isn’t really that massive. And that just made me think,
‘Well, what was all the fuss about?!’
As primarily an acoustic player, Yola also had to
find the right instrument that would be workable,
settling first on a Washburn parlour guitar. “There’s
some guitars that really make you feel like you’re
never going to play guitar!” she quips. “So I made
sure that I had something with a friendly neck and
also something that could fit underneath my rack!”
Now her go-to instrument is a Fender Paramount
acoustic, which suits her kinetic style of guitar playing
down to the ground.
“I hit the guitar pretty frickin’ hard, because I’m
quite a rhythmic player,” Yola observes. “But with
the Paramount, because of the nature of the pickups
they’re using, I can hit it without getting a boatload
of feedback. And it’s got a really great neck, so if you
grab your F – I’m a grabber, not a barre-er – then it
works. It just works for my kind of playing.”THE SPICE OF LIFE
Yola’s tastes in music have always been broad – “my
playlists were a hot mess,” she chuckles – bringing
in everything from R&B and hip-hop to grunge
and Britpop, with dollops of classic Americana andcountry thrown in for good measure. “I was like,
‘Is there a world where all of this stuff lives together?’
In my dream world, all of it would smoosh under
one loving blanket orgy of musical good times!
And it dawned on me that being that eclectic
as a kid was weird.”
As she got older, artists like Beck, Björk and
Radiohead started bringing more esoteric music
into the mainstream consciousness, but she still
found that as a young black woman with a soulful
voice, she was getting pigeonholed in a way that
made her uncomfortable.
“I’ve always been trying to follow what feels like
my path, as opposed to kind of trying to contrive
or contort what I’m doing too much. It’s not like
I haven’t done that, it’s just that I recognise that
isn’t me.
“And that’s very hard to explain to people who
hang around in environments where that’s all that
black people do. But I’m more complicated! I had
eclectic records like everyone else did. I did have
things like hip-hop and R&B in my childhood...
but my voice don’t sound like that! And so the only
thing I could do was follow my voice, and see what it
wanted to do.”YOLA
46