[Interview] Yorina, the intimate singer

With the encouragement of composer Dan Levy of The Dø, Yorina Bosco unveils her sublime first EP entitled Dry Your Tears. JustFocus had the pleasure of meeting Yorina to learn more about the musical creativity that surrounds her. 

JustFocus: I love the way your EP is designed containing almost only piano-voice pieces. Did you struggle to find your sound or did you want it to be very intimate from the beginning?

Yorina: The music was created in intimacy, thanks to my very intimate musical exchange with Dan, the director and producer. So there was no "sound research" per se, the arrangements came very intuitively with my compositions. The sound, melodies and lyrics form an inseparable whole. I remember composing Dry Your Tears one day and being in the living room with Dan the next night, recording vocals on an arrangement he had made after his workday. The song has hardly moved since.

JustFocus: Your words are so honest. Were you afraid to write such intimate things and share them with the world?

Yorina: On the contrary! On the one hand, writing did me a lot of good and when I realized that it could also speak to others and provide positive emotions, then I could only feel all the happier!

JustFocus: There's a slight nostalgia hidden in your voice. Where do you think this comes from?

Yorina: I'm not sure it's nostalgia… Because nostalgia tends to immerse itself again in the past without really wanting to get rid of it, and that doesn't look like me. So maybe it would be more of a certain melancholy, because melancholy, unlike nostalgia, moves me forward. And maybe it comes from this melancholy, from my desire to move forward!

JustFocus: Whatis your creative process? Do you start with the melody, music or lyrics?

Yorina : I sit at my keyboard or piano, the melodies come to me at the same time as the musical harmonies. The melody and harmonies carry me gradually towards the lyrics. It's quite magical as a moment… Everything is shaped in intuition, I do not calculate anything, I do not think, just I create. 

JustFocus: How many songs did you write for the EP? Was it difficult to let go of a specific song that wasn't chosen for the EP?

Yorina : I wrote hundreds of songs before choosing this EP and even today I do not stop, I need to compose and write all the time. It makes me happy, carries me and makes me evolve enormously, even if there is melancholy! 🙂 Of course it was difficult for me to put some songs aside, but life is long. 🙂 They will have their moment of glory one day! 

JustFocus: Are you planning to release a first studio album?

Yorina: I understood that today we don't have to plan too much. The album will come I hope soon, but there is no hurry, I want to bring this EP to life. He needs to live before the album and I also need to live with him before an album release. 

JustFocus: Your voice is so angelic and pure; it's hard to find that kind of voice in pop without the full use of auto-tune. Who are your favorite singers/bands?

Yorina: Oddly enough, some of my favorite artists use auto-tune en masse! Like Kanye West for example. I am very much in awe of his music. But in a "non-auto-tune" setting, I also listen to a lot of other artists like Lorde, Bill Withers who are a great inspiration for me, or Sigrid or Julia Michaels also lately. 

JustFocus: Do you have any hopes and fears regarding your music career?

Yorina: Things are all so new to me. I wasn't making music 3 years ago, so I discover and work every day so intensely that I don't really have time to create hopes or fears. If sometimes certain hopes or fears emerge, they disappear again as soon as I make music. And it's better that way, because in my life things have always happened differently than I could have imagined.

Check out the Wild As A Horse music video:

Yorina will be in concert in Paris on Monday, June 25 at the Pop-Up du Label for an evening that promises to be very emotional.