In 2006 Corinne Bailey Rae released her self-titled debut album, a record she had recorded on a shoestring budget while still unsigned. But the success of that album was instant and immense. Debuting at Number One in the UK, featuring hit singles such as ‘Put Your Records On’ and ‘Like A Star’, becoming a smash-hit around the world, and crashing straight into the Billboard Top 20 in the US – the first British female singer-songwriter to do so in decades – meant Bailey Rae gained a huge global audience within months.
And now, four years and four-million album sales later, comes the long-awaited second album. For the 30-year-old singer and songwriter from Leeds, this meant politely declining the suggestions that she work with this or that big-league producer in this or that big-money studio. It meant co-producing the album herself with friends and musicians she had worked with in the past to retain intimacy and control, shrugging off the huge, worldwide expectations engendered by the self-titled debut and refusing to be bedazzled by that album’s multiple Grammy and Brit Award nominations. http://www.corinnebaileyrae.net
Similarly unbidden but also uninhibited is ‘Are You Here’, a song from the sessions that Bailey Rae resumed after a long period of grieving. Boldly, baldly, the song begins the album. “He’s a real live-wire, he’s the best of his kind,” Bailey Rae sings over delicately strummed guitar, “wait till you see those eyes…” On every level it’s devastatingly moving.
“That was another line that just came out,” she says quietly of the title. It is all, she admits, part of her coping with her loss. “I feel like I’ve been playing music and writing and using music to help me with all the different emotions that I’ve been feeling. When I started writing that I was thinking, I don’t really want this song to go into the world, ’cause it’s so naked… But I had to. ”
One of her favourite songs on the album is the jazz-flavoured lament ‘I Would Like To Call It Beauty’. She loves playing it live, loves the almost telepathic interplay she and her drummer enjoy. “I guess that song is about my experiences of late. It’s about grief and what it does and the things it makes you aware of.”
The title comes from a late-night conversation she had with Jason’s younger brother comparing their views of the world. Corinne was speaking about God and Jason’s brother said he believed in a force that binds everything, holds everything. He said, “I would like to call it… beauty”. She was flabbergasted. “What a thing to say! Really we were talking about the same thing…” So powerful was the sentiment that she took it for the song title, and duly credits her late husband’s brother as its co-writer.
“I have experienced a lot of beauty in the loss,” is her remarkable admission, “in the way that I’ve been able to survive. The way I feel like I’m being held – held up. I guess the song is about the amount of beauty that is in grief because of the way that people hold you up, and forces and nature, how they hold you up.”
Overall ‘The Sea’ is, she reflects, in part about the uniting bonds of grief, stretching from her aunt to herself and to all those around her. “All the bonds deepened. And all the dross is washed away as well. Only the purest things survive. That’s one really beautiful thing about it.”
Ultimately, though, ‘The Sea’ covers the waterfront of human emotion. Yes, the worst kind of heartbreak is in there. But so are the best kinds of love, plucked from deep within this most truthful, unflinching of artists. “Everything I do I just want to be real and honest,” Bailey Rae concludes. And this album is without a doubt one of the most honest works of recent years, and one of the most beautiful too.
‘The Sea’ is released on Good Groove / Virgin Records
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