The past few years have been freeing for Yola. The genre-spanning British singer left Nashville, moved to the New York area (and started dating), earned her first role on Broadway (as Persephone in Hadestown), and began work on the next phase of her musical career. That era of Yolanda Quartey is now here with My Way (out today), a five-track mix of dance music and Eighties pop-R&B that marks a gentle but determined departure from her prior two albums: More Janet Jackson than Dolly Parton.
The collection contains everything from odes to fuckboys to diss tracks to celebrations of Carnival. Its title speaks to the increased autonomy Yola feels she’s been able to carve out for herself; she co-wrote and co-produced My Way, drawing on her years of behind-the-board producer chops. “A big part of this new era, and this new art, is finally having the bargaining position,” she says. “Being in the right space and knowing enough people in the right space, and freedom, finally, to go, ‘OK, I can now pick my environment, as I choose.’ One of the most exciting things about this new era is this is me being able to do me, and I’ve not really been entirely free to do me.”
Her last album, 2021’s Stand for Myself, was, she now says, a different story. Produced by Dan Auerbach for his Easy Eye Sound label, the record represented yet another moment, in a career full of them, of Yola feeling creatively stifled, as though her full range of artistry — as a singer, arranger, producer, and instrumentalist — was sidelined. She fought to get her preferred musicians on the record, fought to have the track “Dancing Away in Tears” released as a single (a fight she lost), and fought to insert herself more into the recording process, to little avail. The experience was one of several that influenced the title track on My Way: “You wanted control,” she sings, “but this is misery.”
“It’s cookie-cutter bullshit, is all it is,” she says of the old-fashioned label model of Easy Eye Sound, with its in-house songwriters and musicians. “It’s what they did in the old days: People have no agency. That was something that was celebrated, so I can see how people hold that up as a way to operate. But it’s also a waste of my skill.”
Yola recently walked Rolling Stone through the five songs on her new EP.
“Future Enemies”
The song: This pulsing dance-rocker finds Yola casting off negative forces in her life.
Yola says: Its first inspiration came from dating, those moments where you meet somebody and you’re like, “Oh, no. I know how to be charming, I know how to charm people. But I’ve noticed, in this moment of charming, that if you figure out who I am as a person, you know that I’m charming you. It isn’t that we get on. This has been pure duping.” That was something you encounter quite a lot when dating. Everyone you meet isn’t your person. I realized I had some people in my circles who were really shit friends. It was like they didn’t give a crap whether you lived or died. They said they did, but their actions didn’t show that.
If you’re very confident in your skills, like I am, some people could find that mad threatening. The need to subjugate or put you in a beta role becomes overwhelming. That started showing in my social life. I noticed that one of the central tenets of “Future Enemies” was just this opportunity to avoid making enemies that were completely unnecessarily made. Somehow you need to be like Homer [Simpson] backing into the hedge. That’s freaking me. You just need to disappear.
It’s been one of the central tenets to my life: Other people putting me on, walking me around their dreams. It wasn’t just musical collaborators. It was people I did business with, friends, every part of my life. People were finding something that was useful in me and then going, “I’m going to use that to get what I want out of life, and I’m going to leave her in the dust.”
“Temporary”
The song: Leaning into her high register, Yola whispers and sings this midtempo dance-funk “ode to fuckboys,” anchored by a strutting bass line from Divinity Roxx.
Yola says: I was probably out on a date with somebody who was the genre of person I like to call “hot and horrible.” They’re a smokeshow, but they’re a dreadful human being. When you’re dating a lot, it’s fucking exhausting. I don’t know if you’ve seen these streets, but they’re ratchet as fuck. People are trying to demonstrate they’re not a complete fucking mess, so they do the best they can on their profile, and they rock up, and they’re a mess. Hetero men don’t really know how to look after themselves in the best of times. The ones that do often are hot and horrible.
But you know what? They do have a role. You can’t date seriously all the time and not get burned out, so you need someone who isn’t serious at all. The song is really an ode to fuckboys. Part of what they get off on is hoodwinking you into believing you’re the one. When you’re exhausted, they step into the frame and make sure you don’t realize a real connection with your horndom. It was probably in 2023, in New York in the summer, I’d been on a date with someone. It might’ve been inspired by a couple of people, now that I think about it, a few vapid cats. Just after the pandemic I definitely met a few cats down in Long Island who were like this. Motherfucking Surf Lodge. Some years later, I started dating seriously, and it made me think back to that era.
“Symphony”
The song: This surging funk-rocker captures the thrill and rush love of new love: “Play my heartstrings with both your hands.”
Yola says: I was starting to feel like I was getting closer to what my person would be like. The U.K. never had my person: I knew it from my jump. The whole ethos and functionality just runs antithetical to my existence. He was never ever going to be there. I arrived in Nashville and was like, “Probably not.” I didn’t date in Nashville. I was there full time for four years. Call it hashtag “too long.” I’ve been really down on Nashville. The way I operate my life wasn’t compatible with the city. The infrastructure of Nashville was really dope to me: the radio stations, the press, venues. That’s why I stayed so long. But the makeup of the city, the culture, if you will, wasn’t exactly a match. Maybe I was too far from home. Even from people from varying backgrounds, the assumption that centering witness was what the definition of normality was.
That isn’t the case in New York at all. England has a lot of white-centering. But that was the opposite of what I was looking for when I came to America. I wanted to find places that centered in more diverse ways. Not just had diverse faces that centered all identically, but had diverse ways of centering. That’s way more interesting to me.
So when I started living between New York and Nashville, I started dating in earnest like it was a full-time job: Five days a week. I set out a schedule. I was dead serious. I was on a couple apps, mostly ones that centered around dating Black people. I’ve been in England. I grew up in a village. I’ve been literally drowning in white people. I’m not a sexual racist. I went out of my way to make sure my va-jay-jay was not biased. Some people are. When “Symphony” started happening, I started noticing that even though it wasn’t the person [I was dating], some things were being brought out in me that were really positive. Something these people demonstrated was really positive. That helped me incrementally find my person, and then I found my person. But I wrote the song before I found my person.
“My Way”
The song: Yola channels her best Michael Jackson impression on this fiery, anthemic kiss off to a stifling foe.
Yola says: I like a diss track. This song is about when you’re trapped and you can’t just evaporate because you have to be in this space. It’s about the levels of which I had to go through, mind gaming, after someone tried to mind game me. This song is really about how I really tried with someone: “I’m interested in you as a person and how you operate. Let’s be collaborative. But you just can’t seem to not want to invoke the mammy paradigm, which is the plus-size Black woman who serves you at the sacrificing of herself.”
And this isn’t just one person. This is a genre that would find me all the fucking time. But in this particular situation, the line “You’ll get what you want” is because you’re either more powerful than me. The kind of people who can play power games over you are rich people, older people, white guys, white ladies playing the victim, skinny people playing the victim. People don’t realize anti-fatness is anti-Blackness. I think fat phobia is an intersection people don’t give any respect to, but it’s in every single culture, as much as colorism is. As much as “My Way” was about work, it also reflected into the personal space. “My Way” is the decentering of everyone else’s narrative from my narrative. “My Way” equals agency, me being able to have a say over my own life, for the first time, at age 40.
“Ready”
The song: Howard Artis’ charging drumbeat provides the heartbeat for this bouncy funk-pop tune that has layers of meaning but, on its surface, is a party-friendly, feel-good ode to living in the moment.
Yola says: If I played you “Ready” and then I said, “An African-Caribbean person was involved in the making of this song,” you’d be profoundly unsurprised. And that’s the point. It’s about [the passenger ship HMT Empire] Windrush, and it’s from the point of view of an African-Caribbean Brit. The lens that it comes through sonically are a lot of the things that were big in the U.K. when I was growing up, as much as Caribbean and African influence. You’ll hear M.J. influences. There’s definitely Lionel Ritchie. There’s Gloria Estefan.
It’s supposed to be a song that would blow up big at Carnival. It’s one of the most important parts of feeling sane as a Black person in the U.K.: You’re going to walk down the street, someone’s going to have a machete and green coconut stand, and they’re going to slice off the coconut, open the flesh off the top, and pour in a little bit of alcohol and make you a piña colada. On the other side of the street is going to be the jerk-chicken barrels. You’re walking down towards whichever sound system you want, and you feel you have some communion with your Caribbean life that you missed out on having. The song is supposed to evoke that sense of celebration.