Author: Shea Gibbs

She’s a six-time Grammy nominee who’s coming off a buzzy cinematic debut playing Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. So why isn’t Yola, who’ll take the Jefferson Theater stage with her band on September 17, a household name?

A few answers come to mind when talking to the self-proclaimed “genre-fluid” British songstress. First, she’s difficult to brand. Genre fluidity is something some people just can’t dig. And second, she’s skeptical of the media.

“I felt like all people want to do is put you in a little box—or even in a large box,” Yola says. “But white guys can do anything. We thought they couldn’t do hip-hop. They were too far from the streets and elitist. That hasn’t stopped them.”

Household name or not, Yola can sing. And play guitar. And write music. Oh, and she’s an avid student of the human brain.

After her breakout first album, the four-time Grammy-nominated Walk Through Fire, Yola hit a creative dry spell. Her solution? Go deep into her own songwriting process and turn it on its head. “I managed to kind of deconstruct the way I create on a scientific level,” she says. “I am aggressively sciency.”

Yola’d been curious about the brain and its relationship to singing and songwriting since battling vocal nodules early in her career. After struggling with average medical care and vocal coaching during her recovery, she decided to learn exactly what was happening to her. Applying a similarly scientific approach to songwriting was only natural when she had to overcome writer’s block for her second LP, Stand for Myself.

Yola breaks it down like this: Many of the songs she wrote for her first record came from her prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that does all the consciously clever stuff. But on a few songs, she figures she was able to draw from her midbrain, which is responsible for the senses. Those midbrain songs express ideas that spring to mind and “bump together” without help from the clever prefrontal cortex, and they’re more inspired.

“The idea of using that part of the brain that holds everything we have ever sensed and creates this ‘soup’—that’s the thing that allows you to make more elegant connections,” Yola says. 

Using that part of the brain is easier said than done. But Yola, like so many of us, had a lot of time to putter around the house and try things over the past couple years. One strategy that worked consistently was watching meditative television—track and field, Formula One racing (she’s a “massive fan”), or the Tour de France—into the early hours of the morning.

Sitting in her living room or idly performing household tasks with burst-of-activity sports playing in the background, Yola was able to enter a less cognitive state, ignoring basic motor functions and focusing on her midbrain soup. The process yielded at least a third of the tracks on Stand for Myself, Yola’s first album to debut on the Billboard 200 (at 196). Another third came from ideas that had been in her head for years, and for the final third, she credits her producer and collaborator, Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach, for taking them to the next level.

“Foundationally, Dan and I are both music fans,” she says. “He was able to imagine me doing feasibly anything, and that was also important for me to realize: I can feasibly do anything.”

At this point in her career, Yola refuses to be tied to a genre or put in a box, but she also has a well-defined mission ahead of her. After playing Sister Rosetta in Elvis, she’s considering more acting gigs and has been in talks with producers. But any role would have to be on her own terms.

“I am going to see what speaks to me,” she says. “If I play someone, that character is going to be nontoxic to Black women. That is the brand.”

When it comes to music, “it’s about reclaiming everything that has been stolen from Black people,” she says. She doesn’t want to see what happened to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who had her role in inventing rock music scrubbed from the history books, happen to other marginalized people.

“The machine that we live in has constantly tried to program you against the efforts we’re making to be better. It is an attack on our brains,” Yola says. “Once we realize we didn’t come out of the womb like this, we can say, ‘Okay I have just got to stop these things from attacking my brain and know exactly what we are consuming.’”

Yola says her two genre-fluid records to this point have been building blocks, bridges to something even bigger. Now that she’s showcased her abilities in multiple genres, she’s free to focus on one if she chooses, maybe with a blues record here or a disco album there.

For now, though, she and her band will bring big shows to her fans, even as she plays smaller venues like the Jefferson between festival junkets and major-city headline spots.

“Everywhere we go, we still bring the same bus with the same trailer,” Yola says. “One thing that is maybe different from a festival set is I like to strip everything back on a few songs and show people an original version from before I took it to anybody else. I like to give people that.”

Ramona Martinez began writing songs when she was 15 years old. Then, she stopped.

Now, 15 years later, she’s back to penning tunes—this time in cavalcades. She’s written more than 20 songs in less than a year. And she’s unapologetic about her mission: “Country music stardom is my goal,” she says.

Martinez, a former NPR radio producer, moved to Charlottesville from the D.C. area six years ago for a UVA podcast production job. Not much more than a year after the move, though, she quit her day job and set about working professionally as an artist. Primarily focusing on linocut, Martinez says in her artist’s statement that her “work seeks to reclaim Christianity for misfits, radicals, anarchists, and outcasts of all types.”

Along the way, Martinez has also written for C-VILLE Weekly, joined the Bridge PAI board, and helped launch the Feminist Union of Charlottesville Creatives, which supports local women and nonbinary and genderqueer artists. More recently, she and FUCC co-director Sri Kodakalla have shifted their focus to Mala Leche, an online magazine they created to showcase the work of the artists the union supports.

But Martinez never left music behind. She’s kept her pipes warm singing in the Trinity Episcopal church choir and plays the tin whistle at a high level; she took up the instrument for Blue Ridge Irish Music School sessions for about two years. Her first stringed instrument was upright bass, and she’s played it off and on for the LUA Project, a Mexican-Appalachian fusion band, since moving to Charlottesville.

In 2021, Martinez decided to write a song. Why? She’s not sure. It was a “yellow brick road thing,” she says. “It is weird—it’s kismet. All of a sudden, I had all of these songs, some of them fully formed. I keep telling myself, ‘God wouldn’t have given me all of them if I wasn’t supposed to do something with them.’”

She decided to play some solo shows. A gig at Champion Brewery last October led to another brick in the road: Several local musicians volunteered to play with her. She formed a band, The Holy Smokes, with Kyle Lawton Kilduff on bass, Brooks Hefner on pedal steel, and Owen Brennan on drums. Blake Baines joins on electric guitar from time to time.

Charmed with a ’60s honky-tonk sound that calls to mind Patsy Cline and George Jones, Ramona & The Holy Smokes have gotten traction with recent shows at Champion, Ting Pavilion, and The Southern Café & Music Hall. The group is planning to record its first EP this fall. “If you think you don’t like country music … Ramona & The Holy Smokes will definitely change your mind,” Martinez says.

Next up, Martinez and Hefner will play The Garage on August 12. The singer-songwriter says the duo shows are distinct from Holy Smokes gigs but have their own charm. Arranged with a guitar, pedal steel, and Martinez’s sweet liquid warble, the pair will likely take on some of Martinez’s sadder (though often irreverent) tunes, like “Honkey Tonk Angels.” “You can expect to laugh and cry,” she says.

In addition to calling on her Catholic Christian roots for songwriting inspiration, Martinez says she focuses on what songwriter Harlan Howard called “three chords and the truth.” 

“Melody drives my songs,” she says. Martinez might be in the car, driving along and singing to herself to work out new song ideas. Or she’ll look back on her past and weigh her experiences “with a wry smile and a tear in my eye.” 

“I think the plague really forced us to be introspective about who we are and where we are in our lives,” Martinez says of her post-COVID songwriting outburst. “Romantic loss and living below the poverty line are really good fuel for writing songs.”

The Holy Smokes have been instrumental in pushing Martinez’s songwriting forward over the past year. Having a team of accomplished players around has helped develop arrangements and flesh out simple melodies. When she gets stuck on a song, she takes it to her mentor, Maddie Mae of Maddie Mae & The Shadow Cast.

Martinez has at least one other big plan in mind on her yellow brick road to country music stardom. Rather than moving to Nashville like so many songsters, she hopes to help Charlottesville develop its country scene into “a new Bakersfield,” referring to the late ’50s-era home of honky-tonk. Along with her own burgeoning band, she says acts like Charlie and the 45’s, who frequent Honky Tonk Karaoke at Holly’s Diner, and John Shanesy and The Accommodation, which skews toward the outlaw side of the honky-tonk spectrum, are poised to drive the growth.

And while Charlottesville has a few musical miles to go before it’s the new Bakersfield, Martinez figures the current zeitgeist makes the time right. Renaissance, after all, follows the plague, she says.

For Martinez’s own part, renaissance will require her to navigate her love of multiple artforms. She worries about losing focus on her visual art as she falls more deeply into music. But she keeps coming back to that word: stardom. “I’m working on saying it aloud and owning it,” she says. “Because that is absolutely my goal.”