, who is an opera singer and classically trained vocalist of many, many octave range and can sing bass to metzo without really that much challenge. That narrative builds to this point where we break down because we’re actually just sad, and that’s the reality of it. You know, on a good day, we’re actually crying. I am really dry-eyed as a person, and so in those moments where I manage to shed a tear from my eye, I’m really proud of myself. It’s real because it’s an emotional exploration that I have to draw on every day. Hades is upset because he feels as though it just is an abandonment issue for him. And for me, I cry when I’m relieved that I get to see flickers of the person I fell in love with, fresh and new, like that person’s been there the whole time. That kind of discovery is what makes me break down: “Oh, he’s there. Thank God he’s there.”
It’s relief from the worry of how hard it’s been, shoving it down because I have to hold the world together and so I don’t have the luxury of breaking down. I let it all go when I realize that it’s not all lost. I didn’t feel I had the luxury to let go when I felt like I had to hold everything together. That’s very Black woman, and that’s even more plus-sized Black woman, because you don’t even have the Eurocentric/skinny privilege of being able to maybe segue into the perception of white ladydom and maybe step out of the Strong Black Woman paradigm. When you are plus-size and you’re dark-skinned, you are perpetually in the Strong Black Woman trope, whether you like it or not. And so this was highly relatable content. I was like, “Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. I know this.” And the exploration of that has been mad-cathartic.
Let’s talk about your new music. You’ve talked about going in a different direction, or going back to a different part of your roots, saying the new stuff reflects a different side of what you grew up with or what you came up doing.
Yeah, I think I came up doing two things because my mother’s record collection had two sides. My mother liked country and American music but she also used to DJ disco and soul music and everything that exists in between that we refer to as Rare Groove type stuff. So for anyone who’s been to one of my shows when I was promoting my second record, they noticed that the covers that I do are Rare Groove covers and soul covers. And so, the plan has always been in the offering, since before lockdown, but especially since — I was like, “I need a new band that can play in a different way so we can do these kinds of songs.” The covers that I would do when I was promoting my second record are the hints at what I’m doing now. The really super cool thing about it is that my fans are insanely smart. I was DMing with some fans who were coming to see me in “Hadestown” and I was like, “I hope you’re ready for a change in sound.” They’re like, “We know what it is. Your covers are a massive giveaway.” I was pleasantly surprised that my fans have been paying so much attention to what’s been going on, and they’re like, “We’re not surprised. We’re ready. Bring it.”
One of my first jobs was in a band called Bugz in the Attic, and they were very much part of this scene… around like soul music and Afrobeat and Rare Groove and Latin rhythm, and made this hybrid sound that was very much part of an underground scene that existed in West London in the 2000s. And I came up through that scene, the Broken Beat scene. … My first show I did live, ever, was singing jazz, and I feel like that side found its way into Bugz in the Attic. And then my Tina (Turner) voice found its way into my rock background and all those kinds of things. They kind of mixed, playfully, all the time in my deliveries. But that was always the challenge, me finding a home for this hybrid voice that, when my foot’s off the pedal, has a certain personality, or, when it’s on the pedal, has another personality.
The transatlantic conversation between the U.K. and the U.S. musically has always been super interestingthe conversation of us absorbing music internationally and feeling it a different way because of context. And so that’s a story that I’m always trying to tell. I’m not trying to rehash being an American. I’m trying to tell a story that is very much mine, and people might not be aware that is a British story.
Can you mention some of the covers you did that would have tipped fans off to where you were headed?
I used to cover, and I still do, a song by Yarbrough and Peoples called “Don’t Stop the Music,” which is very decidedly a ‘80s soul, Rare Groove genre-type song. I covered Anita Baker’s “Sweet Love.” We’ve covered René & Angela’s “I’ll Be Good.” I think we even did Chaka Khan’s “Through the Fire.” We’ve been covering for a while “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince. So you are getting acquainted with a feel through some of those artists’ aesthetics… On the second record, I had to do loads of kind of playlists for iHeartRadio and those types of things, and I was doing things you’d expect from me, like Staple Singers, but then I was always throwing in things like Rotary Connection’s “I Am the Black Gold of the Sun”… I’ve been bread-crumbing hard, leaving breadcrumbs so that there’s nothing that is really a surprise.
You released the single “Future Enemies,” previewing the “My Way” EP you have coming out Nov. 15. It’s a great song… and so way past being rootsy, it’s safe to say it won’t be nominated for the Americana Awards, the way you were in the past.
No, no, because that has nothing to do with that. When I was very much in that direction, I wanted to explore that because I recently lost my mother and she really listened to a lot of that kind of music. And it was really therapeutic to do that, to reconnect with her in that way, and the music we bonded over. … But I’ve mentioned that my first gigs I ever did outside of school were jazz gigs, and I’ve mentioned Bugz in the Attic before, but people didn’t really latch onto it because it didn’t really play into the narrative, because it didn’t make any sense. So I just keep talking about everything about who I am, in full knowledge that at some point I’m gonna get to tell the story of my actual functioning life. There’s so much missing narrative.
There is a lot of backstory in your life and career, for someone who was considered a brand new artist, and indeed did get nominated for a best new artist Grammy with a solo debut. There has to be a lot of consideration over how much to let people in on.
I was in Bugz in the Attic for years, then I lost my voice, then I joined Manic Attack. Then I took some time out and was doing a lot of writing with this artist Will Young, who was the first winner of “Pop Idol” in the U.K. And yeah, dance music and house music were in my pantheon of work of. I was always working at sample replay company, called Replay Heaven, where we would replay soul samples and samples from the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s that producers wanted to use. … All of the things that actually paid me functionally any money were associated with the kind of sounds that you get on this album, and things where I was asked to be part of writing teams, part of production teams. This is all how I cut my teeth. I did teach, I did lecture. I was also on tour. “Frontwoman for hire” was my job — people looking for somebody who can sing motherfucking anything, and because they have maybe six different features on the album, but they can’t fly out all six people, they find someone who can sing at least fricking three styles, and then find someone else that can sing the other three — and that’s exactly what I was doing in Massive Attack.
And then when I moved to London, that’s when I joined Bugz and that became my real job, being in a signed band that was assigned to a subsidiary of Virgin. And being part of a scene, being on a tour bus like that, all of those things I did for the first time, that was the only reason I was able to step into that (in a solo career) with an easier start. But a lot of that narrative, I just wasn’t able to talk about that part of my life yet.
You’re changing a lot of things about your career, including much of your team.
I was in the middle of a whole load of stuff, so uprooting everything didn’t necessarily make sense until I could feasibly take a break. And so, with the end of a contract and being able to actually go, OK, let’s look at everything and actually design it for the life I’m actually functionally living instead of just loads of holdovers from a past life…
I’m even hopping on social media more than I have been because I’m now able to talk about me. Like, what I was doing once I left school? Who am I? If I’m Black and British, what denotes that difference? You know, if people wany to get to know me, as opposed to just the things that I loved about America, which is really what the first two records were… The further you get through my work, the more you like what I do later and later and later, that will be a reflection of how much you like me. … So when the crowd grew with the second record and our venue size grew with the second record, I was like, “Cool, you’re starting to get interested in me.” Because that’s when I was able to put some of my actual functional life experience of music-making into the making of the record.
The reason why I called the EP “My Way” was really because it’s actually about me exploring all the skills that I have that I worked on all this time. Working in all those spaces, I got a bunch of skills, but I wasn’t necessarily able to use them in the (solo) records that I was making previously, because the makeup of the way those records were made was very old school in its way. That therefore meant that there was an inevitability that I was gonna have to wait to kind of use all of these skills, because I’m making music from the programming and we are then overlaying live instruments once we’ve got the demo kind of done — as opposed to everything being started in a live session in the studio, and then putting in the electronic part afterwards. I love to start my writing process (alongside) the production process, because a lot of the times I have production ideas… And so it’s about finding people that are so collaborative and hyper-flexible in the way that they make music that however the idea comes, we can go and get at it, instead of “This is the way I make music, and there’s just one way,” which is very much the kind of Easy Eye way. There’s one way of making a record, and I’m like, “That’s gonna limit the kind of ideas I can get into.”
So that kind of flexibility in working with Sean Douglas and Zach Skelton, who you’ll know from Demi Lovato’s “Heart Attack” or working with Madonna and loads and loads of chart-topping bad asses and legends of music… it didn’t matter how I came at it, they were ready. And that’s really what I needed — somebody who it didn’t matter how the idea gestated, they were ready. … I was in a production team for 16 years. I think a really important part of the making of music is that you actually really get to self-actualize, and do things that you know you can do, or that you’ve been doing for everyone else for almost decades. Prior to the time I did it for myself, all those things I did that I then sold people on, they went and made money. So it’s kind of overdue that I use these skills for myself. But you know, I got there in the end.
Just to ask about “Future Enemies” — the concept of the song is interesting, in that not that many songs are ever written celebrating thwarted romantic situations, or potentially romantic ones that get cut off before they can go wrong. But maybe for you it came out of other situations, not romantic ones, that you were glad didn’t go any further than they did.
I think the number of times somebody is glad that they got out of a situation unscathed is a lot. Andwe don’t have a lot of songs about that. I was dating and it was inspired by the dating situation, but then I realized that the philosophy applied to everything else in life. It’s about meeting someone and talking and everything seems really nice and then you start realizing gradually, “Oh, this is not gonna work out.” But it’s still going nice. You have the opportunity to recognize the potential of a future enemy and not make it, and just be like, “Hey, that was really nice,” steer away from the subject that you know is gonna create the (fracture), and then just evaporate from their lives for all eternity, never to return. You know, it’s a privilege to have seen that moment and caught it, because some people never see that moment until it’s too late.
Sometimes you’ve got fricking people in your circle that you don’t even like, or some people have old-school friends from back in the day, from when they were going through a really big change or upheaval or from school, and those people were particularly attached to a more devolved version of yourself. Then you grew up, and you started hating yourself less, or you just got people around you who upped the bar for what is good enough for you as a friend. And if you managed to just duck out and drift from this kind of person — it might be a friend; it might be someone you work with — if you just disappear without being detected too much, then you might not make an enemy out of somebody, because sometimes you don’t need to. Sometimes it’s really important for people to know they fucked up, but sometimes, ain’t nobody got time for that. Sometimes they’re beyond learning anything, and you’re like, “I’m not gonna spend my entire fricking existence teaching this motherfucker how to be decent to me. I’m just gonna evaporate.” They might just have a cognitive bias towards you because you’re a woman or you’re plus-size or you’re dark skin and they don’t know that they have a bias, or — this is the big one! — you are not just physically Black, you are culturally Black. Those people don’t know what it is that they’re not jibing with.
There are so many different ways in which you can naturally discover that there’s an absence of that feeling of a mesh or of understanding. And people either work to kind of bridge that gap, or you notice them perpetually not work to bridge that gap. You’ve done the bit in your life where you tried to fucking coach everyone, and even if they did get a little bit of a clue, they were so exhausted from the U-turn they had to do in their entire consciousness that it took them two years to get step one, and a bitch ain’t got time. Meanwhile, I’m around people who took no tuition at all and treat me great. But we still get into this mentality that we have to save everybody. And in that sense of saving everybody, we have to then explain ourselves endlessly. People can be nice and just a mismatch. They just won’t be nice to you because they have a cognitive bias that they haven’t dealt with. Are they gonna beat the people in your life who didn’t need that work?
So that means that the kind of people that you gradually want to be in the company of just gets narrower and narrower as you learn who you are. For me, it definitely principally was about dating — but it was everything. You’re spending all that energy in the space where people do understand you, want you to be there, miss you when you’re gone, and love that you are the main character in your own narrative and not just a side-fricking-character in their narrative. And I think everybody can relate to that, as they grow up.
