A PICTURE of a chef chasing a chicken with a meat cleaver led to Corinne Bailey Rae returning with one of the most extraordinary and exceptional albums of 2023.
On a video call to the Mobo and Grammy Award-winning singer in Washington DC, where she is playing the Lincoln Theatre, Rae recalls how Black Rainbows began.
Black Rainbows is a stunning and original album of ten songs that are as far away from Corinne Bailey Rae’s 2006 breakthrough hit Put Your Records On as you can get
Black Rainbows is only Rae’s fourth album in 17 years. Her previous one was 2016’s The Heart Speaks In Whispers
Corinne is a Mobo and Grammy Award-winning singer, pictured here at the Brits in 2017Credit: PA
She says: “The photo was a sign for Harold’s Chicken shop in Chicago and also had a man staring out from it.
“That man was black contemporary artist Theaster Gates.”
Gates is an artist whose work focuses on racism, exploitation and black identity.
His Rebuild Foundation saves abandoned buildings in the South Side of Chicago, an area known for poverty and violence.
Rae explains: “One building, a former bank, had become the Stony Island Arts Bank, which Theaster has filled with artworks including paintings, sculptures and all the books from the Johnson publishing library, including everything that had been submitted to Ebony and Jet magazines whose readership was the black community.”
And it was Rae’s visit to the Arts Bank in 2017 which inspired her to write album Black Rainbows, which is out next Friday.
“I was like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory,” says Rae.
“Every room I was, ‘Oh wow, look at this’. It would be a postcard, a book or a black doll and then looking at the history of each item.”
Black Rainbows is only Rae’s fourth album in 17 years. Her previous one was 2016’s The Heart Speaks In Whispers.
And although she’s been touring during those years, she’s also become a mum to two daughters — aged five and three — with her husband, producer and musician Steve Brown, who plays in her live band.
On the road they juggle their work with fun time with their girls.
“Motherhood and music is like a big jumble,” says Rae.
“I’m breastfeeding and wiping a bottom while I’m going on stage. What? There’s a food mark on my top, who cares!
“Then the next day it’s, ‘Here’s the sun cream, there’s a water park down the road, now go’.”
They’re clearly making it work as Black Rainbows is the album of Rae’s career.
And looking stylish in a multi-coloured Duro Olowu blouse, Rae looks far from the working mum trying to juggle interviews with clothes washing.
The album’s second single, Peach Velvet Sky, was inspired by one of the books from the Arts Bank, the 1861 Life Of A Slave Girl by Linda Brent, a pseudonym for Harriet Jacobs, and was the first fugitive slave narrative written by a woman.
Jacobs hid in a crawl space for seven years to avoid sexual assault by her abusive master.
From there she secretly watched over her children from a small nook and the song is about the fragments of sunset Harriet Jacobs saw through the tiny crawl space.
It’s an astonishing song about a remarkable story.
Rae says: “I read it when I was 13 or 14 and I think her book should be on the school curriculum.
“What she went through and the mental strength and courage she found, as a mother, really affected me.”
Black Rainbows is a stunning and original album of ten songs that are as far away from her 2006 breakthrough hit Put Your Records On as you can get.
She says: “I’ve put on the posters for the shows that this is Black Rainbows in full — it’s not a performance of old songs.
“And if you would have asked me yesterday how I was feeling about the tour and album, I would have said, ‘I’m terrified’.
“But our first show went really well so I’m excited now.
“It’s not just the stories that give the songs their broadness, the musical styles do as well.
“I really felt when I was making the record that there was so much licence to just fly off in all these different directions, to make it spectral as it’s called Black Rainbows after all.
“There’s so much fun and richness in there. It feels much bigger than any of my other records because the stories are so important.
“I always say to everyone, ‘The album’s really bonkers’. It’s made me a difficult artist to market, which I love.
“I remember in the early days I was invited to an EMI dinner, and played Put Your Records On, but I really wanted to play my jazz version of Led Zeppelin’s Since I’ve Been Loving You because I really wanted to say something else about myself, which was, ‘This is my first pop solo record, but I’ve come from an indie band [she was in a riot grrrl-inspired band called Helen when she was 15] and I have the confidence to make any music’. And that’s still my role.”
The different musical styles are what make Black Rainbows a revelation.
Red Horse is beautiful, yearning soul pop while the eight-and-a-half-minute-long Put It Down turns into a bit of a rave number.
The indie punk influence can be heard on New York Transit Queen, which has been likened to Santigold, M.I.A and the White Stripes.
Storywise, the song is a riotous tribute to the hell-raising spirit of the first African American winner of Miss New York, Audrey Smaltz, who won the beauty competition in 1954 when she was 17.
Rae was inspired by an archive photo of Smaltz, but she also got to interview her in 2019, when Smaltz was in her early 80s, which Rae says was an “incredible experience”.
Another standout on Black Rainbows is Erasure, an irate track where lyrics including, ‘They put out lit cigarettes/Down your sweet throat/They fed you to the alligators’ are spat out in anger.
Rae explains: “Seeing the subject of the erasure of black childhood came out as a stream of consciousness.
“I really like that song. We were just kind of holed up in this place next to the Arts Bank in November.
“It was freezing cold, it had snowed and I was playing my guitar and all of this came out as I recorded it.
“I had seen scores of postcards of children escaping from alligators, with the threat of children being fed to them — it was unhinged.
“And on the subject of the erasure of black childhood, there’s also the Tamir Rice Pavilion now at Stony Island Arts Bank. It’s to remember 12-year-old Tamir Rice who was fatally shot by Cleveland police in 2014.”
He was a child playing with a toy gun which two policemen say they mistook for a real weapon.
Rae says: “There’s propaganda around black children that they aren’t really kids, they’re close to adults, especially the boys, and that they are dangerous.
“The first song on Black Rainbows is A Spell, A Prayer, which is an important song to start off the album with.
“Looking at these periods in history, the history is not finished and all of us have a line of ancestors who got us to where we are.
“Tamir was a kid, a baby. I understand how important it was to Tamir’s mother to have a place to remember him.”
Becoming a parent herself has meant these stories really affect Rae as she sees things through a mother’s eyes.
“It changes how you see things and how you feel,” she says. “My daughters are the most important things and so some of these stories are so powerful.
“My daughters are aware of what I do but the shows, the travel is just so normal to them.
“There might be a point when they’re older and they don’t want to go to San Francisco and want to go to a friend’s birthday party, but at the moment they are happy to go on another aeroplane.
“But when you’ve had a baby, time is elastic. Some days can last forever, while other days just pass so quickly.
“I remember that when Jason died [Rae was widowed in 2008 when her first husband died of an accidental overdose] I couldn’t remember the ordering of events.
“Everything went mushy and weird. I was just liquid and mush but I wanted to be graceful in how I represented Jason and how I talked about him.
“Then all of a sudden, years have gone past. Time is really elastic with grief.
“But the main power you gain through all of that is empathy.
“It feels like your whole world has ended but this has also happened to loads of other people.
“I’ve had people come up to me and thank me for talking about mourning and how it was very useful to them.
“That helped me through it.”
Corinne, on stage in 2003, is now a mother who takes her kids on the roadCredit: Getty
Becoming a parent has changed how Corinne sees the world and the songs she writesCredit: Getty
Having been reflecting on historical issues throughout Black Rainbows, how does Rae feel about today’s world?
Rae says: “We finished last night’s set in New Jersey with the song Earthlings from the album.
“And I said, the way I feel having done all this research and also being a person who is up on what’s going on — I do read the newspapers — and to be aware of the immense, huge problems that we are facing, including environmental collapse, populism, war, famine, poverty and violence . . .
“But these structures are legislated by human beings and so believing in the capacity for us to change is an important thing for me. That gives me hope.
“Individuals have the ability to wake up one day and change their minds.
“Knowing that people can start again and have a complete change of heart on things is what gives me hope.”
- Album Black Rainbows is out next Friday. Corinne Bailey Rae will perform the album for three nights at London’s Ladbroke Hall from October 25. See corinnebaileyrae.com/tour for details.
Album Black Rainbows is out next FridayCredit: Amazon
