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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
As they prepare to unveil their fourth album, ‘Joy In Short Moments’, The Snuts have spoken with NME about how stepping away from touring gave them the chance to reflect on some of life’s biggest challenges and bring greater attention to mental health.
Their first album since 2024’s upbeat ‘Millenials’ follows a rare break from the road over the past year. During that time, frontman Jack Cochrane also experienced a major change in his personal life as he welcomed his first child.
Along with getting used to fatherhood, the singer began thinking about deeper questions that the demanding touring lifestyle had previously left little room to consider. His reflections on growing up, dealing with loss and understanding what success really means gradually found their way into his writing, eventually shaping the direction of the band's more personal new album.
Fans were first introduced to the album earlier this year through ‘Summer Rain’, an emotional track exploring postnatal depression and the “fear of the future”. They later returned during the summer with the more hopeful ‘Defibrillator’, encouraging listeners to move beyond negative thoughts about themselves and find comfort in connecting with other people.
Speaking to NME about the creative shift behind their fourth record, Cochrane explained: “By taking a conscious break from life on the road and making records, my world opened up to let so much more of the real world in,” he said. “For the first time I was living then writing, not writing while trying to live.”
He also described how the change helped the band approach recording differently, adding: “It unlocked a new process that the band had been crying out for,” he continued. “The studio sessions were set up to allow us to be friends and not colleagues. Distraction and external pressures were completely eradicated from the recording environment, allowing us to trust our gut and have the conversations we needed to as humans.”
In the remainder of the interview, Cochrane also discusses his new role as an ambassador for mental health charity CALM and talks about starting a podcast designed to encourage more artists to speak honestly about their personal struggles.
NME: Hi Jack, congratulations on the new album. You’ve said that this record was about addressing the topics that you previously tried to hide from. What kinds of questions did you find yourself confronting?
Jack Cochrane: “I would say mainly, ‘What do I need to be happy?’… Eeek! It’s a big one I know, but having set out with the title ‘Joy In Short Moments’, I was able to spend my time searching for them and allow joy to do what joy does: compound and relieve the stresses of the modern world.”
That’s not the easiest question to find yourself confronting. Did you manage to find any answers along the way?
“Ultimately yes. With the completion of this record I was able to find a much happier healthier version of myself I had been so long yearning for.”
The album sees you deal with new themes, but musically we also see you return to the guitar-led sound from your early days. Did revisiting those roots make you notice how much has changed since you were starting out?
“For sure. We were able to remove any snobbery from the process. We’re no longer new kids on the block and with that came a new found ability to be really honest about the kind of noises we wanted to make and the type of artists that had originally inspired us.”
This album goes hand in hand with you becoming an ambassador for CALM and launching your own podcast dedicated to checking in with fellow artists. Why was it important for you to get involved in the conversation about mental health?
“I think conversations and role models are absolutely essential for young people. I wanted to have more and do my best to be one. Every song on this record was born out of unfiltered, open and honest conversation.”
From talking to people on your podcast, including Louis Tomlinson, and using your platform to open up this dialogue, is there anything interesting that you’ve noticed?
“I think that more often than not, young men are finding it difficult to combat the struggles they are facing in this modern world. To me it feels like there are less and less spaces and opportunities to have meaningful, healing conversations…”
Having had those conversations yourself and explored them on the album, it must be somewhat daunting to now put it out into the world. Is there something that you hope people take from it?
“I’d like people to feel less alone after hearing the record and the themes intertwined with it. I think music is more than just heartbreak and I hoped in the writing of this record I would be able to highlight some more universally relevant topics.”
You have your headline tour coming up next month. What can we expect from the shows?
“Big smiles and big sound all round! It will be the most self assured Snuts tour to date.”
‘Life In Short Moments’ is out now Happy Artist Records in partnership with Virgin Music Group. Their UK and Ireland tour kicks off next month with an opening night in Dundee. Visit here for tickets and check out a list of tour dates below.
NOVEMBER 2026
19 – Dundee, Livehouse
20 – Aberdeen, Beach Ballroom
21 – Edinburgh, Corn Exchange
23 – Dunfermline, Alhambra Theatre
24 – Newcastle, O2 City Hall
26 – Sheffield, Octagon Centre
27 – Nottingham, Rock City
29 – Norwich, UEA
30 – Hull, City Hall
DECEMBER 2026
1 – Bristol, Prospect Hall
3 – Leeds, O2 Academy
4 – Manchester, O2 Victoria Warehouse
8 – Birmingham, O2 Academy
9 – Portsmouth, Guildhall
10 – London, O2 Academy Brixton
JANUARY 2027
26 – Belfast, Limelight
27 – Galway, Róisín Dubh
28 – Dublin, Academy
