Yola - Symphony

Yola is a singer/songwriter and actress. She released her solo debut album in 2019, which was nominated for 4 Grammys, including Best New Artist and Best Americana Album, and Rolling Stone named it one of the best country albums of the year. But the thing is, Yola’s music career wasn’t new, and her background wasn’t in country music. She’s from Bristol in the UK, and starting back in the early 2000s, she was a vocalist recording tracks for DJs and electronic music producers. In January 2025, Yola put out an EP called My Way. And as you’ll hear her explain in this episode, a lot of her new music is motivated by wanting to assert her identity beyond the Americana and country music boundaries. In addition to her music, she’s also acting – she played Sister Rosetta Tharpe in the 2022 film Elvis, and she starred on Broadway in the musical Hadestown. For this episode, I talked to Yola about her song “Symphony,” along with co-writer and co-producer Sean Douglas. Yola and Sean trace the journey of the song “Symphony,” and, along with it, Yola traces her own journey, too. For more info, visit songexploder.net/yola https://songexploder.net/yola.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 1:18Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This episode is sponsored by the podcast, What It's Like to Be. Do you ever think about what other people's workdays look like? Satisfying some of that curiosity is the idea at the heart of bestselling author Dan Heath's podcast, which is called What It's Like to Be. In each episode, Dan interviews someone from a different profession to find out what it's like to be a professional Santa Claus, or a Secret Service agent, or a long-haul truck driver, or an aerospace engineer at NASA, just to name a few examples. The show gives you an insider view into all kinds of jobs from a wide range of industries, answering questions like, what do mail carriers learn about us from our mail? There are so many jobs out there

• 2:01Hrishikesh Hirway?

  that exist only as titles in our imagination, if they even register that much. This show is a chance to reach beyond what you know or think you know. If you're curious to learn more about the work lives of other people, check out What It's Like to Be, wherever you get podcasts.

• 2:17Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I've talked about Quince before on the show and how some of my favorite clothes are things that I've gotten from their website. But they have a lot of categories beyond clothes. For example, I just ordered a cotton velvet tree skirt, which is the thing that goes around the Christmas tree to hide the stand and the cords from the lights and stuff. And it also catches pine needles. I grew up with an artificial tree, so I'm kind of new to the ways of having a real tree. But Quince is letting me step my game up. And everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. So it's a great place to do all of your holiday shopping, whether you're buying clothes or accessories or stuff for your house. Give the gift of quality this holiday season.

• 2:58Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. It's now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was Song Exploder. It's the best way to support the show. This episode has some explicit and adult language. Yola is a singer, songwriter, and actress. She released her solo debut album in 2019, which was nominated for four Grammys, including Best New Artist and Best Americana Album, and Rolling Stone named it one of the best country albums of the year. But the thing is, Yola's music career wasn't new.

• 3:43Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And her background wasn't in country music. She's from Bristol in the UK. And starting back in the early 2000s, she was a vocalist, recording tracks for DJs and electronic music producers.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  I cut my teeth on a little known scene called the Broken Beat Scene in West London, being like a front woman for hire. And I got hired by a group called Bugs in the Attic. It had a lot of jazz in it, had a lot of funk in it. It had a dancey element to it. And that was like a big part of what built me.

• 4:19Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And so in January 2025, Yola put out an EP called My Way. And as you'll hear her explain in this episode, a lot of her new music is motivated by wanting to assert her identity beyond the Americana and country music boundaries. In addition to her music, she's also acting. She played Sister Rosetta Tharp in the 2022 film Elvis, and she starred on Broadway in the musical Hades Town. For this episode, I talked to Yola about her song Symphony, along with co-writer and co-producer Sean Douglas. Coming up, Yola and Sean trace the journey of the song Symphony. And along with it, Yola traces her own journey, too.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  When I first landed here, when I moved from the UK to the US, I'd lost my mother and I was kind of communing with the music that me and my mother bonded over, which was a lot of Shania Twain, to be honest, and some Dolly and some other things. But and so I kind of went into that space with the will to commune with her a little bit musically. But then, once I was done with that, it dawned on me that like, people didn't seem to exercise a whole lot of curiosity as to how the hell I got here. And it's, oh, because you're centering the things that we need you to center, which is that you're holding legendary white artists aloft. You're centering whiteness, which society wants generally.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  I was like, that's not my mission in life. I'm allowed to be a fan without decapitating my entire personality. But my story is going to be different because I'm from a different continent. And my parents are from Barbados and Ghana. And just being first generation and being Brit, all of that makes my story. And so when I was writing this song, well, just before I was writing this song, I was dating. And I think I needed to move cities to date.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  I was still living in Nashville and I was flying to New York today. Yeah, I spent like a summer staying at my friend's house. And we went to these cool little hip hop fifty events that were going on around the sea. And I just felt like everywhere I went, I was having a different permutation of blackness that was like not related to the other in any way. And so like, I felt like I was just in this place where I was a living example of non-monolithic blackness. And that was really feeding to me. And that, as a result, the likelihood of me finding my person was gonna be there. And so I then made a mission to spend some time in New York and be dating more seriously.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  That's what this era has been, has been me realizing that if I don't tell my story now, then my narrative will be co-opted by people who love the mammy paradigm. The plus-size, dark-skinned, black woman in service, who joyfully and willfully shucks her own agency. And that is not remotely in my personality type. And that didn't just manifest in the creative space. It was in a lot of spaces where I was the assumed fat friend. People didn't understand that their fat phobia feeds into the nature of their anti-blackness. And so specifically with the song Symphony,

• 8:13Speaker 01

  that's a really kind of like, I'm being loved on song. In full recognition that people my hue and my build are not the centre of rom-coms habitually. And so there's an element of resistance in writing a reality where you're being aggressively loved on.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  I would start these groups, I call them starter groups. And the idea of forming them was exclusively because I play a little guitar. But the things that I can imagine are way beyond what I can play on a gazillion instruments. And I need to find someone to help me translate what's in my head. And so the starter team was like a way of making sure that we could get into my brain and figure out what the hell's going on in there. I would take what I call a nugget, and it's a voice note, that's a nugget. I was going, I'm not even doing all the words yet, I'm just doing vowels.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  So I took it to this duo called The Privilege, Christopher and Christian, to do a pre-demo. And we're not trying to finish it, we're just trying to get the spirit. Christopher and Christian are twins and they're great. They were coming through Nashville and we found this studio downtown, rented this space. And so one hopped on the drums, other one hopped on bass, and they just started letting down that bass line.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  And I was like, okay, so we're already in.

• 10:13Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So you have this hook and, okay, this is an idea for a song. What is this song about? Did you already know?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. That hook, that I'll put you onto this body of mine is very kind of like presumptive. It's very like, congratulations, you've won the competition of access to these titties. And like, it's very like, congratulations, you've won the competition. You get to smash this bitch. Like, it's very, it's very like that, you know?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  In this moment, I talk a lot in production terms. I'll be like, oh, I really visualize a kind of Parliament funk atelic style stacked vocal. And the idea is to try and extricate the spirit to make sure that we don't miss anything. We don't need to do any more thrills outside of that. But if we, we need to do everything that is necessary to get the spirit right.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  I purposefully leave space for perspective because I want to collaborate. I love it. It's my favorite part. And then that's when I show it to Sean and Zach.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  My name's Sean Douglas and I work with a great writer, producer Zach Skelton very often. And he and I were both big fans of the stuff Yola put out and didn't know where she was musically at the time, but just had a hang and she's obviously insanely talented. Like Yola brought in these seeds of songs and a lot of them bore this frustration or complications of old relationships. And this one really stood out because it was really visceral and it felt overtly in your body and felt overtly positive. I do remember it was a few days, it must have been a few days into us working together. Cause I remember being much more comfortable with the idea that like Zach and I heard this thing, this amazing verse and this bassline that is like super catchy in and of itself.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  It was interesting to sort of like take a couple of days and sort of figure out the, what exactly you wanted to do because it wasn't anything you had done before.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  No, especially with a celebration song like this, you have to explain the rest of it. Like what are you even, you're gonna put someone onto your body? Like what, that's not even a thing people say. And so you have to, you have to kind of deconstruct, why is this important?

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Because, you know, people don't center, you know, the fat black femme in a romantic guise in a way that's highly celebratory and highly sex positive and highly valued. And that's what this song is. And it's not very often that I meet people who can get out of the way of their own agenda for long enough to hear what's in my head, especially people of stature, writing wise. And so that's something that is mad rare, and I'm mad grateful to Sean for it. Like, it's a good ass time.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you, me and Zach, we lucked out with a kind of that mind meld, yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  The mind meld.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  We started working on it at Zach Skelton's studio over here in West Hollywood. She came to us with the bassline and that melody.

• 13:33Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Sometimes when there's material that's been started before, you know, you'll pull up stems and start writing off

• 13:39Speaker 01

  We did.

• 13:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

  the elements that were already there.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  To make it kind of easier to work on, Zach pulled the stems into his session. And then Zach added this breakbeat.

• 13:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  One of my favorite parts, one of the things I love in this song is this guy.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  That's Zach.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that little vocal sample is one of the first things Zach added to the little stems once he pulled them in. If you grew up on like hip hop things and DJ Premier beats and things like that, you you just want a cool vocal sample. It just gives the whole thing some muscle. So then we were kind of looping that verse and kind of singing the verse part over that.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  So you're in the groove and then riding this bassline and you sort of build up all this tension. You're not going anywhere harmonically different, you know, you're sitting in that pocket, which feels really good.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  I was on the roads.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  And we can just play in that same tempo. So once you do that for, you know, 16 bars, you're going to want to stretch and and go to this, you know, bigger sort of chordal moment.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  I started playing that progression. I was like, we can get a little poppier here. And she was super down for that.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  I felt like when you started playing those chords, I started hearing a reacting melody.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  And we just go then and want, got this big soul chorus out of it.

• 15:45Hrishikesh Hirway?

  My conversation with Yola and Sean Douglas continues after this.

• 15:52Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 16:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 18:05Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 18:43Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So the three of you made this demo in Zach's studio. Did you have a plan for what you were going to do with it after that?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, we then go into Gold Diggers and record a bunch of stuff. And it was very much a testing situation of like, do I need to do a live session? I'm going to have to do one to find out whether that's what I want to do because this is my first time since being in the country that I've had the opportunity to do it.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  In Gold Digger Studio, we got all the live guys playing for a couple of days, get live takes and it was just so fun to do because it's just not the norm for me.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  A drummer that I really rate and it was just an absolute beast, Howard Artis.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  We toured together for years, really stunning player. I was like, he's 100% the drummer.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  So Divinity Rocks bass player. Might know her from, I don't know, Beyonce? I was like, I want her fingers doing the magic on this particular bassline.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, and she did an amazing job of, you know, that bend is so specific in the demo that to get the same feel for the live recording was kind of, I didn't think we would get it. I thought we'd honestly go back to the other one, but she crushed.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  She crushed.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  So that was like the foundation of what the beginning of like the live session idea is that I was really close to some real monsters, some real badasses.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Who's singing there?

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Oh my goodness gracious. If you speak to anyone that's ever played in a live band of mine, they'll tell you I've got a problem with putting mics in front of everyone's faces. I'm like, everyone's singing. I love a group vocal.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  This is when I get into my vocal biomechanics lecturing bag. So specifically vocally, I asked for a metso soprano vocal with a lot of low formant in the voice. And then I asked for a soprano singer with a lot of soft palate resonance.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  And when the backing vocalists were recording their parts, were you in the room with them? Were you singing along with them? Or were you in the control room?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  I was in the control room, pointing and waving. And that was my time to run the session. When vocals come in, then I'm producer. And then when guitars or keys come in, then Sean's producer. When another instrument comes in, Zach's producer. But that was a moment where they looked at me like, this is literally what you lectured. Do it.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Yola got hyper-specific with them about intonation and sort of phrasing of it. And it's amazing how much that changes the way it comes through.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  And like, singing that is like a diaphragm workout. When we were tracking the BGVs, remember? And I was like, in front of the glass with like, my gut fully out, okay? Like belly button on show situation. And I'm literally going, if I don't see diaphragmatic hits, you're not sitting this right. I need to see guts move.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  Just take your time, just take your time, I will not break.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  You can't really do the vocal if you're not doing the big hits.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Your heart go round, chills up my spine, chills up my spine. You make the music start and start and start, go on.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  The hook is really tight, like staccato and syncopated. It needed something that was the antithesis of that. And so, we needed a big tada.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  I felt like once we got to the horn stacks, the whole song feels just physical. Once you got there, you start to go, oh yeah, this is like a record.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  When I used to be on tour, kind of in my Bugs in the Attic era, we were doing this festival in Australia called Good Vibrations Festival. And we were opening for James Brown, no less. And I'd see him for about a month. We'd all sit together. And I feel like the outro of Symphony, you'll hear me go, wah, wah, hey, hey, hey, oh. Then I go into, your love, your love, give me, your love, your love, your love, your love. Your love, your love, your love, your love, your love, give me.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Your love, your love, your love, your love, your love, your love, your love, your love. That wouldn't be out of place on a house tune.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Because that was my other bread and butter. I was the house vocal for DJ producers on lots and lots of house tunes. And all of that history, this song is piecing together. Sonically, all the different parts of my life, vocally, they are snapshots right the way through.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  I remember we were in Gold Digger Studio and she would, you know, knock out her leads in like three takes.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Oh, how you make me sing. Oh, the joy, the revelation that you bring.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Which for me and Zach working in more pop leaning stuff is like a rarity, but such a luxury. And she just crushes it and you go, oh, that's awesome. The engineers and me and Zach were just kind of like looking through the glass into the booth and just kind of jaws on the floor moment. It was crazy.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Play my heartstrings with both of your hands. And I sing like a symphony, sing like a symphony. I love collaborating. I love being part of a team. And so that's what led me to these songs of celebration and just a little bit of introspection on my situation.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  I feel like this song really encapsulates the joy of mind melds. And it's kind of like about finding my partner, Henry here, and a mind meld of a different kind. And so, yeah, the kind of lyrics of this song are very like luxuriating in this kind of smugness of finding someone. But I wrote it before I met him. I wrote it to manifest him. And then he turned up and it was exactly this song and that was it.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  And now here's Symphony by Yola in its entirety.

• 26:29Speaker 04

  I'll put you on, I'll put you on To this body of mine, of mine, of mine, oh mine What you give up, what you give up You will get back this time, this time, this time, oh mine Oh, how you make me sing Oh, the joyful revelation that you bring There's nothing better than this Just being in the warmth of your embrace Where we're going, we can't come back

• 27:12Speaker 04

  Feel the tempo, just like that Play my heartstrings with both of your hands And I'll sing like a symphony, sing like a symphony for you Hey

• 27:34Speaker 04

  Just take your time, just take your time I will not break your heart, your heart, your heart, your heart Chills up my spine, chills up my spine You make the music start, and start, and start, go on Oh, you make me scream Yeah, your breath on my neck is pure living Singing the melody Oh, the gentle lyric whispered in my ear Where we're going, we can't come back

• 28:17Speaker 04

  Feel the tempo, just like that Play my heartstrings with both of your hands And I'll sing like a symphony, sing like a symphony

• 28:38Speaker 04

  Give me, give me, give me, give me. Give me. Your love, your love. Give me. Your love, your love. Give me. Your love, your love, your love, your love. When we dance, we can't come back. You're the tempo, just like that. You're my, my sweet, over your hands. And I'm singing like a symphony. Singing like a symphony. Wow. Hey, hey, hey, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 29:19Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Visit songexploder.net/iola to learn more and to find links to buy or stream this song. This episode was produced by me, along with Craig Ely, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan, with production assistance from Tiger Biscuit. Special thanks to Christian and Christopher Underwood from The Privilege for their help. The episode artwork is by Carlos Larma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, you can sign up for my newsletter. You can find a link to it on the Song Exploder website.

• 30:02Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You can also follow me on Instagram, and you can get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Thanks for listening.