Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
Corinne Bailey Rae is no stranger to the nation’s capital, having performed at the White House for Paul McCartney in 2010, followed by DAR Constitution Hall for Smokey Robinson’s Gershwin Prize in 2016.
“I absolutely love playing in D.C.,” Bailey Rae told WTOP. “There’s just something about the crowd. D.C. is often our first show to sell out, I’ll get that phone call like, ‘D.C. has sold out,’ and I’m like, ‘Yes!’ … It’s a really magical place.”
Bailey Rae added, “I love that hotel, The Line, it’s really cool. I like the parks, I like that so much is going on, and getting to play at the White House that time for the Obama Administration … I can’t believe it all happened in D.C.”
Next month, the Grammy winner returns to the nation’s capital on Sept. 6 for a live show at Lincoln Theatre on U Street, Northwest, where she’ll play all 10 songs from her new album “Black Rainbows,” which arrives on Sept. 15.
“Last time I came to D.C., it was all the songs that people know well — ‘Put Your Records On,’ ‘Like a Star,’ ‘Trouble Sleeping’ — but these are a special run of shows where I’m playing just ‘Black Rainbows,’ a new record I wrote in response to this art archive in Chicago,” Bailey Rae said. “It’s mostly African American history, art, dance, it’s cosmic and Afro-futuristic, it’s jazzy, it’s funky, I’ve got some punk and indie songs as well, so it’s a real mixture.”
Born to an English mother and Caribbean father in England in 1979, Bailey Rae grew up listening to a variety of music genres before studying classical violin and eventually recording music at her Baptist church.
“I listened to my parents’ records like Stevie Wonder and Simon & Garfunkel, my dad collected 45s,” Bailey Rae said. “As a teenager, I was really into American indie bands like Belly, Veruca Salt, Hole, Nirvana, then they sent me backwards to Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix. When I was a little older, I got more into soul and jazz.”
Bailey Rae said of her music taste’s range: “I had a mixture in my record collection of ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill’ sitting next to a Jimi Hendrix record or Bjork’s first album next to a Jamiroquai record.”
After signing a record deal, her self-titled debut album “Corinne Bailey Rae” (2006) exploded with the first track “Like a Star” and the smash hit “Put Your Records On,” which featured visual storytelling with lyrics like “sapphire and faded jeans.”
“I remember being at Abbey Road listening to the strings go down for ‘Like a Star’ and crying tears of joy because it was so amazing to be hearing this music, finally getting the icing on the cake,” Bailey Rae said.
On her hit single: “When I think of [‘Put Your Records On’], I just think of sunshine, being in my little flat on my small bed that wasn’t quite a double bed, playing my guitar and coming across this riff … just thinking, ‘I really like this,’ just the bouncy feeling of it.”
Two songs earned Grammy nominations for Song of the Year: “Like a Star” and “Put Your Records On,” the latter of which was also up for Record of the Year. Bailey Rae herself was nominated for Best New Artist.
“It was a fascinating whirlwind,” Bailey Rae said. “I remember we had a gig in New York, then we needed to do ‘Oprah’ the next day, flying on a private jet, which just blew my mind, I’d never done that before. … I met Mary J. Blige at the Grammy announcements, and I came back crying to my makeup artist friend: ‘Mary J. Blige liked my album!’ … I got a call from Stevie [Wonder] … I found out Prince came to one of my shows. I couldn’t believe that.”
Soon after, Bailey Rae covered Joni Mitchell’s iconic song “River” on Herbie Hancock’s acclaimed tribute album “River: The Joni Letters,” which won the top Grammy prize of Album of the Year in 2008.
“Herbie is an absolute legend,” Bailey Rae said. “Every time we rehearsed, he would play a completely different intro. I was so embarrassed because I wouldn’t know where to come in. … I realized after the third time that he’s this jazz genius where it’s never the same twice. … When you play with people who are total giants, it lets you do things you couldn’t have done before, so I feel like I’m caught in this updraft, spiraling up and up.”
After the death of her husband in 2008, Bailey Rae recorded her second full-length album, “The Sea” (2010).
“That changed my whole life,” Bailey Rae said. “I started to think of it almost as a before and after. I had this great success but in this carefree innocence … then with ‘The Sea’ I felt like I was climbing back out of this weight of grief that continued in me for a really long time and shaped me. Now when I look back at it, I feel proud of my survival and feel like there’s so much grace and beauty and strength of coming through a loss like that.”
She bounced back to win her first solo Grammy Award for Best R&B Performance for her cover of Bob Marley’s “Is This Love” on “The Love EP” (2011). She followed up with her third full-length studio album, “The Heart Speaks in Whispers” (2016), including songs like “Been to the Moon” and “The Skies Will Break.”
“I felt more pressure on my third album,” Bailey Rae said. “With ‘The Sea,’ I felt people were saying, ‘Alright, this is a record you needed to make, but now it’s time to get back into that same place.’ You can’t go backwards, you can only go forwards, so I’m really proud that I was able to make a record where I was able to listen to my instinct. It’s called ‘The Heart Speaks in Whispers’ about listening to your intuition and quieting all the noise around you.”
Most recently, that creative intuition has blossomed into the aforementioned new album “Black Rainbows,” which will release alongside her book “Reflections/Refractions at the Stony Island Arts Bank.”
“I wanted it to reflect the fact that it was an art project,” Bailey Rae said. “Sometimes when you have an idea it explodes out into different places. … It’s a continued passion of mine, the objects and events in the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago. There’s so much history in there, there’s so many stories that have been lost, quieted or erased that I have unearthed in the making of this record, so those people’s stories are told on the album.”
Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
