Grammy-winning, UK neo-soul artist Corinne Bailey Rae made her live radio debut on Morning Becomes Eclectic in Oct. 2006, then released a self-titled LP that sold over 4 million copies. The album’s North American single “Put Your Records On” peaked at No. 64 on The Billboard Hot 100 chart and received both “Song of the Year” and “Record of the Year” Grammy nominations.
More: Corinne Bailey Rae (Morning Becomes Eclectic, 2006)
Her freshly released album, Black Rainbows, is a far cry from the carefree, stripped-back, jazz-tinged musings of her debut, instead finding Rae marinating in tension. The distorted instruments (Rae’s voice included) and militaristic rhythms of “Erasure” melt seamlessly into the acid-jazz-informed “Earthlings.” And the rest of the album covers almost all of the sonic ground in between: smooth electronics, searingly sweet vocals, guttural cries, silences designed to unnerve, and maximalist sounds designed to overwhelm.
Rae tells KCRW that Black Rainbows all stems from the objects and artworks collected by Theaster Gates.
“I had become aware of this visual artist called Theaster Gates, and found out that he had this practice of saving buildings from demolition, and restoring them and bringing them back into the community,” says Rae.
A primary project of Gates' is the Stony Island Arts Bank. In addition to a vast archive of Black art representing decades of American life, it also has a publishing archive — all the books that were ever submitted to the Johnson Publishing Company. This is the same publisher behind Ebony Magazine, Jet Magazine, and Negro Digest.
“[But the archives] also had these difficult and problematic objects that were collected by this Black and Chinese banker called Ed Williams. He would go to yard sales and flea markets and take these objects: newspaper articles, print media, that circus mirror of blackness … derogatory images made for white amusement. As soon as I walked in, I experienced it as this cathedral to black art, this cathedral to a historic moment in American life. I was really fascinated by the space and the movement between the glamor, the fashion, the community, the in-depth news … and then moving to these difficult objects as well and what they meant and the tension between those spaces. I [then] found myself on tour, lying on my bed in the tour bus writing poems and songs, and really wanting to go back and find out more about the arts bank.”
After years of research, Rae built out the characters and themes that would come to inhabit Black Rainbows. The album’s title encapsulates the wild tonal shifts and rich profiles present within.
She explains, “Sometimes we can imagine Black experiences presented as homogenous, monolithic. This must have been what people were thinking and feeling. [But] actually, when we look in the bank and see all these different writings by these different academics, or even look at several years of copies of Ebony Magazine — it's got every avenue that ever was.
We get to hear all these conflicting voices, all these different ideas about how this diaspora and community will survive … whether it's integration, separatism or … what's the future. [Is it] hopeful, is all is lost? I was fascinated by this rainbow.”
Evocative artwork hints at the decades of Black art that inspired the tonal ambition of Corinne Bailey Rae’s Black Rainbows. Credit: Thirty Tigers.
While Rae initially thought that branching off so significantly from her signature sound would automatically relegate Black Rainbows to side-project territory, a happy accident with the album art led her to fully embrace it as an extension of the work that she’s done using her tried and true moniker for all of these years.
“[The initial mock-up of the album art said] Black Rainbows, and also Corinne Bailey Rae. I first thought ‘I meant to tell him not to write my name on it.’ … [But] okay, this has been my obsession for the last seven years, I am steeped in all things to do with the arts bank. It sent me on so many different adventures, and discovery of artists’ exhibitions all over the world. Many, many hours and days, and months, and years of research. I thought, ‘No [side project required], I will claim this triumph as my own.”
Catch “Corinne Bailey Rae Presents Black Rainbows” in SoCal on Feb. 7, 2024 at San Diego’s Observatory North Park.