Yaya Bey Comes Back Around

Image by Chris Panicker, photo by Nikita Freyermuth

This year’s solar eclipse was a full-circle event for Yaya Bey. Seven years ago, she was fresh off getting hitched and set out on a road trip to see the last eclipse in totality in Nashville for her honeymoon with her now ex-husband. Her life soon spiraled into a black hole. “I am exactly where I was in 2017, but in a different way,” she says softly, tucked into a booth at an empty disco-themed Bushwick bar, swimming in oversized, earth-toned ensemble that almost camouflages her. “When I came back [to New York], that’s when my life changed because that marriage didn’t last.”

Today, on a semi-cloudy afternoon in Brooklyn, the Queens-raised singer-songwriter is newly married again and no longer writing from a place of despair. After the release of her 2022 album, Remember Your North Star, and its epilogue, Exodus the North Star, which both charted the dizzying ebb and flow of grief and self-love, she took a long, dramatic exhale and emerged with Ten Fold. Her new album is an attempt to free herself from a sudden cyclone of expectations, pressure, and self-doubt that arose in the throes of a career ascension that dovetailed with the death of her father, Ayub Bey, a rapper/producer named Granddaddy I.U., best known for his 1990 debut album Smooth Assassin. “I think I’m still in the denial stage of grief,” Yaya says. “I haven’t gotten to the place where it’s real. I needed to stay busy. I needed to give myself to something.”

Ten Fold is an album that bends in the breeze, with playfully hardy songs like the gentle, bass-propelled “the evidence” and the shiny, loping house-influenced single “Sir Princess Bad Bitch,” an affirmational, Issa-style mirror moment with a secure mantra: “I wouldn’t ever rather be/No other thing but the thing I am.” Yaya loops her father’s patois vocals on “so fantastic,” a lithe dance track that sounds like an outtake from a ’90s Reggae Gold mix; she pays tribute to his sophisticated style in the music video for her single, “me and all my niggas,” a plush, kicking memo on resilience. Her voice dips into piercing lower pockets throughout the album and with her signature devastating honesty.

When we meet, it’s an hour before the eclipse. Yaya admits she’s still battling bouts of imposter syndrome, but she’s gotten better at quieting the noise in her head, which is usually her own voice. She’s more settled than she was the last time the moon blocked the sun.

Pitchfork: The last time we spoke, in 2022, you said you were emerging from a dark space. Ten Fold sounds like a reprieve.

Yaya Bey: Ten Fold feels like I’m not even the same person I was when I made North Star. 2023 radically shifted who I am. I’m not trying to prove anything to anyone. I have what I need. Everything I’m doing right now is to satiate my genuine urges, but it’s not coming from a place of lack. When I made North Star, I was in despair. And even though I was grieving when I made Ten Fold—I’m still grieving—I’m not in despair. I have more of a willingness to surrender to the seasons of my life.

Does this album continue the thread of North Star or is it a new chapter altogether?

Ten Fold is a whole new chapter. Last year was like a fever dream. I was so broke when North Star came out. I was three months behind on my rent, feeling like, how in the fuck am I really gonna be a musician? I done gave so much of my life to this shit, and then in the blink of an eye, I got a publishing deal for a substantial amount of money. And then I went to Europe for the first time, and I came back, and my dad died. I kept getting booked for shows and the money kept coming in. It was like, well, you asked for a career and now you have it. I was definitely under a lot of pressure.

Did recording this album feel therapeutic?

I don’t think I’ve known grief in this way, and I haven’t taken a hit this big before. Life has definitely brought me to my knees, but nothing like this. I’m growing. I’m trying. But it’s a really vulnerable place to be. I remember I was recording the NPR’s Tiny Desk recently, and when we got to “reprise,” the song about my parents, everything felt like it was collapsing. I had this lump in my throat, and I was winded because I have Long COVID, and I hit these flat notes. I had this complete breakdown when I finished the set. When I got in the Uber on my way home, the crying that I was doing was guttural.

I think I felt pressure to hold it together. My dad died, and I didn’t even take bereavement. It was right as I had a breakthrough in my career where I could make a living off of this. He didn’t have life insurance. I had to pay for that funeral, and then I became the breadwinner in my immediate family. You know when it’s like, if I sit down, I’m not getting back up? I felt like that.

What emotions came up during this recording process?

Most immediately, my imposter syndrome. Coming up as a musician, I was always told I’m a singer who can’t sing. I honestly have a lot of friends who think I can’t sing. Some are more outright with it. Some people come to my show, they’re front and center, and when it’s over, they have nothing to say. I’m more confident in my writing than I am in my singing. I don’t think that I can’t sing. I haven’t come into myself vocally in this way where I’m like, “This is my vocal identity.” I come at songs so much from the writer’s standpoint. I write them, and then I have to figure out how to sing them.

I disagree with those friends. Also, it sounds like you’re taking your voice to new places on this album, going to a lower register.

The whole album had a different vocal approach. I tried different things with my lower register and head voice. Some people are vocalists first. For me, it’s about the story and the melodic journey. I think for a long time I felt like my talent isn’t valid if I’m not this great vocalist. Music is a very pretentious space, so I had a lot of messaging that made me doubt myself. People take a lot of shots at me, a lot of digs, and I always take it on the chin. And in my mind, I’m like, one day, things are going to change.

I hear you assuming that fight stance on tracks like “Career Day,” where you sing, “Who do you wanna be when you grow up? Me.” Did recording those songs help you power through the self-doubt?

When I wrote “Career Day,” I was still in shock that it worked out because it took so long, and it took so much sacrifice and so many low lows. Now, it’s like, fuck, I can pay my rent. I feel like people are always trying to humble me in general, and it spills over into the music business. When Pitchfork gave me Best New Music, it introduced me to the indie space, and the indie space is white. Black people are tokenized in that space, and anytime Black people are tokenized, they’re expected to be docile. I’m not shy about expressing my politics at my shows, and a lot of incel white men come to my shows and are furious afterward. They go on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube and complain. They want to tussle. They want to fight, and they want to humble me. It’s weird. In my music, I can fight back when I’m disempowered. I’m working on that in real life, too, but it helps to approach it through the music first. When I write, that’s where I feel like I have authority.

You described “chasing the bus” as a departure from self-doubt.

“Chasing the bus” is metaphorical. It sounds like I’m talking about a romantic relationship. What I’m actually talking about is the people around me who encourage my self-doubt. When you meet people in your life at a time when you aren’t certain of yourself, people get comfortable with you being that person. And then there’s this guilt that comes when you want to depart from that because you can feel that they want you to stay there.

Please tell me how you came up with the title “Carl Thomas Sliding Down the Wall.”

You know how sometimes in the group chat, when girls be going through some shit with their boyfriends, and they’re like, “Damn, this nigga got me sliding down the wall”? Or, you know in the movies where the white lady has a breakdown, and she’s sliding down the wall? When you think about Carl Thomas, what do you think? He’s emotional. He’s in his feelings. “Carl Thomas sliding down the wall.”

[Laughs] What, of the many ridiculous things our New York City Mayor Eric Adams has done, inspired the critique on “Eric Adams in the Club”?

I wrote “Eric Adams in the Club” on a day when the sky was orange and shit because of the smoke [from the Canadian wildfires], and that night, Eric Adams was in the club with Robert De Niro. That’s the line, “The world might be on fire/Dance, this shit is dire.” I saw this social media post that said when you’re in dark times, dance music is what is the most popular. I tried to find that space where you can dance and then come home. I have a friend who’s also a musician, and we go back and forth about whether it’s better to write accessible songs or go deeper. I like the approach of making it accessible. You ain’t gotta pull out a dictionary. I’ve been exploring clever ways to convey a deeper message. New York has been gentrified in all these inaccessible ways through academia, class, and status, and every fucking thing is over-intellectualized. I think about: Who do I want to come with me?

Your husband produced “Eric Adams.” How different is it to write from a place of being in love?

It happened so serendipitously, and it was weird. We’d been friends for 13 years, and I’d always had a crush on him, but we were never single at the same time. We started dating in the fall of 2022, and when I came back from Europe, I was supposed to move into an apartment, but it was a scam, so I moved in with him. I had such bad luck with love that in my mind, I was planning a way to get out of it. I was so resistant to it, even though everything was going great. And then [in December], I got the call in the middle of the night that my dad died. I remember sitting on the couch next to my boyfriend at the time, and I was like, Oh, that’s why you’re here. It’s wild because I had this conversation with my dad about dating where he was like, “Don’t bring no nigga here unless you sure. Have somebody that’s gonna be there for you, gonna be loyal to you.” That was such an odd conversation because, even at my big age, my dad refused to acknowledge that I dated, so hearing him telling me the type of person he wanted me to have was crazy. But in retrospect, my dad knew he was dying. I wasn’t privy to that. I didn’t know until after he died. So I’m sitting on this couch, and I’m like, this is so I won’t be alone.

What does validation look like to you now?

I went through a lot of rejection, and when I experienced that, I wanted validation. But before I experienced the rejection, I was mostly like, I just wanna make a fucking album that I feel like is fire. I want to make music that I can’t stop listening to. I went on that journey of damn, my peers don’t acknowledge me, and now I’m returning to my original idea of validation. As far as how I feel about the music itself, independent of survival, if I fuck with it, it’s valid.

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork