Yebba Sheds Old Beliefs With A New Album

It's Been a Minute

NPR

News Commentary, Society & Culture, News, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2021

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It was 2016, and Yebba's career was beginning to take off. But 2016 was also the year that something awful happened: Yebba's mother committed suicide. And that changed everything, too.

Now, after years of collaborating with artists the likes of Sam Smith, PJ Morton and Robert Glasper, Yebba has her own standalone album. It's called Dawn, a reference to her mother's name. In this chat, Yebba and Sam talk about the emotional toll it took to make Dawn, growing up in the church, and shedding old beliefs while making room for new ones.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, I'll say I'm here before we get started.
0:02.1	Wanna mention that today's episode addresses suicide
0:05.2	and grief and it has a frank discussion of mental health.
0:11.9	You're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR.
0:14.3	I'm Sam Sanders.
0:16.3	Back in 2016, the singer-songwriter Yeba
0:19.4	performed one of her original songs
0:21.3	at an intimate venue in New York.
0:23.5	The song is called My Mind.
0:25.4	And at a quarter till three, you closed the door
0:31.6	and lay down next to me.
0:34.4	It was just Yeba and an acoustic guitar and that voice.
0:41.7	A video of this performance hit YouTube soon after
0:44.2	and it quickly went viral.
0:46.4	A lot of people, all of a sudden, were talking about Yeba.
0:51.0	Ed Sheeran was one of the millions to watch it.
0:53.8	And he later said it made him cry.
0:56.3	And Sheeran went on to cosine Yeba to his record label.
1:00.5	But shortly after that electrifying career-making performance,
1:04.4	this performance had kind of changed everything for Yeba.
1:07.0	Something else happened.
1:08.8	A thing that would change everything in a very different way.
	...

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