Get to know: Yaya Bey

Often we forget that creating art is a difficult and vulnerable thing, and often it can threaten to leave the artist exhausted, tired and depleted once it's finished. They take their time to create a project, hoping that the audience is patient enough to take it in. Sometimes they don't even think about the audience, after everything is all said and done, and the comments are just a drop in the ocean. But for some musicians, the album isn't even the hardest part, but it's living with it afterwards.

“This album campaign has been so hard”, Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Yaya Bey confesses. “Maybe it’s because the last one was so hard, and it just rolled into this one. I think I came into it feeling a little discouraged."

“Sometimes I wonder if even what I say matters anymore.”

Across the Atlantic, Yaya Bey might be one of the most important voices of her generation and has created the thoughtful and weighted do it afraid.

It’s been a quiet emergence for the New York-born artist, which fits her demeanour to a tee, who grew up in Jamaica Queens, a community full of blackness and diversity who, has also lived in "Chocolate City", DC, before returning to the east coast. She made her debut, Remember Your North Star, in 2022 before following it up with Ten Fold.

do it afraid is different to Ten Fold, which expressed her grief and loss at the passing of her father, making sense of the COVID pandemic and heartache. This new album, whilst light in some ways, is equally or even more so dark.

Yaya found the time to speak to New Wave Magazine about her album, carrying the weight of expectation, the flimsical nature of the music industry, and articulates on the state of affairs in America and the wider world.

“I think it’s taboo to even say that”, she said, continuing her train of thought, “because when you have an album campaign, the onlookers are expecting you to be really excited about it and it’s not that I’m not excited about it. I think that I’m just afraid to put myself out there again.”

“I used to write and read a lot of poetry”, Yaya shares as we discuss ‘raisins’, one of the tracks released in the run-up to the album. “I think maybe I started writing songs and poems at around the same time, but maybe poetry made me a stronger songwriter.”

“There are similarities”, she answered, comparing poetry and songwriting, “but I think songwriting is a step further in the sense that there is musicality as well. In a beat poem, there is some music and cadence, but there is musical technicality in songwriting.” Love Jones, The Last Poets and Jil Scott-Heron all come up in conversation as broad influences.

Speaking about ‘Raisins’ further, she said: “There was a lot of emotion pinned up. Especially on whether the things that I am going for are attainable and if they’re not, just like (the realisation that) life is still worth living, and that reminded me of Langston Hughes’ poem ‘Harlem’, where he says what happens to a dream deferred does it shrivel up like a raisin in the sun.”

Asked how she came to name the project, she said: “ It was really the point that I was at in life, I was in between labels and trying to figure out new management. I think I was understanding that this might be my last album for a while.

“Not forever”, she hurriedly corrected. “For longer than I’m used to taking a break, and there is all this weight going into it, and also out of a lot of things that have happened in the past year, I have got to sit with it now, and go out and be happy.

“Sometimes, there is a weight to being happy too.”

“Life is nuanced in the way that while grief is happening, joy is also happening, you know, it’s not linear and it’s really scary to try to be happy in the midst of not happy emotions.”

“Remember Your North Star is the album most people remember me the most for, but the album after that, some people that I worked with perceived [Ten Fold] as a failure. They switched up on me, and that was really triggering”, Yaya says.

“It’s hard to talk to people every day, give them the best that you got and as soon as the numbers don’t look a certain way then you’re nothing. That’s hard. It’s not how I view myself, because people say all the time that all you have to do is love yourself but you live in a world with other people, who are going to treat you how they view you.”

There is a pleasant variety in the music found on do it afraid. The album overflows with R&B, hip-hop, jazz, soul and dance with the help of a range of producers BADBADNOTGOOD, Exactly, Virginia musical collective Butcher Brown, Rahrah Gabor and Nigel Hall.

However, most of these collaborations were done remotely, with Yaya preferring to work closely with an engineer in the studio.

“I like recording and writing the songs because I think it is the only time that I am not thinking about what people think", she says.

“I don’t have to think about if it’s profitable yet or ect ect. I just get to make the music, which is probably my favourite part of the whole process."

Describing the non-linear-ness of the project, she says, “It’s like I am moving through emotion and I think every album I try to paint the story where I’m at emotionally and mentally at that juncture in my life.

Speaking about 'end of the world', she said: “I’m moving through different types of love songs, ‘end of the world’ is a love song but also does social commentary.”

She pauses for a moment to gather her thoughts before continuing. “Sometimes you know, I don’t know necessarily what it feels like in the UK, but I imagine across the world there is a similar feeling of what the fuck is going on.

“But especially in America, it just feels like, like the world is on fire and I guess, ‘end of the world’ is what it feels like to be in love during the midst of that, because the state of the world impacts your relationships, it impacts your psyche. How you plan and feel about life, and here in the US, we are having conversations about whether we should stay here. It’s a very intense time, alongside like several genocides happening (in the world).

“Right now, people are talking about ICE, I mean, the whole concept of detaining people is horrific. No one is talking about Haitians. They are being deported and detained at a much higher rate than anyone else.”

Social commentary and engaging with the times is something that Yaya has never been afraid of, and as our talk ventures out to wider topics, thoughtfulness and introspection, it highlights the notion that things do exist beyond music, and it’s fitting that that is where the conversation comes to a natural close.

Yaya Bey is set to start touring in America across the East and West coast in September. 

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