“B
irth! The birth canal motivated me
to start singing!” Yola – aka Yolanda
Quartey – is a one-off, as her answer
to the question ‘What first inspired
you to make music?’ shows. It’s accompanied by a
booming, staccato laugh that will frequently pepper
our hour-long chat in her rehearsal space in a quiet
cul-de-sac just north of Bristol.
The laugh is a constant, even when the 35-year-
old is getting into some of the dark places in which
she’s found herself. But it never feels forced – she
comes across as someone who laughs now because
she’s genuinely grateful and delighted to be out of
the other side. And not just out of it, but thriving –
creatively fulfilled for the first time ever, having just
made her debut album with Dan Auerbach.
But anyway, back to the birth canal... “I came into
the planet and the second I could form any coherence
of sound, singing seemed as obvious as talking,” Yola
elaborates. “It’s like asking, how long have you been
eating? How long have you been breathing?”TAKING RISKS
Yola’s voice is one that you might well have heard
without even realising it – her pipes have beenFIRE WALK
WITH ME
featured on pop hits by Katy Perry and Will Young,
and EDM chart-toppers from Chase & Status and
Duke Dumont... but that’s never been the music
that she wanted to make.
“From about age four it dawned on me that I was
weird! I was like, ‘Have you heard this song Goodbye
Yellow Brick Road?’” Yola recalls. “‘Oh man, the
chords, and the way they move...’ And everyone was
like, ‘Wuh?!’”
Yola grew up just outside of Bristol in Portishead.
Her Ghanaian father left before she was two and
her mum – a psychiatric nurse who’d come over
from Barbados in the 1970s – was left to keep things
together as best she could, which didn’t involve
encouraging her daughter’s dreams of being a
musician... “She did everything within her power to
ruin my music career!” Yola exclaims. “We definitely
had this classic single-parent family situation where
you’re just trying to keep above water. We were
always on the breadline and sometimes when it was
bad, she’d go to the supermarket bins and get out-of-
date stuff. And so I can understand her point of view
of, ‘Why are you taking a risk?’”
Despite her circumstances, Yola ended up attending
a relatively good school (“I like to say that I thought
my way into a grammar school, I definitely didn’t pay
my way!”) and it was here that she was first exposed
to the freedom that privilege afforded her peers.
“I was acutely aware that we weren’t like those
people,” she recalls. “I couldn’t do a classics degree
and then go, ‘I wonder what I’m going to do with myWORDS JOSH GARDNER PHOTOGRAPHY ELEANOR JANEFrom poverty and homelessness
to destructive band environments
and a very real brush with death, Yola
had quite a journey on the way to the
Nashville studio where she created her
debut album with Dan Auerbach.
We sit down with the Bristol-based
singer and guitarist and find out why
the guitar became a powerful symbol
of creative independence that
helped her shape her own destiny...GUITAR MAGAZINE 43YOLA