Bristol born
country-soul singer and songwriter Yola Carter took some time to chat with me
after her set at the Nashville Meets London festival in Canary Wharf. Read on
below to find out her views on finding her sound through Dolly Parton,
‘5-second writing’, and love and loss.
Ciara’s Country: First
of all Yola, nice to meet you, and can I say what a fantastic set today!
Yola Carter (YC): Thank
you!
CC: How did you
find playing in front of the Nashville Meets London crowd?
YC: It’s a
beautiful venue, crowd were great and really attentive, which is a thing when
you’re a singer songwriter – you want to have a crowd that really loves to
listen. I loved it.
CC: And I think
we all really enjoyed it as well, particularly because you have a very unique
style – we heard some ballads out there, a lot of soul, some country, and even
some yodelling – how did you find your sound?
YC: Well it was
like I was dousing for who I was, you know? Like as a Black woman, in the UK,
you get a lot of things that you should be thrust upon you, like you should be
doing this, you should be doing that, and I never was much of a ‘normo’ by any
stretch of the imagination, and so the whole ‘should’ never really fit me as a
person, and so I was like listening to music in my Mum’s living room, and she
had like a special kind of record case with all of her most precious records –
I wasn’t allowed to touch all of them – and I was just going through and I’d
find things like Dolly, Staple Singers, and I had no idea what it was that I
was getting into, but I just loved it! And I listened to pop music and such
growing up – that was great but it didn’t sit with me in the same way. So that
was me as a kid, I grow up, I do a bunch of different things in my teens, and
these little instances keep coming up of like being sat in my friend’s living
room and listening to her Dad’s records and playing hippy music, and
alt-country, Neil Young, CSN, and I was always around that environment so then
going and doing things. It took me a while to decide what I wanted to do and I
found myself pushing projects that I was into towards what my agenda was, and
now I’m doing my own thing, it’s just ultimate freedom.
CC: That sounds
great! We can definitely see a lot of those influences in your music, in your
songwriting style – can you tell me a bit about the creative process when it
comes to writing your songs?
YC: Well, my
writing process is me on the couch with my guitar watching Bargain Hunt, cause I’m never really looking for a song. For this
record, and I’ve also demo-ed up an album which we’re going to post soon,
you’ll be able to find it probably on Soundcloud, I was just writing in this
way, just going around chords not really looking for anything, and then I’d
find something and be like ‘okay, that’s nice’, and then something springs into
my head. And I’m one of those really annoying ‘5-second writers’ that a
progression happens and then the song jumps into my head almost entirely
complete. Not all the time! To start with I wasn’t really playing a lot of guitar
so I didn’t have all the chords I wanted, so I’d play as much as I could and
then Kit, who plays lead, I’d go ‘How do I play this?’ or ‘How does this go?’
so he was a real help, certainly at the beginning before I got my fingers truly
oiled. But the vast majority was me on the couch playing a pretty hack guitar
but with the purpose of having the feel, the chords, the idea. And I wrote
fifty songs that way in a relatively short space of time because I wasn’t
really paying attention and I realised that there was a lot going on in my
head, and when you collaborate a lot, a lot of your own ideas get stuck in
there, and so I had a big old cleanout!
CC: What would
you say has been the most interesting song that you’ve ever written?
YC: Jeez Louise!
I don’t know, that’s a really hard one. I don’t know how to answer that, I
really don’t. Maybe Heed My Words,
just because writing about death is always a little bit overreal. And maybe Free to Roam, because it’s a really
happy song about losing your mum.
CC: I suppose the
storywriting process is very much a part of country and soul as well.
YC: Yes, I think
that’s actually what I find most fun, most interesting – the process, and
writing Free to Roam, like I’d lost
my mum and I was having a real conflicted time about it because she was
troubled, we were troubled, everything was troubled, and like the song came to
me, first the baseline, and then the lyrics started coming up so I was like ‘I
need to get this down!’ So first I was like singing into my phone because I
don’t play bass so there I am just singing it into the phone and I’m trying to
work out the way the bass wants to go to the vocal part that’s in my head. So
I’m just singing each part in and then I’m singing in the acoustic parts and
bits that I know how they go, but it came as a response to an epiphany that I
had as a response to just feeling better about the whole situation.
CC: So quite a
cathartic process then.
YC: Yeah, in a
really big way.
CC: Finally, my
last question for you is what’s the one question you wish you were asked in
interviews but never have been?
YC: Oh my
goodness gracious! I think, like writers always want to be asked about the
motivation behind they’re writing, but you’ve already asked that, and that’s my
favourite question! It is, because we’re storytellers, so we want to talk about
our stories, not always about us, but also about people we know, so that’s my
straight-up favourite question – what’s your writing process, what are your
songs about. People don’t ask me that enough.
CC: Alright then!
And I think we’ve all loved hearing the stories behind some of your songs
today. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me today Yola and thank you for
a great concert!
YC: Thank you!
Big thanks to Yola for
taking the time to talk to me, and if you’ve not heard her music, do yourself a
favour and check it out! You can keep up to date with myself and Yola on
Twitter at @CiarasCountry and @iamyolacarter
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