Spotlight on West Memphis’ Yebba

Local musician recently wrapped summer tour

By Ralph Hardin

ralphhardin@gmail.com

You might be cool, but most of us will never be “get a shout-out from the president for your music” cool.

But such was the case back in 2021 when West Memphis native Abbey Smith, known professionally as Yebba (which is her first name spelled backward, in case you didn’t pick up on that), was on the former POTUS’s list of top songs of the year.

Yebba’s “Boomerang” was listed right alongside such hits as Lil Nas X’s “Montero,” Lizzo and Cardi B’s “Rumors,” with and Bad Bunny’s “Volví” to name drop a few.

The 28-year-old singer isn’t the first talented performer to come out of Crittenden County, but as she explained in a feature story for the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, her road to a music career is a rather unique one.

Inspiration comes from many places. For Smith, while studying to be a music teacher, the West Memphis native had a vision.

“It feels kind of wild to be sharing this, it’s so personal,” she told Halls, “but I had this feeling, like a valve opening up in my chest and taking in this air.” She takes an enormous, gulping breath. “And then it became very dark, and I was looking down as if from beyond myself at this tiny person on stage, and I felt… free.”

When, on her dazzling debut album, Smith sings about her mother’s suicide, the rawness of her grief registers with devastating force.

Halls gives Yebba high praise, noting, “Not since Amy Winehouse has there been a voice like this – a giant, soulful vessel that swells with pain and shimmers with gorgeous vulnerability. Smith, who performs under the name Yebba, has the music industry at her feet.”

The article paints the artist as “endearingly humble,” a young woman who only dreamt of becoming a backing vocalist — not one desitned for the spotlight. Every Sunday throughout her childhood in West Memphis, her preacher father would take her to sing at his church while, back at home, Yebba says he introduced her and her brother to the music of Aretha Franklin and the Clark Sisters. In the interview, Halls learns that when Abbey was just 12, her father made her the church’s worship pastor, a role that saw her arranging the music for Sunday service, choosing the songs and running choir rehearsals.

The experience gave her the skills and the confidence to start writing and performing her own songs. In 2016, after clips of her singing on Instagram earned praise from such influential industry figures as producer Timbaland and rapper Missy Elliott, she got her first break, backing Chance the Rapper on Saturday Night Live.

“Her dizzying falsetto riffs prompted him to turn around, mid-song, in stunned admiration,” said Halls.

Determined to seize the opportunity, Smith dropped out of college in Nashville, where she’d been studying with the intention of becoming a teacher, like her mother, who taught physics at her school.

Instead, she moved to New York, and that September, at an intimate gig in the city, performed her first song, “My Mind,” a furious ballad about unfaithful love, which sees her unleashing the pain of heartbreak with a level of vocal precision sure to bring you out in goosebumps.

Her dream was starting to come true. But then, just three weeks later, her mother took her own life, leaving Smith so racked with rage, grief and guilt that she temporarily lost her faith.

When she found it again, she adopted the stage name Yebba — an affectionate nickname her mother had used – and the song’s lyrics (“I’m about to lose my mind, how could you do this to me?”) took on a distressing new meaning. She asked fans who downloaded the song for free to make a donation to the mental health charity, Mind.

Halls explained that “My Mind” would become her bittersweet calling card. After hearing it, Ed Sheeran told an American radio station in January 2017 that it had made him cry. Meanwhile, Mark Ronson agreed to produce Smith’s first album, Dawn, named after her late mother.

Her profile duly raised, when Smith released her debut single, “Evergreen,” two months later led to to chart-topping collaborations in 2017 and 2019.

“The grief had physically manifested itself in my voice,” Smith told her interviewer via Zoom. Halls said this was Smith’s first “proper

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interview, from a meditation retreat in California, where she has finally given up smoking – the one rebellious vice she managed to sneak past her strict parents as a teenager.”

Her grief, she said, was coming through in her vocals.

“I could just hear that I wasn’t in the right head space. My grief wasn’t coming from a place of acceptance… I was in it and I was consumed by it. I wasn’t proud of any vocal I was doing,” she explained.

It later became clear that Smith was dealing with PTSD, triggered by her mother’s death and, while she put out two singles over two years (one of which, “Distance,” made it on to Barack Obama’s 2020 playlist), her career stalled.

“She tells me that the hauntingly beautiful lead single, October Sky (titled after the month her mother died), is the result of 300 vocal takes over the past four years ‘because every time I cut a vocal, I was going through a different period of grief – most of which was just straight-up anxiety,’” said Halls. Only recently has Smith started to come to terms with the tragic circumstances of her mother’s death. During our interview, certain memories will cause her voice to falter — and she will look away to compose herself.”

“I always thought it was so strange how people worship pain in art,” Yebba said. “More than they do the feeling of when that pain has been overcome: when it’s been turned into something beautiful, so you can have communion with me; not so you can feel sorry for me.”

Smith says the music industry’s exploitation of pain put her off signing to a label for years.

“I was ready to wait everybody out,” she told Halls. “I was uninterested.

Firstly, I was thrilled with background singing, but also I didn’t want to meet record-label people when I was dealing with severe post-traumatic stress. I was seeing a therapist for the first time ever, and so I was busy – busy getting therapy. I was trying to figure out how I could stay alive; how I could tolerate life for long enough. So, anybody that pushed me? I said great, I won’t meet them then, that’s not a problem.”

Dawn was released in September by Columbia Records/Sony, the label to which Smith eventually signed last year.

“Part pop, part soul, part rap, with lyrics that swerve from the biblical to the diaristic, it defies categorisation and will no doubt unite every demographic in the auditorium when she eventually gets to perform it live. It will also make her a star,” said Halls, before asking, “Is she ready now, for the inevitable fame; ready to be mentioned in the same breath as Winehouse, to be anointed the next Adele?” For Smith, Dawn represents not so much the launch pad of a glittering career as the fulfilment of a calling. She used to feel frustrated when members of her congregation would compliment her singing at church: “It was about God, everything else was irrelevant.”

Superstar performer Drake collaborated with Yebba for “Yebba’s Heartbreak,” which is available to stream on YouTube and Spotify.

Yebba recently completed a regional tour that included stops in Nashville, Austin, Dallas, and Chicago before wrapping in Detroit on June 17.

The last word on the album is spoken, not sung – a sample from a voicemail once left on Smith’s phone: “I hope you’re having fun, and I hope you’re singing away… You’re my little star. I love you. Bye. Love, Momma.”

Portions of this feature were originally excerpted from a telegraph. co. uk article titled “ Meet Yebba: the ‘ onein- a- million’ voice destined for the spotlight.’ All rights reserved.