Shining a light

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This article was published 18/08/2017 (3329 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Yola Carter has two kinds of laughs. There’s one that’s a full-out guffaw — loud, warm and genuine — and then there’s a second one, an infectious, squeaky giggle that sneaks out when something really tickles her.

The latter was the laugh that echoed through the phone as she recalled one of her earliest musical memories, listening to the Jackson Five, and how, as a child, she thought she was already falling behind on the path to success when she found out how old Michael Jackson was when he got his start.

“From about (age) four, I was chomping at the bit. I saw the Jackson Five and I learned that Michael was five years old and I’m like, ‘Is that when people have to start? Oh no!’ So I had this real sense of urgency, that I had to get really good, really quick, or I’d miss the boat somehow… I remember the feeling; it’s hilarious now, but it was kind of worrying then,” Carter, 34, says, laughing that laugh.

The Americana songstress grew up in Bristol, a city in the southwest of England, which she describes as “right-wing conservative,” and not exactly a hotbed of country-music activity. Her mother wasn’t keen on her becoming a singer, but Carter persisted and, by the age of 14, she was taking any gig she could get, performing every genre of music.

Eventually, she shifted into work as a session writer in her later teens, crafting hooks and rearranging vocal lines for artists locally as well as internationally (including for pop star Katy Perry). She continued to do that for more than a decade, adding production work to her skill set along the way so when it came time to make her debut solo EP, 2016’s Orphan Offering, she was prepared on both the artistic and technical levels.

This summer, Carter is in Canada for the first time, playing a handful of shows in the western part of the country; she’s already rolled through festivals in Calgary; Canmore, Alta.; Edmonton and Golden, B.C., and will make her Winnipeg debut at Interstellar Rodeo tonight at The Forks, which will be the only full-band show of her Canadian tour.

Erin Lebar: You spoke earlier about singing every genre growing up — jazz, folk, rock, et cetera — what drew you so strongly to Americana and country as your sound of choice going forward?

Yola Carter: Occasionally we have people that are born into family dynasties, like the Carter family or something, people that maybe grew up in Appalachia and everything that they were around, the tradition was domestic to them. They woke up, they looked out the door, wherever you went, that was life.

But I think the world that we live in at the moment, circa the ’80s, that’s not been life in a lot of the states, that’s not been life in a lot of Canada and Europe and the U.K.; we’ve all gravitated toward things that speak to us regardless of where we’ve been born… because we buy records and we follow what speaks to us and there doesn’t seem to be any sense to that anywhere in the world. I suppose if there was, you wouldn’t sell any records outside of your territory.

Country speaks to people because it tells stories, and it’s still so fiercely human. Whereas pop music and EDM have moved… away from the humanity of things — though there’s still a bit of sentimentality in pop — but they’re not so enthralled with the whole tradition of storytelling as much as we are in country music. That’s what it’s for.

I think country music can lose its way at times and stray too close to pop-country, and can lose that quality, but classic country and the genesis of country, that was the point.

Erin: With storytelling being such a pivotal part of country music, what are the stories you aim to tell?

Yola: This first EP that I’ve done started with a message of hope and of thankfulness for being in a situation, or finding a situation, later in my life that allowed me to do what I’m doing now, that freed me mentally enough that I wasn’t just consumed with fear or reluctance.

I think it’s very easy to get consumed with the things people tell you to do or to think or whatever, and so at first I wanted to be thankful just for the support from people around me that I now have, because I didn’t always have that. Pretty much the first 29 years of my life were… with the worst humans and a handful of nice people, but literally I could count them on one hand… like a complete sh– show (laughs). And so I’ve been talking about coming out of an abusive relationship and trying to be as open as I can about the nuances of that, and poetic as I can be so people can still enjoy (the music) and also as clear as I can so that the code that I speak in pipes out to people in the same situation…

I suppose I talk about growing up a bit; (the song) Orphan Country talks about growing up in a very kind of a broken family situation and a right-wing town and what that might be like for a four-year-old black girl growing up with not much refuge of any kind.

I think sometimes it’s important, especially in the genre that I’m in, to speak as vulnerably and as autobiographically as you can for a short amount of time, before you move away into how you feel about the world.

I don’t know if that quality of vulnerability in black womanhood is something that is talked about or is a point of view that exists in music that I listen to… I wanted to be a little vulnerable so that people remember that ‘strong black woman’ is not an adage that happens the second you pop out of the womb. If you manage to achieve that, that’s through a lot of struggle and a lot of effort.

Erin Lebar: Given everything that’s been happening recently, specifically in Charlottesville, how are you feeling about the world right now?

Yola Carter: Right? What the frick!? What do you say about stuff like that? In an age of terrorism, where we can’t say white people can be terrorists, there’s our problem… we’re in an age of terrorism where we say the word and an image of a skin colour flashes before our eyes, a facial-hair content (and not in a hipster sense) flashes before our eyes, which is so Third Reich it’s terrifying. And you can literally drive through a group of people and the T-bomb is never dropped.

It’s very hard to believe that that’s possible, especially when it’s extremists. We’re living in an age of white extreme terrorism that somehow we’re still not naming.

You’ve got to hope it’s just a matter of time. Or are we just in a situation where it would be very easy for a Nazism situation to come about? And just because we don’t want to name it, it happens again and then history looks on us as the people that didn’t call it out…

When you grow up in a right-wing town like I did, you get afraid that someone is going to drive into you just because you’re dark. I felt that; I had that thought from ages five and six. I look left-right-left again because you think you’re going to get mowed down and they’re not going to slow down…

When you see something like that… that’s been in my mind since childhood. That level of the message of hatred is insidious.

Yes, that happens in the States in Charlottesville, lives were taken and people were injured, but in another situation, that mental threat exists so much more broadly. I don’t know how many black people would be surprised that that happened. I was horrified, but I don’t think that was something outside the realm of my imagination and that’s not cool — that’s a problem.

Erin: Are you discouraged by that? Or does it make you want to fight harder to make things better?

Yola: Yeah, well it does but… for the love of God, I’m a songwriter! Make things better, ha! (laughs) Like, I’m me, right? I’m not deluded. There have been some great writers in the world, but I don’t think that we change the world; I think that we shine a light on things. And the only way any battle gets won in truth is psychologically, is in the mind. They win each mind singularly. They haven’t got the money or the resources to come to each house and make you scared, so the one thing music can do is work on paradigm. That’s the weapon we have as musicians, and that’s what we can wield.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length.

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @NireRabel