SPOTLIGHT: Yola on Standing Up and Claiming Her Majesty [VIDEO]
Stacy Chandler
Posted On July 19, 2021
Photo by Seth Dunlap
EDITOR’S NOTE: Yola is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for July 2021. Read more about her and her new album, Stand For Myself (out July 30), in our feature story, and look for more from Yola all month long.
“Now I’m alive,” Yola sings throughout the title track of her new album, Stand For Myself, out July 30. And buddy, you can feel it.
The song, written with album producer Dan Auerbach, Hannah V, and Natalie Hemby, addresses breaking out of boxes built by others and embracing your true self and your greatest potential. It speaks to the genre-fication, bigotry, and limitations she once encountered in her personal and professional life, and how she broke out of it all.
“The song’s protagonist ‘token’ has been shrinking themselves to fit into the narrative of another’s making, but it becomes clear that shrinking is pointless,” Yola explains in a press release for the song.
“This song is about a celebration of being awake from the nightmare supremacist paradigm,” she continues. “Truly alive, awake, and eyes finally wide open and trained on your path to self-actualization. You are thinking freely and working on undoing the mental programming that has made you live in fear. It is about standing for ourselves throughout our lives and real change coming when we challenge our thinking. This is who I’ve always been in music and in life. There was a little hiatus where I got brainwashed out of my own majesty, but a bitch is back.”
Watch Yola perform the song, majesty fully in place, at Easy Eye Sound’s studio in Nashville in the video below:
