One summer season afternoon in 2021, I used to be driving round city doing errands. All Issues Thought of was on the radio, with Ari Shapiro interviewing the singer-songwriter Yola about her album Stand For Myself, launched earlier that month. I would already been listening to the file on repeat; its exuberant assertion of independence and id introduced me simply the uplift I wanted throughout that pandemic summer season. Shapiro is a musician himself, and his music-nerdy pleasure about Yola’s music and message was so infectious, their rapport so joyful, that I discovered myself in a traditional NPR “driveway second,” sitting within the automobile to listen to the entire dialog, with an enormous smile on my face.
Final month, once I sat down for my very own dialog with Yola on the NPR bureau in Manhattan, I wasn’t feeling too smiley. On my means from California, I would been caught for seven hours at Dulles airport earlier than lastly making the final flight into Newark at 1 a.m., however with out my baggage. I felt exhausted, careworn and even slightly dizzy. However then Yola arrived. That pretty voice, that heat presence and highly effective vitality — earlier than I knew it we have been chatting like outdated buddies and I used to be smiling away.
Yola’s music bounces, grooves and carries you away. Like its maker, it’s unapologetically large and daring, outspoken and uncensored. Her 2025 EP My Manner is a breakthrough assortment of deeply private songs about her Ghanaian and Caribbean ancestry, her journey via love and heartbreak, the limitations she’s needed to break via and the protecting partitions she’s discovered to place up. These are onerous truths, onerous received. Our dialog digs into the numerous challenges she’s confronted on her journey to creative freedom, acceptance and the complete expression of self. However the music that emerges from these struggles – a uncooked and trustworthy affirmation of her personal voice and her personal path – is triumphant, optimistic, and in the end joyful. Hear, and also you may end up smiling.
