YOHANA SAHLE

Addis rarely gives you good weather in the middle of the rainy season. Outside, sunlight warms the sidewalks of Kazanchis while people bustle about. Inside a cozy cafe, Yohana arrives and sits across from me, framed by the glow of the afternoon light. Born in Dire Dawa and raised in Addis, Yohana grew up surrounded by music, both at home where her siblings played instruments and at church, singing in choir. “Music has always been around in my life,” she says. Her brother played piano and guitar, her sister sang with a voice that made Yohana think, I want to be like that. Her father urged her to explore different paths, but when he witnessed the intensity of her love for music, he realized what she had always felt in her heart: this was her destiny.“When I graduated high school, I decided to pursue it full-time.” While friends left Ethiopia for university abroad, she stayed, enrolling at the Mekane Eyesus School of Jazz. It was not an easy road. She majored in guitar enough to perform, but never feeling like she truly “owned” the instrument. With no jazz vocal teachers to guide her, she became her own instructor, studying and imitating the voices she admired until her own sound emerged.

Studying jazz was more than technical training it was a bridge into Ethiopia’s music scene. “Every single stone on the road led me to where I am now,” she says. Connections from school led to her first gig, offered by her harmony and composition teacher just months after graduation. “It was in Portuguese,” she laughs, recalling the moment. “I didn’t know Portuguese but thought, why not?”

Yet despite finding the stage as another home since she was 13, she admits to nerves. “I don’t want to feel paralyzing fear, but I do enjoy those first few steps walking on stage and feeling butterflies. I like feeling nervous. It reminds me to feel. That I’m human.”

Before her debut album Kelemat, her biggest challenge wasn’t only external. “Dealing with myself, figuring out where I fit in the artist’s world. It made me question what I truly wanted from my art.” She pushes back against the commodification of creativity, the constant pressure to produce for profit, even when she wasn’t feeling her best creatively. “I want to create because I have something to say. Not because I have to be productive. ”For Yohana, the studio is a warm, intimate space. The stage, a place for communion. “Both are sacred ground to me. You don’t mess around when you engage with art.”

She laments the scarcity of such spaces in Ethiopia, questioning what a society becomes when culture and connection are sidelined. “What is a world without art? Without connection? What are we leaving for the generations to come?”

Over time, Yohana has come to treat her voice like any other instrument, using jazz improvisation to explore and stretch its range. She recalls a college class where they were instructed to express emotions grief, joy, rage with just their voice. “It was an out-of-body experience. Voices can sound pretty, but pretty doesn’t always reach that pit inside you. I want to be that carrier. I want people to hear the rawness in my voice and connect with the emotion.”

She speaks with reverence about musicians who can take you somewhere else entirely. “Once they start playing, they just take you to another realm, you know? Her eyes begin to glaze over as she thinks about the veil separating our world from the other. “It’s powerful. They’re telling you a story and allowing you a peek into a place not seen by many.”

Most of her lyrics come from lived experiences, though sometimes they are born from observation. She recalls writing after watching a couple share macchiatos, their quiet intimacy mirroring her own emotions at the time. “I gave those heavy feelings words,” She says when discussing her debut album Kelemat, which emerged from heartbreak and healing. “I was able to put them to rest. To give them an outlet and finally let go.”

When asked if there was ever a song too real to release, she smiled

As an Ethiopian woman in music, she’s learning to shed the weight of expectation. “It’s suffocating people’s perceptions and expectations. I realized that so many of my fears, so much of the weight I’ve been carrying, aren’t even mine; they belong to someone else.” She pictures herself as a stone in the middle of a stream, unmoving as the water rushes past. “And I keep asking myself, why am I afraid of stillness? ”These days, she’s learning to stand without attachments or labels. Not as something but as someone. Just Yohana.

Legacy, for Yohana, is not about fame or numbers. It’s about being a stepping stone for those who come after. It’s about leaving behind her humanity for people to find themselves in. “I hope when I’m done with my time here, my music serves as a guide. We’re so far from one another, I want my legacy to be helping us find our way back to each other.”

By the time our coffee cups are empty, the café hums with the lunch crowd, sunlight still holding up against the clouds. Sitting across from Yohana, I realize her power lies not only in her music but in her presence. She makes you pause, honor the weight of what’s unspoken, the heaviness of silence. Most of all, she reminds you that listening, truly listening, is its own kind of music.