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Corinne Bailey Rae interview
Leeds star Corinne Bailey Rae talks to Duncan Seaman about dealing with grief and writing songs.
Newly returned from a round of a promotional work in Los Angeles, Corinne Bailey Rae sounds bright and focused.
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Today's the day the 30-year-old singer's new album The Sea finally hits the shops, almost two years after the death of her husband and there's clearly some relief that, after all the talking and all the events surrounding its making, her songs can finally find make their own way out into the world.
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Corinne seemed like the girl who had it all – career, marriage, talent
when everything was overturned.
On the evening of March 21, 2008 her husband Jason Rae, a gifted saxophonist with soul-jazz band the Haggis Horns, had been out drinking in the Hyde Park area of Leeds with a friend, James Sheasby, a recovering heroin user.
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The next morning Jason, 31, was discovered dead at Sheasby's flat beside three empty bottles of heroin substitute.
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Nine months later Leeds Coroner's Court recorded a verdict of death by misadventure, stating that he had died of an accidental overdose of methadone and alcohol. Police cleared Sheasby of providing Rae with the
drug.
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Corinne, who was midway through writing and recording her next album, was devastated. As she later told one interviewer: "It's a massive shock in terms of the story of your life that you're imagining. You've got the first few pages and the rest has just been ripped away."
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In the months after Jason's death did she ever think she would not return to music? "No, I did not ever think that. I did not think about my career at all. It was just not part of my thinking."
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To pass the time, she became an avid knitter. "I got really into knitting," she says. "I love it. It's a really good thing to do to absorb time. I really like making things. (Going back] a lot of members of my family worked in textiles so it feels like I'm connecting to this ancient tradition, working with my hands."
Eventually last year she felt able to write again. "It just happened really naturally. There has not been any point where I have not made myself do anything. For a long time I did not hear ideas coming in but then I was hearing ideas in my head, looking out of the window I would get a little description then I would find myself writing music."
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Reflecting on the completed work, she says: "I feel like I've really waited for that day. The album is getting to speak for itself. I've enjoyed speaking to people about it but it's different when people hear it, so today is a really big day."
She had, she says, "no idea" that its predecessor, released four years ago, would go on to become the huge international success that it was. Four million copies have so far been sold worldwide; it topped the UK charts and reached No 4 in the US Billboard 200.
Its signature track, Put Your Records On, was also a million-seller while the ballad Like a Star, that she wrote in her days in Leeds riot grrrl band Helen, was nominated for two Grammy awards.
"I thought that record would be really underground," she says. "I had been in an indie band before; everything I had done had been off the radar."
Suddenly people she'd known at college – she grew up in Moortown and studied at Leeds University – were into it. "When it went to No 1, I was totally surprised; I was really thrilled as well. It meant I could do all these gigs and people who were at them knew what to expect. I felt I had a lot of freedom in performing that music. It was a really exciting time."
Even before tragedy struck, Corinne had decided that her new record would be different.
"I decided that I would co-produce it, that it would have loud instruments, be noisy, more aggressive".
Now she found herself writing around natural vocal melodies. "I tried to pour out the music," she says. "I put a lot of movement into the vocal, it went with the lyrics rather than trying to get some schema going."
As an English graduate, she also found literary inspiration too. "I really like reading poetry and I like to describe things in a way that's more poetic and also conversational. There are layers and secrets in the lyrics."
She balks, though, at the idea that writing the songs on The Sea was therapeutic. "A lot of people have tried to use that word..." she pauses to gather her thoughts.
"Whenever anyone writes music that's emotional, that speaks from true experience you can guarantee there will be a resonance with it.
"It does not feel a 'before and after' record, a record in two parts.
To me it meant I was the same person. It's good that it all hangs together in that way."
Last November Corinne played her first 'comeback' shows at The Wardrobe in Leeds and in London. "It was great," she says, though she points out she had never completely stopped performing in the previous two years. "I've been on stages during all this time. I've been playing music with my friends, I've been playing at the Sela Bar once a month; it was called Come Sunday. It was really good fun playing other people's music – Stevie Wonder, Van Morrison, The Beatles.
"It did not feel like I had stage-fright," she adds. "It felt great to be back on stage playing my own songs. I'm looking forward to touring."
Performing live, she says, is "her favourite thing about making music".
"It's good to play it in front of people, to see something special happening, to not be conscious of what's going on, to lose control. It's something that only the band and the audience experience at any one time. It's really special."
* Corinne Bailey Rae's new album The Sea is available now on EMI. UK tour dates are due to be announced soon.
For further details visit: www.corinnebaileyrae.net
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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