Yaya Bey photographed by Josefina Santos for Rolling Stone on March 24th, 2021 in Brooklyn, New York. Styled by Alexa Brown
Josefina Santos for Rolling StoneR&B singer Yaya Bey has lived some lives. At 32, she’s dabbled in marriage, divorce, weed peddling, visual art, education for the houseless, and street medicine. She’s also been a songwriter since age nine, first crafting hooks for her father — an MC who’d seen moderate success in the Nineties — in their Queens, New York, home. “He was like, ‘You can’t sing,’ ” Bey recalls, trying to mimic her dad’s bite. “But he always thought I was a good writer.”
Now based in Brooklyn, Bey began this spring with an engrossing EP, The Things I Can’t Take With Me. “I’m just trying to heal,” she says. “I lived a lot of my life having men kind of run the show: my dad, my ex-husband, men I’ve dated.” The music is sensitive and bare. Bey plainly reveals generational trauma, lust, and prayers with innovative vocalizations — sheets of buoyant ad-libs, trills, and stutters. There’s hurt all over, but there’s also defiance. “I don’t want to be some fucking Tyler Perry battered Black woman, because that’s not true,” she says. “There’s layers.”
A cascade of black box braids lay atop Bey’s lavender button-down when we chat over Zoom. Above her head is a painting, a rendition of Jay-Z and Beyoncé posing in front of the Mona Lisa in their “Apeshit” music video. “Yeah, this is not my art,” Bey clarifies. She’s renting a room in Washington, D.C. to work on her next album with an instrumentalist she trusts. Bey spent some of her transient adulthood in the D.C. area, working in museums and libraries as an art curator and teacher. She does the artwork for her music herself, making collages of intimate photos and self-portraits. “God willing, I can do an art show this summer,” she adds. “I can’t do sad songs all the time.”
After her father insisted she couldn’t be a singer, Bey became a poet. “I always wanted to perform my own words,” she says. She moved to D.C. after making a bit of a name for herself in poetry circles, and began dating another wordsmith. “We were this poetry couple. It was so fucking disgusting,” she says with a laugh. In D.C., Bey began working with the producer Chucky Thompson (whose resume includes classics by the Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige, and Faith Evans) and writing reference tracks for another singer. She says that “shit didn’t work out,” with Thompson or the singer, but the experience showed her that she had what it took to make her own music. That, however, meant that shit wasn’t going to work out in her relationship, either. “He was super-Christian and wanted me to be a housewife,” says Bey. “He hated everything I tried to do to empower myself.”
It took her four years from that breakthrough to release her debut album. In the meantime, Bey worked; got married to someone else; joined and left a band with her then-husband; and packaged and delivered the aforementioned weed. (“I definitely paid [my publicist] with money from the trap,” she says.)
Her street-medic experience came around the same time. Enraged after 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in 2014, Bey organized travel to Ferguson, Missouri, with virtual strangers that she had met at a community gathering at D.C.’s Sankofa bookstore. Then, when 25-year-old Freddie Gray was killed in police custody in Baltimore seven months later, Bey went to help out at the protests there. She says she left Ferguson with a black eye after being assaulted by a white agitator, and in Baltimore, she had a gun drawn on her by a member of the National Guard. She makes a particular note of her time in the streets: “All I ever saw was Black women.” She thinks about how she saw Black women put their bodies on the line for Black men in a way that’s often unreciprocated.
Bey’s art is inextricable from her Black womanhood. “All of it really is about being undervalued,” she explains. “And navigating wanting to be valued and wanting to be loved. The subject matter might change, like who’s undervaluing me and who is not loving me.” On her 2016 debut, The Many Alter-Egos of Trill’eta Brown, Bey employs personalities like “Get $ Trixie,” “Celie Jr” (named for the character in The Color Purple), and “Buck McDaniels,” to interrogate gender, relationships, revolution, and her place in all three. Still, she’s careful to make the distinction that she doesn’t make “identity” music. “I make music to cope,” she says. “It’s the place where I can fuss without being gaslit, like ‘Look at you, you’re angry and Black, you’re crazy.’”
Bey’s pen and sounds have grown more unique as she’s shed past collaborators (namely, her ex-husband) and built her confidence. She’s dismissive of her 2019 release This Too…, which she made with her ex-husband in the midst of their divorce — “which was fucking torture,” she says. Last year’s album, Madison Tapes, however, is a charming balm for isolation, released in the pandemic’s early months. It’s marked by interludes of light and introspective conversations from the budding friendships Bey made upon her return to New York after her divorce. It probes heartbreak while celebrating the life she’s rebuilding.
“I’m in a new era,” she says. “I’m like a baby in this bitch. It’s wobbly, but I’m much more empowered now than I was when I started.”
ON THE RISE
M.O.T.H.E.R. – the new collaborative band helmed by Robbie Furze of The Big Pink and currently featuring Jamie T and Jamie Hince of The Kills – have given their first proper interview, talking to NME about the emotional origins of the project, their aim to be “the guitar version of N.E.R.D.”, and their hit-list of future collaborators.
Revealing the new project at the end of May alongside the blistering anthemics of debut single ‘My Love’, Furze shared that the seeds of M.O.T.H.E.R. had come from losing his own parent after a prolonged illness. “My mum got sick about five years ago and was ill for about four years before she died,” he told NME.
“In that period I had a daughter, which was this real juxtaposition of death and birth. My mates – Jamie T and Jamie Hince – came together for me, and then sadly Jamie [Hince] lost his dad too,” Furze went on, sitting in a West London pub alongside Hince.
Hince continued: “I lost my dad four days after Robbie [lost his mum], and it felt like, if ever there was a calling, it was that. But it didn’t all come out of that doom and gloom. I hate mentioning COVID but everyone had so much time on their hands and there was this open creativity back then. I was working on music with Jamie T, sending each other stuff, and the idea for the three of us to do something together came out of that. It felt nice, like we were buying into this camaraderie, and this gang.”
The three musicians have previous credits together, with the two Jamies also writing on The Big Pink’s most recent album, 2022’s ‘The Love That’s Ours’. Fully collaborating on M.O.T.H.E.R., Furze joked, was like “the clash of three egos”. “Everyone wants to work with each other because you like what each other does, and so it’s not quite imposter syndrome but you have to live up to [that idea] and jump in and be a character,” Hince continued. “You can’t be too humble about it.”
Recording between Hince’s studio in LA and Furze’s studio in London’s Bethnal Green, the current trio have also dropped their self-titled debut EP featuring three further tracks: ‘Real Human’, ‘Traitor’, and ‘Surrender’. The ethos of the band, meanwhile, is for the line-up to shift with each release, bringing in familiar faces from other groups and working with whoever might be available at the time.
“We did a little bit [of recording] with Jenny [Lee Lindberg, bassist] from Warpaint who I love; I really want to get something solid down with her,” revealed Hince, while Furze suggested that names including Zach Hill of industrial hip-hop trio Death Grips, and electronic producer Skream have all been in the mix for future iterations of the band.
“We ran into Zach and he seemed into it but then he started ghosting me,” he noted. “Whether or not he decides to text me back, it would be wonderful to have that kind of thing. Jamie Hince, Skream, Rhys Webb from The Horrors [who played on their recent radio session], and Zach – if I saw that, I’d wanna hear what that nonsense sounds like!”
Check out the rest of the interview with Furze and Hince below, as they discuss their endearing bromance, their admiration for Jamie T, and why the band are unlikely to ever make an album.
NME: Hello Robbie and Jamie! You must have been kicking about at a lot of ‘00s parties, how far does your friendship go back?
Robbie Furze: “Me and Jamie T started becoming friends on the circuit of festivals when the first Big Pink record came out in 2009. Then me and Jamie Hince met at Corona Capital in Mexico in 2012.”
Jamie Hince: “He had a reputation – I think we all had reputations… I remember his wife giving me these dried insect snacks and I didn’t eat them because I thought he might have laced them with something…”
Furze: “Every band playing Corona Capital was staying in this massive hotel, so it was just chaos.”
Hince: “It was at the height of ego. Everyone had bodyguards. Bands were trying to outdo other bands. Like, The Black Keys – you’re two guys from Ohio, you don’t need armed bodyguards…”
Where does Jamie T fit into all this?
Hince: “Our orbits crossed quite a bit. I remember seeing him at some tiny little pub when he was probably about 19, and I love how it’s come full circle. My heart sinks a little bit when I see Jamie T working because I know I’m nowhere near [as good as] that. I have to chip away at things and stand back and then dive in again to get the feeling, whereas he’s just got the feeling from the start.”
Furze: “He’s pretty incredible. The song ‘Traitor’ on the EP was supposed to be for my vocal, and he was almost getting pissed off that we couldn’t get the verses right. He was just like, ‘I’ll sort it out’, goes up to the mic, does one take and it’s done. See you later. He’s that kind of guy.”
Do you have to leave your ego at the door in those situations?
Hince: “I did this amazing beat for ‘Traitor’ that I loved, and I sent it to Jamie T and got back a text saying: ‘One pound fish’. Fuck! I mean talk about leaving your ego at the door… I know what he was saying, he thought it was a bit ‘cor blimey’ waltz. But some of the shit he ends up doing, it’s totally ‘cor blimey one pound fish’!”
Furze: “But whatever works for the track works, and everyone has to be happy with it. You push each other without really knowing it.”
How did you envision the project?
Hince: “These things just come together. It sounds cheesy, but I wanted it to be the guitar version of N.E.R.D. – a production team of people that love each other.”
Furze: “We’ve got songs in the pipeline with other artists already, and it makes it like an N.E.R.D. or Unkle or Massive Attack thing. Being collaborative makes me more excited.”
Hince: “It feels like that time has gone where albums really last. Records seem to come and go quite quickly now. So I’ve shifted my enthusiasm because I think the attention span has gone. You spend so much time making records and so little time getting any reward.”
Furze: “I’d like to do standalone singles, or another EP of four or five tracks as a batch. I wouldn’t wanna go further than that.”
None of your individual bands and projects sound that alike – where do you think your tastes align?
Hince: “There’s something unspoken that we all seem to agree on which is this epic-ness. There’s a line in one of the songs that talks about ‘the last of the hooligans‘ and that seemed to be the feeling behind it all. If there’s a similarity with what everyone wanted, it was maybe just being a bit romantic and epic.”
Why do you think you were drawn to that?
Hince: “I don’t know, maybe we’re just lonely men?”
Furze: “Beaten down but being pulled up by hope…”
Hince: “We’ve all been bashing around, making all this noise and spending so much time doing it; I think it gives you that feeling. There’s something tiny and irrelevant about what you do but something life and death about what you do too, and I think the cocktail of that makes it… well, the last of the hooligans.”
Tell us a bit about ‘My Love’ – the first proper single.
Furze: “It’s one of the most basic songs. It’s a love song about hope, but it just has such an incredible energy to it with its simplicity. I’m not a massive Beatles fan but it has this relatable energy [like their early music]. ‘I wanna hold your hand’ – you don’t get more basic than that, in a great way. I think simplicity is power. Sometimes less is more, and if you mean it you can get away with it.”
Are there going to be live shows?
Furze: “Definitely. We’re playing a bit of catch up because we didn’t think ‘My Love’ would get the reaction it has, but we’re desperate to get out and do gigs.”
Hince: “In the spirit of the collaborative project, I’m really liking the idea of having different people in different countries playing with us; having a different vibe each time.”
Furze: “It would be really exciting to see different characters that you know from different bands. For the radio session [with Steve Lamacq on BBC 6 Music] we had Rhys Webb from The Horrors on bass, and I love that idea.”
You’re obviously very close – what are your favourite memories of this charming bromance?
Furze: “Jamie’s probably my best friend in the world and we’ve been through a lot together. In 2015 we both uprooted and went out to LA together, I went out there for about five years and he stayed, so we were pretty inseparable. It got to a point where it was breakfast, lunch and dinner together.”
Hince: “We just became one person. People would confuse us even though we don’t look the same. He had an ex-girlfriend who he went to say hello to and she said, ‘Hello Jamie’. We just started having the same vibe. The same embarrassing energy. We’ve chilled out a bit recently but when I was in LA and Robbie was in London we’d speak to each other for four hours a day. I was getting complaints from his wife.”
The ‘M.O.T.H.E.R. EP’ is out now.
The Big Pink returned with their third studio album, ‘The Love That’s Ours’, in 2022. It marked their first full-length effort in over 10 years. T and Hince worked on that LP, too, co-writing the single ‘Love Spins On Its Axis’.
The Kills released their sixth and latest record, ‘God Games’, in 2023.
Jamie T, meanwhile, made a comeback with ‘The Theory Of Whatever’ the previous year. He recently joined forces with Fred Again.. on the track ‘Lights Burn Dimmer’, and performed with The Maccabees at their big London reunion gig last summer.
