Interview #523: Corinne Bailey Rae

Having debuted at number one in the UK charts, Corinne Bailey Rae’s first album marked her out as a bright new light in the pop world. Recently released album two, The Sea, has built on the soulful simplicity of that record with an added melodic and emotional depth, marking her out as a truly gifted musician.

I Like Music caught up with Corinne inside a highly decorated caravan, backstage at Leamington Spa before her show that evening! We chat about her musical upbringing, what elements of a song captivate her imagination and soul, recording the new album and what the future holds.

“I Like Music because…it gives me freedom and lightness of being.” Corinne Bailey Rae

ILM: Your second album The Sea is the next stage in your musical journey so far, how did that journey begin? What's your earliest musical memory?

Corinne: I guess there were a few different times. I used to play or listen to music at home. My Mum and my Dad were really into records. My Dad collected funk 45s, so they always used to be on in the house, and I really used to love getting them and playing them. I liked the physicality of records even though it was out of date then. I think that’s one of the things that’s attractive to me. I’ve never felt any charm towards tapes, but I felt really excited about putting records on, putting the needle on them and being able to see this physical thing. So I used to listen to Dad’s music; Stevie Wonder, Funkadelic, Parliament, all those kinds of bands. It was amazing to hear that in the house! Then I guess at school people started to be involved in music, playing instruments, and I knew that I wanted to do that as well. I liked the art of learning a piece, I liked performing and playing with other people. I started playing my violin when I was six or seven, I got given a school violin, it was really tiny!

ILM: Do you still play it now?

Corinne: No, I don’t play it anymore! It’s not like riding a bike, it’s really hard to get back into. I thought it would be easy, but it’s not. So I remember playing the violin at school, and finding it easy...I enjoyed being able to express myself, joining an orchestra and playing my small part, then getting to the stage where you’re putting it in with the other instruments. I liked that it sounded completely different in your mind to playing it with other people because the harmonic context is completely different. I used to find that really exciting! So I guess a lot of my musical memories are playing music as well as listening to music. It made me feel part of a group, and I looked forward to the performance. That anticipation of the night and how it unites the audience and the performers in this one moment, a moment that will never be repeated.

ILM: Do you remember the first time you wrote a song?

Corinne: Yeah, I remember writing a song in primary school, so I guess I was eight or nine or something. It wasn’t a very good song, but I can still remember it! I used to have this book, and I would write down my dreams. I used to have really vivid dreams…I guess I still do. But I used to write them down so that I could remember them. I can still remember the dreams I had as a kid, I guess because I wrote them down, but also because of how visual they were.

ILM: How has your writing process changed and developed?

Corinne: In a way it hasn’t really changed that much. My favourite part of writing is the unplanned nature of it, the way that it just feels like it comes from nowhere. I’m not a really technical musician so I don’t approach it like “this chord should go with this chord,” or “I’m going to develop this motif.” I’m much better at just playing my guitar and hearing things, having things come into my mind and just working on them.

ILM: What are the kinds of sounds that you find yourself most drawn to?

Corinne: I really like chord changes, so jazz harmonies and standards. I love the way it sort of pulls you around. I love melodies that are horizontal, but it’s what the chords are doing that informs the melody and adds the emotion and weight to it. So I guess I like emotional music, and music that is honest. That’s really important to me. You might pick a band like Radiohead, or a jazz writer like Hoagy Carmichael or a band like Portishead. To me, the thing that I like about those three artists is the same thing. It’s the harmonic thing that’s happening that I really respond to. Big dramatic chord changes and descending harmonies. Like Paul McCartney’s writing, or John Lennon’s, where the melody is quite horizontal and it’s what the chords are doing that affect the music.

ILM: Do you ever experiment outside the sound / genre that we’ve come to expect from you? A Corinne Bailey Rae rap perhaps....!

Corinne: Haha! I don’t feel like the music that I make is tied to a specific style. When we’re playing the songs on this record live they can be really aggressive and really heavy, but then they’ve got choral music in them. Or there are songs influenced by jazz harmonies, but they’re played on indie guitars. There’s so much music that I like, and it’s mostly to do with what’s happening in the harmonies. I like bossa nova, or romantic classical music, or rock and indie, or blues, or pop music. I love that Beyonce song Déjà Vu, just because of what’s happening in the harmony. I like a lot of hip-hop that’s sampled jazz, or Aretha Franklin. I think outside of genre, so I would never feel limited when I write or play. I would never think “people know me for this particular style, so I can’t do this.” With this record I feel like I’ve taken lots of risks with people’s perception of me. That’s the thing I’m least aware of anyway, and I think one should be. Having only done one record you’ve got lots of space to scan around the horizon and I felt with these songs that they made it clear what kind of style they want to be.

ILM: You worked with producers Steve Brown and Steve Chrisanthou on this record, as well as the last. What's it like working with them?

Corinne: I worked with Steve Brown mostly as a musician on the first record. We only wrote one song together, Seasons Change, but we’d had a lot of experience playing live with each other. I guess I was beginning to learn what a producer actually does, and I thought, “I have a really good idea of how I want it to sound, and I know where I want to work and who I want to use, and what instruments I want to use…” I guess that’s what production is really… It was a really good experience to work with another musician. Sometimes when people record music they’ve had this experience of playing live all the time and being part of a moment, sensing what’s happening. Then suddenly you go into a studio and the drummer does their parts, then the bassist, then the guitarist. You layer everything, and everyone’s working in this terrible isolation. You put it together like an ill-fitting jigsaw, and you sit back and are really disappointed, wondering how come it doesn’t sound exciting.

ILM: Music is more than the sum of its parts…

Corinne: Exactly! I felt like we ought to be responding to each other. I wanted to record when myself and the drummer were in the same room, usually the bassist or keyboard player as well. In this case Steve Brown, with whom I was co-producing, was really instrumental because he was playing. I wanted the voice to lead the songs - run the tempo and the dynamics – rather than do this thing where the singing goes on last, like the icing on the cake. I have recorded like that before, and this polished and perfect backing track that you’ve been working on for weeks is marching on without you. You get through the first verse and think “it’s too fast, and the chorus is too slow!” And there’s nothing you can do about it! So I really wanted to record where there was this movement and pace, and it could be tidal and go to extremes then shrink back just like you play live. I didn’t want it to sound like a big, wet, jam mind you. I wanted it to be highly arranged, and there are loads of layers that we put on afterwards, but I wanted the bones to have come about from working on the music together. So that’s what it was like working with Steve Brown

Then Steve Chrisanthou...I did most of my first album with Steve, and I felt like I’d learnt a lot. I’d been hassling him and looking over his shoulder annoying him. He was a good person to work with because he gave me a lot of room. I think he was proud of what I’d learnt, so he was just sitting back, saying “what do you think it needs?” or “who do you wanna work with?” He had a really good way of facilitating my ideas, which I feel I wouldn’t have got had I worked with a big-name producer. Loads of records that get made these days just sound like the producer. It could be any old singer, and they’re just the cherry on top. I don’t want to be like that. I’d written all these songs myself, and I cared about them and had an idea of how I wanted them to sound. I can’t see myself ever getting to that stage where someone sends a backing track over and I make up a song over it. Lots of people work like that, but I don’t enjoy it. I want to be more involved. I want to control how the drums sound, and the tempo, and especially what’s happening melodically. So it was good to work with people that I knew because they gave me a lot of space.

ILM: It must be amazing seeing other musicians living and breathing the songs that started out with just you, a pen and paper. Out of all the musical collaborations on The Sea, which moments really stood out?

Corinne: There’s a choir on the song Diving For Hearts. I didn’t want it to be gospel or soulful, I wanted this real English classical sound to it. I wanted it to sound spiritual, and thought “what about a liturgical choir?” The sort you go and see in an old church. So I looked up this choir from Leeds University, went on their website and heard what they were doing. I just emailed them, I think it was just before Christmas, and told them who I was and what I was doing. It was really good to have had this idea, to find the choir and to engage them myself. I really wanted to record them in this abandoned church on Burley Road called St Margaret’s. It’s just been taken over by an Arts Council project, but they haven’t had any money to do it up yet. On the outside it’s all bricked-up, and I’d seen it as I was growing up and been a bit curious, but just thought it was an ugly old church. But when you go inside it’s this Gothic church with huge marble pillars, all white stone, and the reason the front is brick is because the committee that was building it ran out of money, so just had to finish it in brick. But anyway, it’s gorgeous inside! There were pigeons and spiders’ webs, no toilets or electricity, but I really wanted to record in there. I got the choir there and ran a cable from the church to a guy who lives next door that I know. So, going from a choral line in your head, a four part harmony that I wrote out, to actually hearing it with that kind of reverb was amazing! It sounded terrifying, which is exactly how I’d wanted it to sound.

ILM: In terms of other collaborations, you've worked with the legendary Herbie Hancock before. What was that experience like?

Corinne: It came about at a time when I had lots and lots of things on. It was exciting, but it was just part of loads and loads of things! I recorded the vocals separately, but then a month or so later I got to perform it with him on that series Live From Abbey Road. That was the first time I actually got to meet him. I remember being really flustered! I was pushed into the corner of this weird dressing room that I think was someone’s office, and as I was getting changed people were coming in so I was really distracted. But then when I came down to the floor I just suddenly saw him and the grand piano with no lid on, and I saw Wayne Short, who’s this amazing jazz Saxophone player who I hadn’t realized was going to be on the session. Then I really started to freak out! I was thinking “oh no, I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t know the song…” In a way it was good that I was so distracted beforehand cos it meant that I didn’t have enough time to get really nervous about it!

But yeah...he was just very suave and cool. He seems to have been time-travelled… You think of his early records when he’s in a trench coat in the ‘50s, but then he worked in music through the ‘60s, and there was all his electronic stuff in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. He seems to have gone through what I think of as real different musical eras and spaces. It was sort of intimidating to work with him. There were plenty of times when we were doing a take and I’d mess up my re-entry into the song cos I was listening to Wayne Short do his solo. I was totally spellbound! But they were very, very gracious. We must have done a few takes of that before I came back in in the right place! Every time we did the introduction he played this amazing, brand new melody.

ILM: Who else would you like to collaborate with in the future?

Corinne: I’d really like to do some music for a film at some point, and I imagine that would be working with someone else. I’ve written some music for a Peter O’Toole film called Venus. That was great, looking at a film and writing for musical cues. I enjoyed that, so I’d like to do something like that, which I guess would involve a team of people...

ILM: What do you look forward to the most about playing live?

Corinne: I look forward to all the gigs. I enjoy them all. Yesterday we played to 500 people in Glasgow, today we’ve got this gig in Leamington Spa in this really beautiful room. I like playing to really small crowds. We did this gig sponsored by Louis Vuitton that was on the roof of the Louis Vuitton store in L.A. That must have been 50 people, but it was a really beautiful gig, even though I wasn’t expecting it to be. The thing about playing music is that you never really know how it’s going to go. You never know what the audience is going to be like or how they’ll respond. I love that there’s always a point in the gig when you get really caught up and forget where you are and you feel like things are really opening up naturally. I live for that freedom. This year I’m really looking forward to Cochella, and playing in Hyde Park with Stevie Wonder in June. We’re also playing at Lilith Fair, which is this wicked all-female tour that travels round America. The there’s our big tour of UK, Europe and America in the Autumn. And Glastonbury. So we’ve got a lot of really good gigs this year, and that’s what I’m really looking forward to doing.

I really like the feeling of being on a tour bus and just having a big suitcase and a little bag. We’re just about to go on this seven-week tour of North America and I feel like it’ll be a break! I feel like it’ll actually be a rest for me! At the moment we’re travelling around, dipping in and out of countries, doing TV shows and radio stations and all the promotion of the record. To me touring is actually getting to play the album and that’s the part I really enjoy.

ILM: Where have been the most inspiring places that you’ve travelled to?

Corinne: I really love New York. It’s an amazing city, and I like the way that people always arrive with a certain energy. There’s always an expectation about New York. It’s a city of immigrants and there are generations who have arrived with the expectation of change and adventure, and I think that informs the place. I really like being there because there are always people playing that you can go and see. Last time we were there I saw Gil Scott-Heron. I just looked up what was happening that night and there were five or six gigs that I would have loved to have gone to. I really like the feeling of being part of an artistic community and being around other musicians and painters and film-makers. I also love Paris. I really like the light, and the way the city’s planned. It’s just really beautiful. There’s so much art there, so many galleries. There’s an unmatched elegance in Paris.

ILM: What have you been listening to recently?

Corrine: It’s been a real mixture! I went to see Patti Smith a few days ago. It was a book tour about her life with Robert Mapplethorpe. She’s a writer and poet as well as a musician. All those things bleed into each other. It was brilliant. I’ve been listening to her music a lot recently and reading a lot of her poems. Gil Scott-Heron in New York was amazing. I like to see people who’ve had a really long career, and see them reflect on not just their music, but what it is to be popular or unpopular, and move in and out of people’s consciousness. Erykah Badu’s new album is great. I like Window Seat, and we heard the rest of the album when we went to a listening party a few weeks ago.