Brave, Daring and Audacious: Corinne Bailey Rae on Embracing Creative Freedom
Wednesday, 20 April 2022
Written by Simon Ramsay
You can’t please everyone all of the time. Sure, fans of Corinne Bailey Rae would certainly like her to release more music, a desire that’s echoed by the singer herself, but every artist has their own unique process when it comes to creating the kind of magic they hope will enrich the lives of their listeners. As she moves into the next phase of her career, Rae has plenty of enchanting treats in store for everyone who values her thoughtful, heartfelt songs.
Since shooting to stardom courtesy of her multi-million selling 2006 debut, Rae has enjoyed the kind of remarkable career that could have easily ruined less grounded individuals. Were we to list all her achievements and experiences, from collaborating with Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock to hanging out with Barack Obama and Prince, you’d be forgiven for thinking she’d lived a charmed, fairytale existence.
But both her Mercury Music Prize-nominated record ‘The Sea’ and ‘The Heart Speaks In Whispers’ were partly inspired by the death of her first husband, the saxophonist Jason Rae, with those works finding her flush-of-young-love soul aesthetic evolve into a more emotionally visceral combination of atmospheric R&B, indie, electronica and jazz.
Having found new love and happiness after years of working through her grief, Rae is now married to her long time producer Steve Brown, with whom she has two daughters, and still resides in her beloved home city of Leeds. Empathetic, smart, refreshingly candid, it was a delight to chat with Rae about all the exciting new projects she’s working on, moving forwards with fresh conviction and why, sometimes, it’s a total face ache to keep smiling, prior to her current UK tour.
Just to catch up, what have the last few years been like?
Kind of crazy, really. I’m always surprised when artists say ‘I’ve had such a good time in the last two years. I’ve written three albums and I’m writing a stage musical.’ I haven’t found it to be that sort of a time. I’m not the sort of artist that just locks themselves away and creates on their own in the studio. I always like being around people, working with musicians and being inspired by people. It definitely made me realise how dependent I am on those relationships I have with my band. When it became legal to rehearse again, you suddenly realise how much you love making music. It was good to get back together and, when we finally did, it felt like such massive freedom.
During the pandemic the powers that be clearly didn’t appreciate what artists contribute.
I was struck by that advert, the one that was quickly withdrawn, with a ballet dancer called ‘Fatima’. They’d said ‘Fatima your next job should be in AI or some kind of tech.’ It was basically a message to all artists: ‘You’ve had your fun but aren’t useful to society and should retrain as something that will help.’ I felt it was a standard Tory thing. There wasn’t an understanding how people made a living and, also, how much money that brings the country.
So there was this big disconnect between the Conservative government and how art is and isn’t valued. It was a shame and definitely made you feel you were doing this indulgent thing, which added to the whole, for me, weird mental health stuff of not being able to play in front of people. After a year or 18 months I thought ‘Is this really valuable, does anyone really care, should I really be wasting my time, should I be retraining as a teacher?’ It was great that I was already working on a project. If I hadn’t I wouldn’t have necessarily been able to conjure anything from my ‘lived’ experience at that time, because it was just a lot of survival.
I believe you actually have three new projects on the go right now. You’ve just mentioned the art record you’re working on. What more can you say about that?
It’s inspired by the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago and is a side project that will come out under another name, probably next year. It’s [the kind of] music I haven’t made before. It’s not about mining myself, my feelings and my experiences, which I’ve really enjoyed. When I went to the Arts Bank it had an archive of artists' work and objects from America’s complicated past called the Edward J. Williams Collection, and it had all the books that were ever given for review to Jet and Ebony and Negro Digest since 1943, this incredible archive of more than 10,000 books on Black subjects. Everything from dance to music, biographies, historical Black colleges, the Black pioneers that went west after the Civil War. Tonnes and tonnes of detailed, specific knowledge you can’t find on the internet.
It was thrilling to be in this library, to spend all this time reading and to be around that volume of output and I just found myself writing. I was on tour and writing about a sculpture I’d seen and then writing about parks. I felt these pieces were telling me stories. So that’s what this record is. It’s their stories and my story researching the history of those objects.
You’re also working on an indie band type project with a ‘dear friend’ whose identity you don’t want to disclose just yet. Please elaborate, as much as you can!
That’s in its early stages, but I love working with her. We have a band and we’re gonna do tours supporting indie bands and playing to a hundred people. I like the idea of doing stuff where there’s no pressure, it’s someone else’s tour and you can just turn up and make noise and be more aggressive. I often feel, when I come off stage, like my face kind of hurts from smiling. The music is generally positive, so it’s really nice to have somewhere to put the more ambiguous things I think and feel.
What can you tell me about your long-awaited fourth studio album?
It’s in its early stages but I want it to be free, risk-taking and really joyous, like a big, joyous, messy romp, kind of exuberant and multi-textured. I want it to be like an explosion. It might be a reaction to my last record, which was very inward looking, super analytical and conscious. I want to do something that’s grand and not overthinking. It’s informed by the feeling of playing on stage, which I love so much. I often say when we’re in front of an audience that this is a total one off event. The audience and us will never all be together in the same place again. It will never be recreated. The songs will never sound the same again. We play differently every night. We don’t use backing tracks or click tracks, any of that stuff, and my band likes to improvise. So that’s important for me, to have it be free, and the record will be influenced by that.
How far along are you with the record?
I’m quite far down the line. There’s a selection of songs that, some of them I’ve had for a while, and they’ve suddenly clicked and fallen into place. I just started something a couple of weeks ago when I was in Los Angeles with a great writer and producer and it’s like ‘Ah yes, this is fun.’ With this guy, when I looked at our direct messages they went all the way back to 2013. It’s like people you bump into at, say, a festival in Germany and then see them two years later at an awards ceremony. I felt it was fated for us to finally get together. Our writing styles are the same, almost like on our own but in the same room, trying out things. Then we were able to play each other our ideas which I really liked. It wasn’t rushed.
And who is that mystery producer?
I’ll say when it’s [closer to the time] because I take so long to make things. I’m aware of my snail-like output. Other people have big teams and because I’m producing and arranging and engineering a lot of the time, it just makes it really slow. I’d like to work in a different way, probably a bit smarter. I’d like to have more records out than I have but everyone’s on their own path I guess.
Given those gaps between releases, what parts of the creative process do you work on hardest and which take the most time to get right?
The production part is like a time sponge. You can spend as long on it as exists. You think ‘There are ways we can make this better,’ which would sound better to us but wouldn’t to most people. I’ve read that quote about people finishing work where they say ‘You never finish it, you just abandon it.’ That’s how I feel at the end of a project. I don’t have that finisher gene.
My favourite part is when it’s the beginning and it’s all open. You’ve got a song and you’re just ‘Who knows how this is gonna turn out?’ I enjoy that excitement, that idea that everything is possible. The funnel of starting narrow and going wider and wider and taking things in. That buzzes me up but then, similarly, I find it painful at the finishing stage. Closing it down, turning off the things it couldn’t be and accepting what it is. I guess that’s how I work.
You probably made your debut album in quite a blissful creative bubble, so how challenging was it to deal with the fact that, once it became a hit and made you famous, there was a keen focus on what you produced?
It was nice to make the record outside of the label but I also got to do that with ‘The Sea’ because of the circumstances. I was on my own. We were left to our own devices. Some of the songs people hadn’t heard until we were mixing them. They were very sensitive and hands off when I was making that record. But by the third record I felt under pressure because I’d had this one really successful commercial record and this one successful critical record. I was like ‘This third record has to be X & Y.’ It slowed me down, that pressure.
You’ve amassed an incredible amount of experiences throughout your career. Have you ever thought about writing a book?
I’d love to write some kind of book. I don’t know if it would necessarily be my story because I don’t know if that’s interesting enough. I think a lot about grief. That experience was very dramatic and also universal. I remember, at the time, looking at lots of literature, especially for people who are younger. I was 29 when I was a widow and there weren't tonnes of things to read about people being at that same stage, feeling like their life had finished.
Not that it would be a blow by blow account of what happened to me, but it would be more like, ‘This is useful. These are some of the emotions and the lessons…’ I feel I have a massive amount of knowledge and experience in that area and often share it with people, one to one, who’ve lost a partner or close person at a younger age. I’d like to find a way to write something like that when I get the time and work out the right way to do it.
Finally, in 2016 an interviewer described your life, at that point, as having a three act structure. Can you sum up what the fourth act looks like for you right now?
For me it’s freedom. Not getting in my own way, being brave, daring, audacious and having the confidence to step into some of these new relationships with people and be confident in my own music-making process. I am a self taught guitarist and an indie singer and I didn’t go to jazz college. I wouldn’t say I have no confidence but I have a different type of confidence to someone who, perhaps, is also a professor at Berklee. I feel it’s this weird punk, jazz kind of moment for me. But punks are very ballsy and I’m looking forward to stepping into more of myself and growing, just looking what’s around the corner and moving into it confidently.
Corinne Bailey Rae Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Wed April 20 2022 - CAMBRIDGE Corn Exchange
Thu April 21 2022 - LONDON Royal Festival Hall
Fri April 22 2022 - BIRMINGHAM Town Hall
Sun April 24 2022 - MANCHESTER Albert Hall
Mon April 25 2022 - LEEDS O2 Academy Leeds
Thu April 28 2022 - NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE O2 City Hall
Fri April 29 2022 - CHELTENHAM Henry Westons Big Top
Sat April 30 2022 - EDINBURGH Queens Hall
Sun May 01 2022 - CHESTER StoryHouse
Tue May 03 2022 - BEXHILL ON SEA De La Warr Pavilion
Wed May 04 2022 - BATH Forum
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