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Alysse Gafkjen
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Alysse Gafkjen
Yola (born Yolanda Quartey) has always been naturally drawn to music.
As a young girl living on the outskirts of Bristol, England (where she was born), she would look forward to visiting friends’ homes after school so that she could listen to their parents’ records. Because she lived in a household with a “strictness toward anything remotely artistic,” and also because she didn’t have the disposable income to purchase albums, opportunities to experience music only presented themselves in incidental ways or through challenging means. Naturally, she developed an eclectic taste, taking in every type of music she could, with a particular fondness for Americana. Her debut album, Walk Through Fire, which arrived in February via Easy Eye Sound, showcases her singular ability to blend roots music with soul and elements of many other genres.
“This record shows that I’m not definable by any one [genre], by any stretch of the imagination,” Yola says. “You go through this, and there are some parts which make you think it could be a chamber pop song, and another one’s roots, and another one’s classic country. There’s a spectrum, and my taste is so broad that I was able to find parts in the genres that were available to me.”
Despite her wide pedigree of musical experiences, Yola’s sound is unique and precise. Sonically, Walk Through Fire is uplifting throughout, even in its darker lyrical moments. It’s grounded in the traditional Americana format, slightly altered to allow room for soul and R&B sentiments, such as bluesy melodies and vocal-driven parts sung with abandon. Produced by Grammy-winner Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys, Dr. John), who reached out to Yola after catching wind of her performance at the 2017 Americana Music Festival & Conference, the LP seems to take cues from other recent country-soul releases like Brent Cobb’s Providence Canyon, which borrowed heavily from the gospel and R&B of South Georgia, and Sturgill Simpson’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, which infused the artist’s outlaw country sound with Motown-style brass sections.
“Faraway Look,” the album’s opener, is a spacious, downtempo anthem which, if its instruments were muted, leaving only Yola’s voice, could work as a Western aria. The singer confronts a lover for seeming to have removed himself from reality, wondering out loud what could be the cause of his apparent stasis: “are you haunted and wanting more?” closes the first verse. The LP’s title track, which Yola co-wrote with Auerbach and Dan Penn (Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin) is a soliloquy by someone facing an ultimatum caused by changing life circumstances. The name of the song (and album) reference an afternoon in 2015 when Yola was the victim of a house fire.
“While dealing with the situation and putting out the flames,” she says, “it ended up being a really cleansing experience. The first thought I had was, ‘I need to think of something that’s worse than being on fire to be able to deal with this.’ And I had come out of this controlling and abusive relationship…and it dawned on me that I would’ve taken anything over going back to that, including being on fire. That sort of validated that, ‘yes, it was that bad of an experience,’ and that I had come out of it.”
The event, and its purifying psychological effect, gets some credit for the 12 songs on Walk Through Fire, which are relatively optimistic following Yola’s self-released, self-produced 2016 EP Orphan Offering. Moving forward, she employed a newfound commitment to her quest to become the artist she was always meant to be. This album is her natural response—her musical response.
“Everyone and everything seems to be pulling in the same direction as my solo project,” she says. “That’s never happened to me before.”