Spotlight on Yola Carter

At the end of the summer I headed to the Nashville meets London festival. It was a 2 day festival and I only managed to make it to the Sunday. If I had known then what I knew now, I would have gone to both days, as I missed out on seeing the amazing Yola Carter. The singer, from Bristol, recently released her brilliant debut EP “Orphan Offering” and if you like a lady with a powerful and incredibly expressive voice, then look no further!

Yola Carter is a country-soul singer/songwriter from Bristol, UK, whose recent successes include a much-hyped performance at Americana Fest in Nashville, having been selected by AMA UK as a showcase artist and noted as ‘one to watch’ by publications including The Guardian, NPR, Pitchfork and Wall Street Journal. Heavily influenced from an early age by Sixties country, Stax-era soul and gospel ranging from The Staple Singers to Otis Redding, Yola was raised in a small seaside town in the South West of the England and “always wanted to be a country music artist”.

Yola Carter has now combined her two skillsets of singer-writer and writer/producer to write, record and produce her debut solo EP ‘Orphan Offering’ out November 1st 2016. A set of songs that manage to be autobiographical and intensely personal while speaking to wider socio-political issues, the EP is a living example of an artist building something from nothing: In ‘Dead and Gone’ Carter sings “there was a time when my people were product to you; if we can’t supersede that now, where on Earth am I heading to?” – an explicit reference to assumptions about the role of black female singers in the modern music industry.

I get the feeling that we’ll be hearing much, much more about Yola Carter in the coming weeks, months and dare I say it, years?

To download “Orphan Offering” click here – https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/orphan-offering-ep/id1168615025

Yola Carter: Website, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram