To: Truthful
From: Entertainment Muse
Date: New Release
Subject: Show Of Emotion

In The Artist's Words
Corinne Bailey Rae released her first self-titled debut album in 2006. She recorded it with a small budget but it returned a huge success. Corinne has maintained her control and intimacy in the production studio with her new album The Sea, co-producing the album herself with friends and musicians she had worked with in the past

This album draws especially on intimacy as it comes after the death of her husband. 'The Sea', is 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."

"All these songs have come from me," says Bailey Rae, "and they're all about capturing a performance with musicians I know and trust." They were recorded mostly in Limefield Studios, a magical house in suburban Manchester which was once an old ballroom and has been converted into a recording space. Here, under the gaze of huge mirrors and a chandelier jostling for space amongst elegant, ageing furniture and a grand piano, Corinne and her band played the songs she had written. "I love making music there. It has an air of faded glamour and I've been to some great parties there. It seemed like the perfect place to record."

Corinne reflects on the title track, "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".

A beautiful, elegiac end to the album - "Goodbye paradise," sings Bailey Rae in a quiet husk as strings, autoharp, piano and celestial backing vocals crescendo - 'The Sea' is about a family tragedy: Bailey Rae's maternal grandfather died in a boating accident. "It was a family story that I had grown up with and never asked much about, but I had never realized that my aunt had been there, on the beach, when it happened. She could see it unfolding but was powerless to do anything about it. It made me think about how that grief and sense of powerlessness can shape a person, watching something that's going to change your life forever? So really that song is about how that grief has affected her. And obviously it's strange to me having lost Jason since then that I was thinking so much about grief."

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.

"It's a love song, but a difficult love song - it's about when things are really difficult, to the point where they're actually hurting your pride. I wrote it after this big argument we had. And it just sorta came out of me as I was playing my guitar. It's really special to me because of how it came about. It didn't feel like it was a really conscious thing. It's just a demonstration of my commitment. Despite what happens - you might get trampled or destroyed by it - it's a love you can't stop. And," she adds, "I really like the way the song's come off. It all builds to one chorus. I love playing it for that reason," she smiles. "It's the one shot."

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. "

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.

Journey through the life of Corinne Bailey Rae

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