Yaya Bey Comes Back Around – Warungku Terkini

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.

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.