Yola: from London to Nashville's soul country star | The music

IIt's the end of the summer when Yola – or Yolanda Quartey, as she was then – has fallen behind on her rent. His roommate fell ill and had to move; Yola was 21, a young singer who still finds her bearings in the music industry at London's Gorge. When her landlord forced her to leave, she was confident that she would find someone with whom to stay until she got her next job. "I knew everything would be fine," she said, shrugging her shoulders. "If I could just stay a little younger."

It was not good, though. The friends and colleagues she called were all very sorry, but accommodating her was not practical. "The rejections were all very mild, very reasonable, but ultimately, I was alone," she says. "Then I ran out of credit on my phone, so I could not call anyone." Yola spent the next nights sleeping on the streets.

More than a decade later, the singer-songwriter is brimming with his first album, Walk Through Fire, at the age of 35. She gives up her homelessness spell with characteristic good humor. "There is a bush in Hoxton Square and I made a big hole," she recalls. "I was begging for food in my artsy sarouel and people were saying," What are you doing here? "And I said:" Everything went wrong, my friends are worthless. "

Yola's personality spans the entire disc, a buffet of country-soul and break-up songs, accompanied by violin, mandolin, Wurlitzer and more, and produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys under his own label Easy Eye. Yola's powerful voice is not just the big, blunt end that impresses – though it immediately makes an impact in the chorus of the opening song, Faraway Look. His true magic lies in the depth of his emotions and experience, as well as in a dynamic range that can go from comforting whispering to a war cry in the space of a few lines.

It's a voice that many will have heard without knowing it. Since the age of 18, Yola has lent her voice (and writing skills) to many pieces of music, ranging from Katy Perry songs to Will Young pop ballads to Chase & Status dance pieces. ; she toured with Bugz in the Attic and worked with Mbadive Attack.

It's only been two years, though, that Yola has started making the music she's always wanted. "I have never been able to expose my ideas because I've always been the girl in the group and who would listen to it? It was always shh, just singing. When she launched her solo career in 2016, the answer was instantaneous: two consecutive honors in the Americana Music Association Awards and a warm welcome to Nashville, a city embraced her music so quickly that she "s in it. she became her second homeland. This has been a statement that changes the life of a woman who says that as a young black woman who grew up in the West, she always had a hard time belonging. Faraway Look's lyrics – "Are you haunted and do you want more?" – are an eloquent summary of a woman waiting and hoping for a breakthrough.

Yola does not remember her Ghanaian father, who left before the age of two. His mother belonged to the "last generation of Windrush": a psychiatric nurse who had emigrated in the 1970s with a one-way trip from Barbados. Yola is certain to have regretted: "A whole generation of people did it. It was the worst bait and switch. "You do not want to be in Barbados, it's really beautiful in Milton Keynes!"

Yola's mother was a practical, stoic woman who had moved her family to the extremely white city of Portishead because she imagined a better life. But the work was difficult to find and Yola remembers that her mother was buzzing on motorbikes between dozens of different jobs. In addition to nursing and care, she was the lady of Avon and worked at the supermarket. When the money was tight, she was looting the trash cans behind the store for discarded food.

"The crowd was real," says Yola. "We knew we were too poor for Santa Claus. We used to get bath products for Christmas – end-of-line vibrations, for a quarter of an hour or so, it was a treat. "As a nearly black girl in town – with the exception of her older sister – Yola has never been allowed to forget otherness." People may have seen us all. but they were always suspicious, they were watching the alleys to make sure you were not stealing, I got used to being placatory and too kind. "

The music was a place where she could feel that she belonged. Her mother's record collection – Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Dolly Parton and Elton John – was a haven and she soon found herself in a cult setting. At age four, she told her mother that she would become a singer when she was grown up. "But because she was so practical, it was a fictional concept for her."

Yola's mother forbade her to continue her music, so when she was a teenager, Yola's rehearsals and concerts became a secret business, disguised as pajamas with friends. She studied at the university, dropped out of school and, after the London crisis, returned to Bristol, where she became the star of a country-rock band called Phantom Limb.

They separated after eight years in what she described as "difficult" circumstances, and the feeling that members of her group had never taken her seriously still intertwines her conversation. "Before, every night I had a tight throat," says Yola. "I lost my voice because of stress." Now she's finally singing the music that she likes, she says, she has regained the ability to sing some high soprano notes that she's had lost.

After a lifetime of being a stranger, Yola believes she has finally found her people – in America, Nashville and Auerbach. The album was a collaborative process, with contributions from country and bluegrbad icons, including Vince Gill, Stuart Duncan and Ronnie McCoury – not to mention Nashville's most popular guitarist, Molly Tuttle.

Yola's joy of joining this community is obvious; being a black woman in a traditionally white genre does not matter, she says, and her songs are not strictly country, anyway. But she is sensitive to race and color issues in the music industry. "I feel like I have to be good, because there are not a lot of dark-skinned women doing what I do," she says. Try to think of a darker female artist than Kelly Rowland who runs a group. It's difficult, is not it?

Yola chose the title of the Walk Through Fire album because of the experience she had when her kitchen caught fire four years ago. She laughed realizing that even then, her life was better than ever.

"I've also realized how many houses I had to go to," she says. "Everyone said," You must come and stay with me! ""

• Walk Through Fire was released on February 22 on Easy Eye Sound / Nonesuch. Yola visits the UK in May and June