Swiss-Polish-Japanese singer, pianist and composer Yumi Ito has long been celebrated for blurring boundaries between genres and cultures. With her new solo release Lonely Island (Enja Yellowbird, September 19th 2025), she strips everything back to its purest form: just voice and piano. Recorded live in a secluded Swiss studio and produced entirely by F(L)INTA creatives, the album revisits ten of her own songs in intimate new versions — pieces she says she would take with her to a desert island.

She joins us here to talk about the inspirations, challenges and discoveries that shaped Lonely Island, and how this stripped-down approach is opening a new chapter in her career.

Lonely Island is your first fully solo album, just voice and piano. What was the turning point that made you decide to strip everything back to this essence?

Playing solo was the way I always made music. I had never performed regularly on the piano in a band until during my Jazz studies. So it felt like coming home, back to my musical roots, after many years of performing in bands.

In the past, I spent most of my life with classical music, whereas now I returned to performing alone, but with my own music.
Since solo is the way I always compose and practice, it felt very natural to finally record my first solo album. I wanted the listener to feel like they were in a room with me, with this raw and emotional feel to it.

Can you tell us about the secluded studio you recorded in, and how this environment played a role in shaping the sound and mood of the album?

“Lonely Island” was recorded at the home studio of the great sound engineer Lara Persia, located in Ticino, the southern Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. The studio is in the Ticinese mountains, which I found very inspiring. The calmness, being alone in the room because Lara’s console was in the other building. So I had the whole studio with the piano for myself, which gave me the feeling of solitude I needed to record this very personal solo album.

Lara also has two lovely cats and a dog who accompanied me during the process. It was so beautiful to be surrounded by nature and animals. Lara records for the Swiss National Radio and for ECM among others, so she is incredibly skilled and understood very quickly what my music needed. Sometimes less is more.

Every sound was recorded live, with no overdubs. Was that a technical challenge, or more of an artistic necessity for you?
You reimagined ten songs from across your career for this record. How did you decide which ones would make it onto your “desert island” list?

After producing albums which were more arranged, like “Stardust Crystals”, where I almost wrote out every note except the improvised solos, or “Ysla”, where we worked with more layers and added subtle electronics by Chris Hyson, I felt that I wanted to record a solo album that holds the momentum and the live feel. It was not recorded in front of an audience but from a very meditative state in solitude.

Since it was just me on piano and vocals it was an easier process arranging-wise, and I gave myself lots of space for plenty of improvisation on the piano and with my voice. Many spontaneous things happened in the studio, which I really enjoyed.
I wanted to re-record those songs because they have traveled the world with me and changed over the years. My relationship with these songs became deeper after countless tours, so I felt like I wanted to record them as a memory and to close the circle of the last albums. I imagined which songs of mine I would take on a lonely island, and without thinking much I chose the ones that felt the most personal and suited for just piano and voice.

You already have a full-band album and international tour planned for 2026. How does this stripped-down release set the stage for that next chapter?

It was very important for me to close the chapter of the older works and compositions and capture them on this solo album, also with a music book that will be released later this year with transcriptions of the solo works, so that others can also play my music.
This album was recorded out of the immense gratitude I feel for all the stages I’ve been able to perform on and the musicians I’ve had the chance to work and tour with over the last years who shaped how I now see and experience music and who inspired me on my path. The solo album is like a snapshot of the moment.

At the same time, I’ve also been working on my upcoming band album which will be out next year.
I love working with my band, and with the next album that I’m finishing now I’m exploring topics such as feminism, ancestry, friendship and togetherness. So it will be a very interactive album, with many different colors. We added guitarist Alessio Cazzetta to my previous trio with bassist Nadav Erlich and Iago Fernandez on drums. I tried out a new way of composing, I think I took more risks and mixed even more different styles. I’m very excited to release this album next year and start a new chapter.

But I’m sure I’ll also record another solo album in the future because I really enjoyed the whole process. At the beginning it was a challenge to be so confronted with myself and to present something so raw and vulnerable, but at the same time I think I grew a lot and recording my music solo gave me a new perspective on my music.
It made me write new pieces for a next solo album as well 🙂

But yes I absolutely love working on my music with my band, and touring the world with them feels really deep to me. I love the interactive playing together, the dialogues that happen between us on stage or in the studio.
So yes, as long as I don’t need to retreat on a lonely island, I love working with my band hehe. I must say my solo album was very much inspired by the many tours we’ve played as a band, and when I play my songs alone I hear the drums in my head, the basslines, saxophone lines and guitar riffs and patterns.

If a listener could only hear one track to understand the heart of this album, which would you choose?

That’s a hard question because it took me half a year to figure out the order of the album, so to pick one seems impossible to me haha.

Maybe the track “Little Things”? I think it is one of my oldest compositions, now 11 years old. It’s about the importance of the little things in life. I feel like it expresses the core message of this album, that we don’t need much in life and that it is about the essence.
But also songs like “Old Redwood Tree”, which live from this meditative ostinato-style way of playing and my voice improvising freely over some piano pattern. I also rearranged songs such as “After the End”, which sounds completely different from the piano-less version I had recorded with my band in 2021 for the album “Ysla”, or “What Seems To Be”, where I swing on the piano.

What was very interesting to me were all the piano soli. I’ve never improvised so much on the piano on a record like on this album. It felt like a beautiful comeback to the piano world that was the first experience for me with music as a kid when I started to learn playing the piano by ear with the suzuki method.

Which track surprised you most once you heard it back in this pared-down form?

Maybe the song “Rebirth”, because I originally didn’t plan to record it but then came up with this more instrumental version with no voice except some spontaneous improvised unison lines I came up with in the studio. I love how I sometimes have no concrete plan and then just get some ideas in the studio and make a new version out of it.

The album shifts between impressionism, Brazilian rhythms and cinematic textures. Were those influences conscious, or did they emerge naturally as you played?

They emerged very naturally as I played because I believe that we humans all have a child within ourselves that picks up all sounds and languages around. Of course, I’ve been very influenced by my classical music background but also my jazz studies where I came across jazz standards and Brazilian music such as the great music of the composer Hermeto Pascoal.

In my day-to-day life I listen to a lot of folk-pop but also neo-classical piano music such as Ólafur Arnalds or Hania Rani, or electronic music such as Josin or JFDR. I already felt drawn to minimal music by Philip Glass and film music by Yann Tiersen as a teenager, so I think that these influences definitely accompanied me as well.
I love when the music brings me into a certain mood, when it has a strong atmosphere and I can dive into it like into a movie.

I imagine my life being the movie and the music accompanying it.

Your background spans classical training, jazz improvisation and learning by ear from childhood. How do those threads come together most clearly on “Lonely Island”?

I think the classical training was the base, especially when it comes to my piano playing and how I compose on the piano. Piano was my first instrument, I spent most of my life playing classical piano but then discovered composition, songwriting and jazz.

When I sung I always felt inspired by soul and pop vocalists since I was a child, while also admiring my mums stunning opera singing.
Thats why later on I went on to study Jazz vocals as well, because I did want to become a professional singer but do my own thing and find my own style.

So on this album I incorporated many vocal and piano improvisations which mainly come more from my Jazz background. When I compose or improvise I do everything by ear.

When I write melodies I like strong hooks and pop-music like chorusses, melodies that come to me intuitively without thinking at all. Inspired by all Pop music and Jazz Standards I ever listened to, but also the “Pop” music of older times hehe .. So I’m for sure I’m also very inspired by all the years I spent with the “pop stars” from the past: Mozart, Bach, Chopin and Debussy behind the piano 🙂
Some of these songs ironically were not even composed on the piano (“What Seems to Be” and “Love Is Here To Stay” were written on ukulele and “Little Things” on the guitar). I don’t know how to play the ukulele or guitar so I just played something by ear without knowing what notes I pressed. I like this approach in music, to feel like a beginner and start over and over again. When I improvise I always go by ear and intuition as well. Of course music theory helped me a lot for arranging and improvising and opened up harmonic possibilities, but once I’m performing I don’t think or analyse what I do.

I think because I grew up in a multilingual and multicultural home born to a Polish mother and Japanese father in Switzerland who both happened to be classical musicians, I learned early on that I do not belong just to one culture and nationality and that we’re all just human beings made of the same blood and flesh. So I also see music in the same way. To me genres don’t really exist, just as borders don’t exist in my world. I like to bend and stretch, see how far I can go, I like to mix and match styles while my main focus is always on the storytelling and the emotion I want to transmit. I think we need to listen more with the heart and analyse less with the mind.

What I also love about playing solo is that I cannot think much because I’m multitasking. I have to focus on the essential and be absolutely present in every moment. Sometimes when I play I enter a state similar to trance which I really enjoy.