Dimensions Weekly Mens Lifestyle Magazine

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.

It also meant embracing the pain she’d experienced and finally, ultimately, this meant ‘The Sea’, a collection of songs about grief and hope, despair and inspiration, loss and love. “I wanted to be open,” explains Corinne. “I’m really aware that I can’t hide any of my feelings. With music I feel like it’s the one time when I don’t have to think and I don’t have to contrive anything. So that’s how this record turned out. It’s not contrived. It’s just open.”

This fan of Curtis Mayfield and Donny Hathaway is way too unassuming to say it herself, but others can: ‘The Sea’ is an album that puts her up there with the all-time greats.

“All these songs have come from me,” says Bailey Rae, “and they’re all about capturing a performance with musicians I know and trust.”

Even closer to home is the haunting title track, the first song Bailey Rae recorded for the album. “We recorded it in a barn near Scarborough in winter, very close to the sea itself. It was freezing cold, the wind was wild and the air was very different that night. And above us was an amazing sky full of stars as there were no street lights for miles. It’s a very special recording to me”.

Jason Rae, a gifted saxophonist and Corinne Bailey Rae’s husband, died in March 2008. ‘I’d Do It All Again’, a sweeping, defiant but woozy song – and the first single – is one of the many songs written before this.

“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.”

‘The Sea’ is released on Good Groove / Virgin Records

-DW | Entertainment

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