Q&A: Gaidaa Unravels with Grace on Her Soul-Baring EP “YARN”

MusicQ&A

May 14

INTERVIEW

THE REVELATION OF SELFHOOD AND SURRENDER —Gaidaa’s new EP YARN doesn’t ask for your attention—it earns it through tenderness, clarity, and truth. A textured and emotionally rich meditation on identity, pressure,and surrender, YARN arrives as a reclamation. For the Sudanese-rooted R&B artist, YARN, her long-awaited sophomore EP, isn’t concerned with chasing momentum—it’s focused on what happens when you stop, strip everything back, and surrender to the slow, unpredictable rhythm of growth.

Where 2020’s Overture introduced Gaidaa as a bright new force in the global neo-soul space, YARN is something more intimate and intentional. It’s a record about letting go—not of ambition, but of the need to constantly prove it. Across its runtime, Gaidaa doesn’t posture or perform. She unravels on purpose, allowing herself to be messy, nonlinear, unfinished. In that looseness, something transformative happens.

“I had the realization that I’m an artist now. Not someone trying to prove I could be an artist, but someone already carrying that title,” Gaidaa says. “And with that came a lot of pressure—not necessarily from anyone else, but from myself. I felt like I had to reach a certain level. It had to look a certain way, feel a certain way, do a certain amount of numbers. The theme of the project became this reckoning with all of those expectations. I had to confront them, let them go, and accept the process for what it was—messy, non-linear, human. That’s how I eventually landed on the title YARN. It reflects the passage of time—five whole years since my last release.”

That ethos pulses through the heart of YARN. Its acoustic textures and soul-rooted arrangements serve as grounding forces, allowing Gaidaa’s voice to soften and question.

It’s no surprise that the last few years have reshaped her relationship with music. Her debut arrived in the middle of a global pandemic, with no rulebook and no roadmap. What followed wasn’t momentum, but a quiet falling inward. “Everything after that forced me to sit with myself—to figure out how to live alongside myself, not against myself,” she says. “That process took a lot out of me, but I’m thankful for it.”

From themes of emotional suppression and burnout to the soft power of spiritual surrender, YARN holds space for what it means to simply exist as a young woman of dual identity, in a world and an industry that constantly asks for more. It’s Gaidaa’s refusal to mold herself into a version that "measures up." Instead, she’s choosing to show up—flawed, curious, and honest.

“At the core, that’s what YARN is about: trying to exist. Just trying to exist right now, in this world, in this industry, in this body—and doing so without losing myself in the process,” Gaidaa says.

That humanization is what makes YARN so powerful. There’s a subtle brilliance in how she allows the imperfections, the questions, and the unraveling to remain. This isn’t an artist packaging a narrative of growth—it’s an artist living it, in real-time, through music.

LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?

GAIDAA: I feel like I make music because I need to, more than anything else. You know what I mean? I make music because it's my compass and because I don't understand what the fuck is going on in any situation ever. My inspiration behind even approaching making music is trying to understand myself and trying to understand the world around me, and trying to piece the pieces together. I feel like music is the one place where I feel like I have space to unjudge and it doesn't have to look a certain way, but I get to figure out things about myself. I get to know myself and I get to know how I feel about the world, and how maybe the world feels about me. I just get to figure things out without feeling like I'm being watched and judged on how I should figure it out.

LUNA: Are there particular moods or themes you find yourself gravitating towards when writing and performing? How do you channel these into your music?

GAIDAA: I think I've just realized a lot of the time I'm just talking to myself. I can't even really avoid it, even if I try not to write something in that lane, I end up doing some version of a letter to myself, almost always from a different perspective, within different nuances. Most of my music is a question to me, but not even a question to me in a specific moment. It'll be like I'm talking to myself at different moments in my life at the same time, somehow, like talking to the present version of me, talking to the future version of me, and I'm talking to a past version of me all at the same time. I've realized that's really a theme in how I write and the things I'm writing about. I'm really talking to and with myself, if that makes any type of sense. I feel like even when I try to avoid writing like that, I just end up writing like that regardless. I feel like I'm always trying to address myself or give myself some hints in the future, or whatever the case might be. I'm always somehow talking to a version of me, whatever version it might be.

LUNA: So beautifully said. It’s so important to be able to connect and speak to all the versions of yourself and the experiences they’ve gone through. You just released your newest EPYARN and huge congratulations! What is the inspiration behind the project and what themes or emotions do you explore?

GAIDAA: This is only the second project I’ve ever put out in my life, and honestly, it was much harder to approach than the first—I wasn’t expecting that. My first project kind of just happened. Life threw a bunch of things at me, and eventually, they just formed into a project. There wasn’t much overthinking. It just flowed.

But with this second one, it felt different from the beginning. I had the realization that I’m an artist now. Not someone trying to prove I could be an artist, but someone already carrying that title. And with that came a lot of pressure—not necessarily from anyone else, but from myself. I felt like I had to reach a certain level. It had to look a certain way, feel a certain way, do a certain amount of numbers. It had to be something—something real, something valid, something that measured up.

The theme of the project became this reckoning with all of those expectations. I had to confront them, let them go, and accept the process for what it was—messy, non-linear, human. That’s how I eventually landed on the title YARN. It reflects the passage of time—five whole years since my last release. I don’t even know how I got away with that, but shout out to music, shout out to the people. I’m grateful.

A lot of life happened in that time. A lot of growth. I had to learn how to just be—how to be an adult, how to be a person. My first project came out in July 2020, mid-pandemic, and that was never part of the plan. Everything after that forced me to sit with myself, to figure out how to live alongside myself, not against myself. That process took a lot out of me, but I’m thankful for it.

This project, in many ways, encapsulates someone who spent a lot of time comparing herself to every Tom, Dick and Harry in the industry. Before working on this, one of my biggest fears was what if my career only exists online? What if that’s the reality I have to accept? Then the pandemic hit, and that became real life. I had to re-reckon with that too—what it means to connect in real time versus constantly performing online.

So this project is really me asking: Is this enough? Am I enough as an artist? Does this version of me work for you? It’s me navigating what it means to make art while trying to stay honest—with myself, with the feelings of inadequacy, with the overwhelm, with the constant comparisons. It’s me trying to feel everything without letting those feelings take over. Trying to be a fucking human being without punishing myself for it. At the core, that’s what YARN is about: trying to exist. Just trying to exist right now, in this world, in this industry, in this body—and doing so without losing myself in the process.

LUNA: YARN feels like a deliberate unraveling – a surrender to vulnerability. What was the emotional or creative turning point that led you to embrace that kind of openness on this project?

GAIDAA: What’s wild is that some of the songs on the project that feel the most like surrender or acceptance—like “Something True” or “Fly Away”—were actually written pretty early on, even before many of the other tracks took shape. That still blows my mind. “Something True” in particular feels like a closing statement, a full-circle song that reminds me where my head and heart really are. It centers me.

The truth is, this EP took so many different shapes over the past year. There were full versions of this project that were completely scrapped—entire EPs that never made the cut. So for the songs that ended up on here to feel so right now, despite being created over a year and a half ago, is surreal. A lot of life has happened since they were first written.

I wouldn’t say there was a single, specific turning point that made it all click. It was more like the puzzle pieces just started fitting together. And once they did, it all made sense. But the journey to get there wasn’t easy. The last few years have been mentally heavy for me. I was in a pretty dark headspace—struggling to feel joy, struggling to just exist. Yet, through all of that, there was always this little voice in the back of my head saying, ‘eventually, this will make sense.’ I didn’t always believe it, but I held on to that thought. I needed to.

A couple of months ago, I actually went back and did a deep dive on my own music—nerded out, as I tend to do—and suddenly everything became so clear. I realized this project is really about reckoning with myself. It’s about letting myself feel things like jealousy, inadequacy, disconnection… and not judging myself for it. Not punishing myself for just being human. Instead, I let those feelings live, let them breathe, and then I could move through them. That process—of sitting with all of it, of finally not resisting it—is what made space for songs like “Something True” and “Fly Away” to hold the weight they do now. Even if I didn’t fully grasp their meaning at the time I wrote them, I understand them now in the context of my journey. It was all part of figuring out how to exist. As a person. As an artist. Just trying to make sense of it all.

LUNA: Compared to Overture, YARN feels sonically more intimate, grounded in acoustic textures and neo-soul. Did you take any creative risks or experiment with new approaches on YARN? What felt different this time around in how you expressed yourself?

GAIDAA: With Overture, I was in a room with a different person for almost every song. It was a time of exploration—I was meeting new people, figuring things out as I went. Honestly, I didn’t know much back then. I was just going with the flow, trying everything, saying yes to a lot of different ideas and energies.

YARN was the opposite. I recorded all of my vocals—lead, backing, everything—alone in my room. That made a huge difference. It was the first time I really had full control over how I sounded and what I wanted to say. I also started experimenting with Auto-Tune for the first time—not in a way that hides anything, but more as a texture, a tool. Overture had literally zero Auto-Tune, so it was a big leap for me. At first, I was scared. I questioned whether using it made me less of an artist, whether I was somehow compromising something. But really, I was just exploring all the different ways I’m allowed to sound.

That exploration wasn’t just sonic—it was also about genre and identity. I’ve had so many people box me in, insisting I’m just R&B. I’m cool if people hear that in the music—it’s part of me. But I wanted this project to stretch beyond that. I wanted to explore more upbeat territory, but without compromising the emotional weight of the songs. With tracks like “Runaway” or “Fly Away”—which aren’t slow songs per se—they’re still emotionally dense for me. That balance was important: songs you can feel deeply and move to. You can cry and shake your ass at the same time. That’s my goal. That’s really all I want—to make music that lets you shake your ass and shed a tear. That’s the sweet spot for me.

LUNA: I love how you can seamlessly balance those concerts so beautifully in your work. Can you walk us through the creative process behind YARN? How did the songs evolve from the initial idea to its final version?

GAIDAA: Agajon, who produced most of the project, was really the anchor throughout, but every song had its own little story—its own moment of origin. “Fly Away,” for example, came out of one of the worst days I was having. I just felt like complete shit. I couldn’t explain it—I didn’t even have words for what I was feeling. I messaged Agajon that I feel horrible and I needed to sing. He had already made this beat and said to try singing on this. I did—literally ten minutes later I sent him a rough demo back. I just said, ‘Thank you. I needed that more than you know.’ So much came out of me at that moment. The song was already there. We just kept building from that raw place.

“Jealous” was totally different. That one started from a very specific moment—I was scrolling on Instagram and saw someone doing really well. And immediately I went, fuck my life, what am I doing? It was a full spiral. So again, I was like, I need to sing right now. I grabbed some random loop off Splice and just started recording. If I go back to the original demo, most of the song was already there. It took a lot of reshaping over time, especially because we performed it live for a long time before a proper recording even existed. But that original energy—that gut punch—stayed.

Then there’s “Rolling.” That was written in Berlin, after I filmed a COLORS session with Bella. I came back to my hotel, opened the door, dropped my backpack, and was supposed to head out to another session. But something in me just said, no, you need to sing something right now. I shut the door, sat down, found some random R&B beat on YouTube, and the song just poured out of me. The whole thing was there at that moment. Each track really had its own journey. Nothing was made the same way twice. A lot of it came down to listening to my gut and letting myself feel something fully—even if it was uncomfortable. That’s kind of the through-line: the songs were born from instinct, from emotional urgency, from not overthinking and just being in the feeling.

LUNA: Do you have a personal favorite song on the album — one that feels closest to your heart or most revealing of who Gaidaa is right now?

GAIDAA: At this point, since a few of the songs have already been released as singles, I think my relationship with them has shifted a bit—I’ve heard some of them one too many times. But “Jealous” is still a song I really love. I was being brutally honest when I wrote it. I didn’t try to filter or edit how I was feeling. I just needed to say it—and I did. That kind of raw honesty is rare, and I’m proud of it.

I also have a deep love for “Something True.” It’s just one of those songs that came from such a genuine place. There’s a lot of heart in it—both in the writing and in how it was recorded. It’s one of those tracks that, if you play it for me at the right time, I might actually cry.

But honestly, I have a soft spot for all the songs on the project. I’m extremely picky about what makes the final cut. A lot of music didn’t make it so that these songs could. Even still, releasing this project has brought up a mix of feelings. I feel like I’ve outgrown it in a way—like I’ve already processed a lot of what this music represents, and the person I am now has moved past it. But at the same time, it was intentional to let this version of myself have space, to let her breathe and be seen.

It was a conscious choice not to punish myself for evolving or changing. Just because this isn't exactly what I would make today doesn't mean it isn’t valid or worthy. I had to remind myself that honoring who I was in those moments doesn’t take anything away from who I am now or who I’ll become. So while I feel a bit distant from the songs emotionally, I still stand behind them fully—and I’m really grateful they’re out in the world.

LUNA: Did you experience any personal or creative breakthroughs or lessons while working on YARN that have shifted how you view yourself or your artistry?

GAIDAA: I honestly learned how to produce throughout this entire process. It’s like I grew a fucking spine. I finally know what my opinion is. I know how to record myself in a way that no one can question me. That’s a huge shift. Over the last year especially—since the last project—I really dove into vocal production. I’ve gotten to a point where I can say, with full confidence, that I respect my own work. I put in the hours. You always hear about the 10,000-hour rule, and I really did that. I pulled back from everything for a while—stepped away from the industry, stopped trying to network or prove myself. I just focused on my craft. At first, it wasn’t entirely by choice, but eventually it became intentional.

I realized that I don’t need to constantly be chasing spaces or people’s approval. I needed to give my energy to what I actually care about. I’m so grateful for that time. It reminded me how deeply connected I am to this. Music isn’t separate from me—it’s woven into everything I am. I’ve come to love it in a way that’s all-consuming, and I know now that I’m willing to give everything to it if I’ve got it in me. For a long time, I told myself I was “just a singer.” But I’ve come to realize I’m so much more than that. And saying that out loud—owning that—has been terrifying. But it’s also been liberating.

LUNA: What are you most excited for listeners to experience when they hear YARN in its entirety?

GAIDAA: I want people to hear the music and allow themselves to ask the questions I've been asking myself, to ask themselves those questions. I feel like I get asked a lot of what the goal is with my music, but I don't know if I really have a goal. I share music in order to connect. There's no other reason to share it for me, apart from the conversations I have with people. I just want people to see that none of us have our shit together. I promise you, none of us have our shit together, and it's important and okay to just be real with ourselves. I want people to throw on my music and to feel like it's okay and normal for them to think out loud the things they're thinking, or to explore the things they've been thinking. Just to look at themselves and see themselves.

LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like for you that you would like to share with Luna?

GAIDAA: I’m grateful because I know the life force it took to get here. When I think about today, and I think about that 14-year-old version of myself—I know for a fact she’d be proud. I try to remind myself of that sometimes, just to recalibrate and ground myself. Because the truth is, we rarely see our own growth in real time. You don’t notice the evolution until you read an old journal entry, or find an old photo, or remember a wish you once had. Then suddenly, it hits how much you’ve changed.

This next chapter—I want to be putting out a lot more music. The plan is to release a second project this year. I will never, ever again take a five-year break between projects. That kind of silence hurts my soul. Sitting on music for that long just doesn’t feel good to me. I want to release songs while I’m still excited about them, while they still feel urgent and alive.

I’m making the best music I’ve ever made. I know it’ll keep evolving, but I’m genuinely proud of what I’m creating. I want to share that. I want to perform. I want to connect. I feel ready to let people in again. I know I closed myself off these past couple years, and I’m not ashamed of that—I needed that time. But I also know it’s not where I want to stay. I’m done operating from fear, so I’m going all in. I just want to do what I’ve always wanted to do—and give it everything I’ve got. Let’s be real, I’m just trying to have a career before the apocalypse hits.