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 Belle & Sebastian share their buoyant 2026 Scotland World Cup anthem ‘It Only Takes One Lion’, frontman Stuart Murdoch has spoken to NME about capturing the feeling back home and his hopes for the team since childhood.
Released today (Tuesday June 2), the Scottish indie heroes’ bid for their nation’s tournament anthem was written after the team’s surprise 4-2 qualifying win against Denmark.
“I felt like we were watching history in the moment, like the hand of God from the old National Lottery adverts was pointing at us,” Murdoch told NME about that game-changing victory. “It was meant to be. Scotland aren’t a terrific team and Denmark are better, but it just felt that day that Scotland were destined to win. Three out of the four goals were things of beauty.”
Produced by and co-written with Pete Ferguson and premiered at the band’s recent London Royal Albert Hall show as part of the anniversary tour for their classic first two albums ‘Tigermilk’ and ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’, the soaring song is intrinsically Belle & Sebastian as it morphs from a hymn to a an orchestral disco jam as Murdoch sings of a nation’s hopes and his own boyhood dreams.
NME spoke to Murdoch from the band’s North American tour, where we found him in a graveyard in Texas. “I was just looking for a park because Austin is a pretty scary place downtown now, so I’ve ended up in the Texas Cemetery,” he shared via Zoom.
Was there anyone famous buried there?
“I was looking around and I found the founder of Austin City Limits, which is pretty cool as that’s where we’re playing tonight. I’m looking at one now and it just says, ‘Martin: he loved the law’. Then underneath it says, ‘Billie Louise: she loved the lawyer’.”
We joke that there’s the opening to a Belle & Sebastian song if there ever there was one. “It’s great! It’s given me inspiration.”
For now, read the rest of interview with Murdoch below as he tells us about Scotland’s chances, 30 years of hurt, if fans will be singing it at the top of their lungs in Canada, the US and Mexico this summer, and what’s next for the band.
NME: Hello Stuart. Here we are with ‘It Only Takes One Lion’ Who needs three?
Stuart Murdoch: “Who needs three? Good question. I wouldn’t know!”
What’s the mood been like in Scotland since you qualified?
“It’s funny. I’ve noticed this everywhere: with the World Cup there’s a mixture of cynicism and anticipation. When the actual tournament starts, everyone will get excited about it. Because of FIFA, the peace prize, the ticket prices, people seem quite down about it. I found that in Mexico. They were quite fed up with the general hype about it. I’m in the States just now and you shouldn’t believe all the hype: people are people. The States are just as ‘great’ as ever. We love coming here, we love the cities. The general sense of North American optimism will make for a good tournament.”
“With Scotland though, people will definitely be excited about it. You have to understand, it’s been 30 years since Scotland qualified so I think everybody and their dog has written a song for the team.”
How do you meet the challenge of penning a World Cup anthem, when there have been so many legendary bangers and absolutely shite duds?
“I never planned it. I woke up with a tune in my head and a feeling. That’s the way it should always be for songs. I couldn’t control myself and it was quite straight-forward. I wrote this initial bit about how I felt about the current World Cup team and the qualifying game. It was more introspective.
“When it starts off with, ‘The days are dark and long…’, it’s just my general feeling about football. I’ve been going to see my own team quite a lot recently. It’s my little anthem for how I feel about football and following Scotland for the last 50 years, just the ups and downs. It’s quite a heartfelt thing. When I was eight or nine, the Scottish team meant so much to me, it the thing I was most invested in. There’s a line in there about how I used to memorise the whole squad before ‘78 and 82.”
Tell us about lyric: “This is Scotland, where everyone knows you start with nothing… where you can join an army for peace”…
“My wife made the video for it and she said, ‘I’m not sure I like that line about everyone starting with nothing’. Our first game is against Haiti and they really have nothing. Their country is pretty poor and they’re going through hard times. It was almost a throwaway line and I’m not sure what I meant by it, but in a footballing sense every game starts with nothing. Even if it’s against Brazil, you’ve always got a chance!
“The army refers to The Tartan Army, which has really been quite a remarkable institution for the past 30 years. We changed from drunken buffoons that used to wreck things to this excellent supporting brigade.”
It’s not your standard football sing-along. Can you see it being sung in the terraces?
“I’m not sure, I didn’t cynically design it for that. Many people have said to me in the past, ‘None of your songs have a chorus, you need to write one’. ‘This is Scotland’ is a chorus! They things need to happen organically. I’m sure the fans will still be singing ‘Yes sir, I can boogie’ for years to come.”
What do you actually think of Scotland’s chances right now?
“With the last Euros, they maybe got stage fright or didn’t have that tournament experience. I think Andy Robertson [captain] will be telling them, ‘We really need to produce our best stuff’. If they do and we see them actually playing football, then I don’t really care about the results that much. I just want to see Scotland exceeding our expectations of them. That Denmark game was so crazy that everything after just feels like a bonus.”
If miracles do happen and Scotland make it to the final, how will you celebrate? A free gig in Glasgow?
“Of course, yes! Free everything. If we even got close, I think the whole country would shut down for a year and the GDP would drop. We’d go into a massive recession but no one would care.
“We were playing a gig in Mexico City and I told the crowd, ‘It’s you and us, Mexico and Scotland in the final’. Mexico have never really got close either. I told them it would be five goals a piece, even after everyone takes a penalty and we have to share the trophy. I would settle for that.”
You released two albums in quick succession with 2022’s ‘A Bit of Previous’, 2023’s ‘Late Developers’ and then your debut novel Nobody’s Empire in 2024. You’ve been busy! Is there any progress on new material?
“We went through a period where we recorded a lot and we said, ‘Let’s not record for a while and give ourselves a couple of cycles off’. We’re doing these 30th anniversary shows so we’re just going to lean on the back catalogue and cruise for a while. We’re doing a year on and a year off so everyone can focus on different things.
We’re not looking at new Belles stuff for a while. I’m meant to be developing Nobody’s Empire into a film, so that’s my next task. It’s a long way off from being made but I’m going to write the script for that.”
Scotland’s first World Cup tournament match is against Haiti on Sunday June 14, before they go on to play Morocco on Friday June 19 and Brazil on Wednesday June 24.
The band’s ‘Tigermilk’ and ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’ anniversary tour continues throughout the summer, performing the iconic albums in full during across the UK, Europe, North America, Mexico, Australia, Singapore and Japan. Visit here for tickets and more information.
