Corinne Bailey Rae

00:00:15Speaker 1: Pushkin crim Bailey Ray's an English singer songwriter whose career started with a bang. In two thousand and six, her debut album Talked to UK charts and was certified triple platinum with the help of her first hit single, put Your Records On. A slew of awards and other best New Artists distinctions followed. As she put out subsequent albums, Krin aspired to stretch herself as an artist beyond neo soul pop music's success. In September, krim Bailey Ray released her fourth album, Black Rainbows. It's an album inspired by her time spent exploring Chicago's historic Stony Island Arts Bank, a vast collection of black cultural relics and writing. Krin's new album is in many ways a reaction to the art she consumed in that archive. It's performed in a mix of jazz, rock and the avant garde. On today's episode, I talked to krim Bailey Rays about the years she spent in the Arts Bank archives and the stories that inspired her new work. She also talked about her record label's exhaustive efforts to push her to recreate the success of her first album, and how a Skateboarding magazine helped clarify the look of her new record. This is broken record liner notes for the Digital Age. I'm justin Mitchman. Here's my conversation with Corinne Bailey Ray your record. I listened to it, I guess went for a walk to go get some coffee and listen to it again. Like, it is really surprising how many different sounds are on here. Like I loved that. I never settled into like a groove listening to it. Yeah. Yeah, it's like each with each song, it's like it's kind of growing, evolving, changing. It's it's awesome. It's incredible, Thanks very much. Yeah, I wanted to have all these different styles, but it really came about naturally from responding to the objects, responding to the events. The idea that came seemed to be in a particular style, whether it was, you know, a punk song, or whether it's more aggressive guitars, or whether it's more like a ballad or something more psychedelic. Like it all it all just kind of presenting itself to me like that. But yeah, it is. It bounces you around a lot. What were the first handful of songs that you came up with for the record. I'm just curious how, you know, like how it started and how it evolved sonically. I think the first handful of songs were I wrote some and the residency. I went to the Arts Bank winside encountered the Arts Bank building, you know, Stoney Island Arts Bank in Chicago. You can see pictures of it online. It's the foundation that runs it. It's called the Rebuild Foundation. It's on the South Side of Chicago, which I don't know how much you know about the South Side, but it was a very vibrant, middle class black area in the sixties and then it's just had so much decline and unfunding and now it's really and there's a lot of difficult issues there with housing, mental health, drugs, violence. But there's this one building there on Stoney Island that hasn't been pulled down by the city. This city wanted to pull it down, and Theasta Gates saved it. He bought it for a dollar and saved and raised four million dollars by selling his own art to make this a building again. So instead of being full of money, it's full of art. It's full of art artifacts, it's full of twenty six thousand books that were submitted to the Johnson Foundation, who did Ebony magazine and Jet Magazine, So all the books exactly, so all the books that were submitted to them over the years for review, as well as the books that John Johnson and the Johnson's collected. And then it has all the Frankie Knuckles records. So it's got this big slice of you know, Chicago house music. And it has all the glass slides from the University of Chicago. So when they digitized their archive, they just gave all this a bank they had nowhere to store it all. And it also has all these difficult objects that were pulled out of circulation by a black and Chinese banker called Ed Williams, problematic objects from America's past, you know, the trinkets and the mammy jars and newspaper articles, photographs, cartoons, all of these things that he would find in flea markets and yard sales that he wanted to just buy and putting a box in his house. So nobody else was buying them and putting them in their house and keeping it all going. So he had these boxes and boxes and things, and they became too much even for him to be around sixteen thousand objects, so they are also all in the bank as well. So I went looking around just as a tourist, as someone who's interested in history and black histories and stories and hidden stories and raised stories. And when I left, I just couldn't help. But you know, I was just scribbling a poem here or starting to write a song here, and I spoke to the asktra about it, and he said, you know, you should come be an artist in residence. You know, they have buildings nearby. So we stayed there for two weeks and just really dug into the archives, read loads of books, sol loads of objects, attended loads of events, and then I've just been going back there very regularly all through these years, you know, since twenty seventeen. So I mean the first song I ever wrote about the bank was called you who Walk These Floors in Fear because I had seen a sculpture that was made from the abandoned floorboards from a police station, and the police station have been left for many decades, and these floorboards are from there, and I thought about what they had been witnessed to. You know how often in history it's the witnesses are silent, you know, they're the buildings, they're the windows, they're the trees, the soil, the slave cabin that, you know, the things that can't talk, but they you know, they've seen a truth. Yeah, that's the first thing I wrote. That's kind of on I guess a part two of the record, which I haven't finished. Then I wrote he will follow with his Eyes and erasure, and then maybe before the Throne of the Invisible God. It just kind of you started from there, he will follow you with his eyes? Is it certainly like a dance element to it, So maybe that's the Frankie Knuckles Chicago house of it all. Well, how did you write that song? Like start off with words? When we had a piano guitar with he will follow You with his Eyes? I had seen all this advertising and I'd found a tin of a beauty product when I was in Chicago. I'd opened the drawers of the stone in the Ed Williams collection and seen this tin and it had this beautiful illustration on and it was this company called Valmore. So then when I was home, I was doing all this research about Valmore and finding out they were kind of like the Avon of their day. So they would sell these beauty products door to door. The guy who did the art for them, they all had these amazing illustrations online drawings, and it was this black artist called Charles Dawson. So they had very sympathetic drawings. You know that the line was targeted at black men and women, and it was targeted in this really romantic way. Whoever did the marketing was really good. So the perfumes would be called things like follow me boy or look me Over. And then when you'd read something in you know, Ebony or another publication about Valmore, and it would have all the products listed, it would say in a big banner across the top, you know, his eyes will follow you across the room, you know, and it would be then it'd be a series of wigs or something that they were selling. So they sold all kinds of things. And I thought about Valmore and just how enticing it was. You know. Sometimes I'd read about the hair products and think, I wonder if you could still get this, because it sounded like from the description that it did everything. You know, it's like it's nourishes but it's not greasy, and you know it it's a styling product and it's it's a premade and it's and I thought, gosh, they were so good. Their marketing was really good, and obviously it was it was the sympathetic view of black men and women, but it was very much aligned with white beauty. So the beauty they we're aiming at was, you know, lighter skin, straight a hair, all of these things. So I guess with a song, I wanted to present a kind of nineteen fifties dream world where you're really under the spell of this kind of advertising. You know, you can imagine them knocking at the door, and if you're a black woman, you know you're going to be taking the hair straightening cream and you're going to be taking the skin lightning cream and all of those things. But halfway through the song, the person who has been very much under the spell of our more, you know, there's this sonic disruption and then they end up saying, you know, I don't want to vanish into a girl that I don't recognize. You know, if you want to run to sweet sweet Georgia brown with another kind of skin lightning cream, you know, light light brown is the thing, not dark. After that line, it's like a break in. It's like a break in the song. Yeah, it's a total break and the person everything just falls away and it gets much more contemporary, and it's just, you know, I'll be there with my plum red lipstick when Black Hair King came my Black Skin gleaming. I wanted it to be a sort of a shock and kind of you know, really assertive, and that the person would be sort of back in there, back in their self and away from this really enticing beauty which held many people under its way for a really long time. The repetition of those lines make it really feel like like a cold arm as much as like a refrain. You know, it's just it's beautiful, and like the way it just repeats, repeats, repeats, and the production evolves over that second half of the song, it's like it feels it feels subversive in a very cool way. Thank you as you're writing out the words, you know, at that point the song should move into something else. Yeah, I wanted it to be a shift away from you know, in the beginning, we had vibraphones and guitars and we had strings, and it was all very dreamy as imagining. Like you know, there's probably Californian movies that were shot, you know, where a car would be sort of winding round the roads, wrapping a mountainside and the sunshining. You know, that kind of fifties dream world, and you can live in it, but at some point you have to when you break out of it, you realize how all consuming it was. And so yeah, I really wanted to have that repetition back, but I wrote it on guitars, so that would always just be like pulling one string plum red lipstick man Blake hit. And then I guess when we did it in the studio, we just you know, we wanted wanted it to evolve, like, didn't don't bring the base straight away and have this more like cosmic sort of weird jazz moments is like is it futuristic? Is it seventies? It's you know what we wanted it to be. We want to be different to what had gone before. Yeah, it's it's incredible. It's really cool. And the tone of the beginning does sort of remind me of like, well, like the late fifties, like early sixties almost like a it's akin to like a Frankie Valley production or something. But then yet again, just like everything else on the record, it's like halfway through it's like, oh shit, we're under something else now. You know. I really liked it, and I thought, you know, some people were saying it's close to what your sound has been historically. So I really liked the idea that you might put it on and be like, oh, finally I can just kind of relax in this, you know. But then you listen to words. What is she saying? She's saying lighter and bright? Why is she's saying longer and straighter? And you know it's kind of you know, I feel like the eye in that song is not really me. It's kind of this I don't know, Shirley Bassie type Earth Kit, you know, delivery everything, you know, everything, you know, I want to when I was being more dramatic than I would normalss sing it, you know, it's trying to sort of be in that world. I'm so happy to hear Shirley Bassie reference like she's incredible and no one talks about her anymore. She's and say, with the earth of Kit, I can just uniquely bizarre but beautiful voice. Yeah yeah, I love that. But you know, I didn't want to say that, but that's what was my response. Listening to the albums, when it got to that song, I was like, oh, okay, something that not you know, it's not that like I pigeonhole you in my mind. But by the time I got that song, I was like, oh, this feels like for MEI terrain. Yeah, and it was. And that's you know, writing it in this sort of buzz and over a guitar style. It's like, you know, I write a lot of songs from there, so yeah, I love that. There's like it's not like you rap on it, but there's some tracks like New York Transit Queen really where it sounds almost like similar to the way ESG like kind of like it was like they weren't rapping, but they were like aggressively talking on the track, but also rhythmically. It was like, that's very cool. It's a really cool reference because I did find that the ESG record amongst Frankie Knichols stuff as well, you know, Frankie Nickles archive. Wow. Yeah, yeah, it's like this band is so cool. I don't know enough about them, you know, I don't know enough about them, but yeah, I really want to use my voice in all these different ways on the record. I mean, I think all it was a side project, so I didn't feel any sort of beholding to the music that I've done before, and I thought, it doesn't matter if it's really different to what I've done. In fact, it should be really different to what I've done, because it's it's a side project. It's not me. It's like you know, I was calling it for it was like the Chicago Project was for ages. It was just that, and firstly it was going to be an EP and then it turned into more but it Yeah, it was only really towards the end of it that I thought, oh, I really should claim this as my own. It has been my obsession for the last seven years and I want it to beat my record now. It's only really when I saw my name on it. You know, we worked in this brilliant graph artist called Manu Shribley, his art designer, and I'd seen his writing on a skateboard magazine and then just kept calling him like please, please, can you do that? It just has to be you? And but I realized I hadn't told him, don't put my name on, so I told him, you know his photos and it's called Black Rainbows. But I hadn't quite explained, Oh, it's not really my project, it's a side. So when I saw my name written down, forgot to tell him not to put it on. But then when I saw it in the way, just even the way he'd written, it made me reimagine myself. It was really weird, but just something about the waste and that script just been free from all the different fonts that I feel like I've tried as sort of logos of my own name, and then suddenly there was just this free writing, and I thought, yeah, I really like I like how that looks. I like how that is. Do you typically look through skate magazines or is that? It was just it was a real fluke. It was just the way they had it presented. I think I've probably got it here that when I saw so, it's like, who's this elegant sort of black teenager on the front and then this writing. I mean, so I couldn't even work out when it was cool at the time. I think that's renaissance issue. But the magazine's called Numbered, But I really really like magazine shopping, and there's this there's a shop called Colours May Fay and leads that I go to. But there's also this store that's it has like a car heart downstairs and loads of skating, but it's got magazines upstairs, and it's everything from punk z means, you know, like rad you know, trans by, Queer publications, and and then just art house stuff and fashion stuff, and so I always think magazines are really special. I mean, I know you can get loads of loads online now, but just seeing how someone's put all the work into it and putting it together, and you know, it costs money to make all these shoots, so I think like you can pay your seven pounds or twelve pounds or whatever it is. And I'm still really analogued. I love coming home from town. There's just like ten magazines and then you get to see like, oh who was the art director, who was the you know, so I really like to do that, and I like to read in the bath, you know. So it's just you can't really do that with your phone, just you end up destroying your phone. I've done it before, I have, I have I do. Why did I do that? Yeah? Way less fun? Yeah? Yeah, I mean I feel like at some point people will realize, just like with Vinyl, you know, it's that it's like it's much more fun. You could scroll Instagram or TikTok or Twitter or whatever, but it's way less fun. It's fun, but also there's a limit to it, which is good, where you know, you never get to the back page of the Internet, and so your brain is I've got this completest thing sometimes when I'm on Instagram and then I'll look up and hours have gone past, and i think I'm trying to just get to the end, and the rule will be no end, whereas with a magazine, you know, when you've done the whole thing, you know, you know, yeah, it's kind of it's nice. It's kind of like a sad thing because you've got to wait for the get healthy. It's healthy. Now go and eat some food or like go outside for a work. You know, that's dead eyed scrolling thing that you can get to it like just before you go to bed. It's so bad, you know, really try not to do it. Now. We're going to pause for a quick break and then come back with more of my conversation with Krein Bailey Ray. We're back with Karin Bailey Ray. So you really you weren't thinking of it as a side project. Just as a way to trick yourself into being a bit more outside of your comfort zone and music making. You were legitimately thinking about this as something that would not have your name on it. It wouldn't have my name on it, and then I thought, oh, I'd like, you know, people could be pleasantly surprised if they found out that it was me. But I was really I think because as soon as I thought of it as a side project, then I just felt completely free. I'm not doing it for a label, and it doesn't have to have radio songs. It doesn't have to have three minute songs. They don't have to be catchy, they don't have a tradition, have to have a traditional form, you know, like some of them don't have a second verse, or some of them have no choruses, or some of them have eight verses, or whatever it is. I just wanted to make and I wanted it to be kind of messy, and I felt all the time really excited that. You know. I think before I would have had a song like before the Throne of the Invisible God. And then thought, Okay, what else can it do? Maybe I should put in a middle eight, or maybe I should now have got to get it smaller, and I've got to get it shorter. Could the beat did it? You know? And I just where does that come from? In you? I think it's just for years of being a label, you know, where you're interacting with people. I mean, when I did my first album, it wasn't without any A and R at all, because we had this really good DJ called Gary Davis who would sort of I was working in a production company with him, so but pretty much we did it amongst ourselves. It was me and Steve Chrisanthau underneath this art shop in a place, a sort of place out of town near Leeds in Yorkshire. And then we could take it to the labels and say here we are, it's whatever, it's twelve songs. Do you like it? Do you not like it? Some of them loved it, some of them didn't get it, And then we interviewed and then we found our home at EMI. At that time. Well then it sounds like it was sort of you more than the label, right, because it's like I mean, the first album is very tight sort of part not in the vacuous sense, but it's a very tight songwriting. It is. It's a more sort of pop record and I think, but yeah, definitely Gary was an influence on that. It was more like I wrote tons of songs and they were the songs that people were saying, Oh, it should be this one, it should be that one. You know, I had a manager at the time I was young. I was like, oh, yeah, this one, not that one, this one, not that one. I'd already written like a style when I was in my band, and of course I did want to connect with people, you know, I wanted to make it work. I wanted people to hear it, you know, wanted to be received. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I wanted it to be received. As you know, I had my English literature degree, but I was working in a cafe and working in a jewelry counter and you know, going down to London when I could to write these songs with people, and I really wanted to sort of make it, you know, I wanted music to be the thing that I did. So I did work. I worked really having that record, and it went through a lot of people's hands in terms of maybe my manager saying yes or no, or Gary Davis saying yes or no, and then obviously various labels eventually saying yes but I think from then on because it was so popular, and then felt a real pressure with you know, certainly my third album to try and somehow recreate what I had already done. But I knew I didn't want to because it didn't feel creatively good to do so. But yeah, I'd had so many meetings where I'd be really excited about a song, you know, we'd work on it, and we'd send it down to whoever was the A and R or the label at the time. We'd be just like, oh, I'm waiting to hear back. I wonder what they'd think, and then you'd get a sort of response. It'd be like, yeah, it's good, it doesn't sound like the first single. It was always this thing about what's the first single? You know, the first single has to smash the doors down, the first single has to be so catchy, the first single has to be a radio friendly, the first single has to be this. It's unique, it's different, it's you. You know, people are basically saying, oh, it needs to be what put your records on did. But of course that was such a different moment, and it was kind of felt like an accident to me. It was just like this is a weird song, a little song that I love and it wasn't like anything else, but it was just accidental that it was successful. So then I always, you know, i'd always feel that pressure and I'd put what I thought was a good offering forward and the response was always like not quite like are you crazy? This isn't it? But not that far off it, you know, just kind of like a bit of sideways look. And then it'd be you know, I wrote like a stand my own when I was, you know, a teenager, but there would be a sort of like, oh, maybe we could pay you with this person or that person. So we ended up doing lots of co writing, which is always weird where it's like, Hi, we don't know each other, we've got five hours, let's make a smash hit. But the person would always be like a giant in music, you know, so then it's even more intimidating. You're like, if this isn't working out, it's me, not them, and so I just think it kind of it sort of crushed my comforce a lot, and it kind of dinted my my radar or my instinct for what was right for me. I guess, you know, so I just keep trying that starting with the second record. I mean, the second record was different because it was kind of a reaction to my first album. So I wanted to play more guitars and have it more indie because my first record was so much more of a pop soul record. It felt like an evolution. It felt related to your first record, but it felt like a step forward. Yeah, thanks, and I loved it. And yeah, I guess I had got more into jazz and into Saul, but I also had all my indie stuff. But I think in terms of politically at the label, I had gone through a big loss at that time. You know, my first husband had died really unexpectedly, and so everyone at the label was very kind and understanding and no one pushed me at that time. So I felt like the first record, I got to do what I want. The second record, I'd kind of got to do what I want because nobody wanted to upset me or they just were happy I was making something and genuine They were good people, you know, they you know, they cared a lot for me. My one a and that person who I still in love, he's a friend. He came up to see me like every two weeks with Fancy Cakes from London and we just sat and talked about nothing and it was a really beautiful time actually, And then he occasionally played me like, hey, there's this Bonker's Lady Garga and Beyonce song, or have you seen this, or like you were trying to tell me what's happening in the world, because I was very much in my own bubble. So in a way, I think by the third record there was a lot of pressure because maybe they had wanted to do more with the second record, but they couldn't because I was in this delicate place. So the third record was like, right, we've really got to make this count, you know. And that was the rhetoric around me. He's like, yeah, really, this is the one, you know, just don't throw it away, that kind of feeling like, you know, it's because of that. I just felt this immense pressure and I feel like I wrote three albums where I could have written one for that and it was just what about this? What? But this not the first single? Don't really hear it. I don't really get that one. And then after a while I didn't need to go to present it to them. I could just hear the voice in my head saying, don't bother finishing that. It's not an international megasmash, you know, and I was like, yeah, it's really rough. I sort of look back on that time and feel really sorry for the me that was that person, and I look at The Heart Speaks and Whispers and think, well, I'm really glad. I'm glad that I got as much done as I did, and I'm glad that there are some good songs that record. But it was really hard to work from an instinctive place. Even though the record was about following your instincts, you know, it's called The Heartspeaks and Whispers, but those whispers were very easily sort of drowned out by other people and by myself probably, you know. So with this record, I knew I wasn't at a label. I didn't think it would take as long as it did. But I am just going to do something completely different to anything I've done before, Like I'm not going to feel those pressures. I'm not gonna think about radio. I'm not going to think about what I've done before because it's not even my name. And because of that, there was just this torrent of creativity and not just that because I was working within this archive. The labor was like sitting reading a bunch of Ebony magazines, you know, or like going to an amazing exhibition in New York's All of a Nation, or going flying to Milan to see Betty Sarr's retrospective, you know, at the Prada Foundation. Yeah. I didn't think of its work, and it wasn't work. That was me just just sort of following my news. But all of those rich things that are all fed into the record. So it was really fun to do. And the right way to do stuff, I guess, is just to wait until you're really excited and then just let it fly out. How did you end up in Chicago that first trip where you visited. I was on tour. I was on tour with the Heart Speaks and Whispers. So we had done you know, we had probably done New York and done you know, Connecticut or somewhere, and then we'd flown into Chicago. And I remember saying to one of my managers, I'm really annoyed because I really wanted to meet this brilliant artist, the Asta Gates, and I didn't tell you, and now he won't be able to come to this show, like I was really fatalistic, and she somehow managed to find him that day and he did come to the show. I didn't know, and when I was getting changed, she shouted me, She's like, don't get change, come out someone to meet you. And I was so excited to see him. I didn't know he was going to be there. I'd seen photos of him, so I knew it was him, and I was just buzzing to talk to him and be like, you know, you've saved this building from demolition, that's what you do. That's part of your art practice. And New Europe into ceramics, and I love ceramics. And you know, he has this background in the Black Church and he has this band called the Monks of Black Monks at Mississippi, and so he's got this music part of what he does as well. And he's lectures at the university and he's super brainy, and so I just was like really excited meet to meet another creative person. And because it's art, you know, there's no rivalry. I mean, there'd be no rivalry between the two of us. Yes, there is literally internationally known, you know, artist whose works sell for you know, millions, But it was really good to just have a scene that you know, he had nothing really to the music industry, and I of course had nothing to the art world, and so it was just kind of meet and getting to know each other as friends. That's so cool that it's like it all came together that it inspired this sort of next like a rediscovery of yourself too. While we're talking about the first record, I really liked the first record. I think it's really good, but it always seemed like I remember reading interviews from me at the time that it seemed like your influences were a bit deeper than that record conveyed, you know, or more varied in that record conveyed. Not that and it's a really great happen I mean, it's like a really well done album, but it always did strike me that it's like, oh, there's something else going on though, and there's some undercurrents that aren't being expressed. You know. I'm really glad you could you could see that feel that, and that's how I felt at the time. It was a funny mixture of feeling. I feel really scepted because people have taken this thing that I made it my hometown, I played on my guitar and I wrote and then here it is in the world. But also it felt like I was somehow keeping us part of myself secret or hiding a part of myself. And maybe that is that that part, you know, it's like the music that didn't necessarily come straight out of black cultures, or the music that I'd grown up listening to, you know, like the indie music. I mean, I know black rock has a black origin as well, but I didn't get to show the part of me that loves electric guitar and loves indie music and this complex simplicity of a band like Nirvana, you know, the simple direct nature of that kind of music and or weird you know, Buke or Triemus or you know those. I felt like in the first record, I didn't get to show the whole thing. I just felt like I've got more and different things to say, and I you know, I just want to keep feeling that that there's more to say. Else why would you you know, why would you bother saying it? Yeah. One thing that was cool about the first record that stood out because it didn't feel like that was a time when it was like there was a lot of kind of milk toast acoustic music, not to I mean, I don't want to name anyone, but your music felt particularly a little deeper, and I think it because it connected to you that I was thinking about it. Like in the States, I guess we have Bill Withers, but beyond Bill Withers, there wasn't a strong tradition of like the soulful singer songwriter, even though there was great songwriters in soul music, whereas in the UK Linda Lewis or Labysiffari, like, there's these people who could like play guitar acoustically and make records that were essentially soul records. And it kind of felt like that was similar to what you were doing, and that kind of resonated with me. At least, you know, there's like this really great songwriting that it's soulful, but it's just presented in this way that is unique at least I think feel like in the States, you know, someone puts the guitar out here, it gets immediately it's a little saccering, you know. Yeah, I mean, I'm so glad you said that. And I mean Bill Withers is i mean, obviously a god in everyone's world, but he is, you know, right at the top of the tree. And I've watched that documentary. I don't know if you saw it a few years ago. It came out still Bill, you know, it was that's one of my favorites. It's such that's such a good album. But you know the documentary that came out when he was still alive, and he was talking about this period of his life where people were saying kind of trying to convince him to change his style. You know, he said there was people at the record label and he called them the black Spurts, and he'd say like, you know, he's like, you need to get above that stool and you need to get two dancers and the gold Lammy shirt and just start. You know, maybe disco was coming in and his kind of homely, folksy, you know style. Yeah, it just it was somehow not seen as commercial enough. But also there was an undertone to like, it's not black enough, it's not black. Yeah, that's always what struck me about being black in the UK. From Afar. I've only been to London once, but from Afar it's always seemed as if y'all had a little more freedom over there to express layers of yourself, you know, whereas here what's black is very you know, put on the the whatever, the l and you know, so interesting with African American culture because obviously black music, Black American music is kind of like the the pinnacle to me of like creative arts. Partly it comes out of that segregation and separatism, So I know what you mean. It's like it's a very specific blackness, which is very specifically not whiteness. And in the UK it's more messy and hybrid because we didn't have legalized segregation. You know, you had the black African people working plantations, but they were in the Caribbean and that was separate from England, even though they were owned by English white people Scottish and culture. Yeah, but then when the Caribbeans came, they, I guess had already been in a hybrid culture where they were black majority islands, but there were lots of white people there, and you know, they're influencing each other and then sort of coming in but also being influenced by American imports, you know, vinyl imports, and you know, think of like a Bob Marley and how much he's obviously into Curtis Mayfield and all those harmonies. Oh yeah, but he's st also doing his own thing with it. So I always think like Caribbean music's sort of hybridized anyway, and then then you get this thing in blackness where the people are black, Like, you know, my dad's family came from the Caribbean, but they also thought of themselves as British because the Caribbeans were they were a British colony, so they already had their British passport. So it's really it's a different it's a really different scene Black Britishness. But I know what you mean. I think it's less defined. It's less strengthened by institutions and the Black universities and the NAACP and the Black Church, and they're all the things that make Black American music so great. But I also think the sort of the hybrid messy thing of the UK means that I feel like people feel blackness is less defined. It's not like someone's drawn a chuck circle around you and if you step out of it, you're not authentic or you know, your blackness is in question. And then of course mine's further complicated because my mum is white, My dad's black, so it's like it's that as well. So I always used to, you know, be playing and think, is this Do I like this because I am not black? Do I like this because I'm And then I would find loads of my black friends would also be feeling or being accused of not being black enough, you know, so you realize that it's a construct. And then you know, even to this day, you know, black girlfriends will be like, I'm going to the carnival West Indian Carnivals, so like I need these kind of earrings and this kind of clothes to almost present as black. So it's that thing has really done a number on all of us where we we limit ourselves because we think that there's a certain expectation of blackness. And that was another reason why the record's called Black Rainbows, because I really wanted to push out to say like, oh yeah, this is a punk track, but you know, I'm wearing a Bad Brains T shirt in the video because of Bad Brains is this amazing black punk band. And you know this, this dissenting music has also has a black thread and black origins, and they've been kind of written out, not Bad Brains specifically, but those those black and scar kind of origins of punk, sometimes not acting knowledge, you know. Well, you know, recently, a Bob Seger song came on the radio for me and I was like, oh fuck. I was like, no one, I just never listened to Bob Siegret, Like something from one of his first records came on. I was like, damn, why did no one tell me how great this is? So I started listening, and I kind of got a little obsessed with like hard rock music or like the begin the origins of hard rock, like you know, late sixties through the seventies, And so I started making like a playlist, like kind of like what was the stuff that made hard rock hard rock? And what I realized was listening is a lot of it came from Well, there's a lot that came from London. There's a lot that came from Detroit. Yeah, and a lot that came from la but a lot of it was out of Detroit, and a lot of it was white guys trying to be soulful, trying to do R and B. Yeah. Yes, I mean you could say that's the start of the Beatles, right, It's fascinating. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. And there was a big scene in the UK, kind of northern soul scene, which was definitely you know, young white bands hearing American imports and wanting to you know, do them or you think of you know, sort of Patty Smith, you know, singing quoting a Motown song or you know Tainted Love, you know, being readne by Mark Harmon. There was there was many incidents and as we were saying earlier, you know the Beetles ourselves picking all these like little Richard songs to cover and it's like yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah yeah, and they all really acknowledged, you know, oh we love Muddy Waters. But you know, at the time, the irony of it was that it kind of took white English young kids appreciating black R and B to kind of sell it black white America. You know. They took it as it's the Britis, it's the British invasion. It's as like you guys should just change the radio channel occasionally, twist and show. You know, it's like listen to the Ising Brothers that listened to Chuck Burial, isn't it, you know, But for some reason it filtered through that connected with them for all the different complications to reasons right to be that way. Yeah, But I mean that relationship between the bouncing back and forth between some of the UK and the US is something that I'm really you know into and following those threads, you know. I love the music history. Yeah, and it's fascinating into your point about like those blues and soul imports that like kind of would find a home in the UK, that there was really not much of a home for them in the US. That's another thing about the UK that I've always envied from afar as it's like it's always in a place for black people to go to feel except you know, the classic stories like Hendrick's going there, or just other various places in Europe where you know, jazz musicians are just going because it's like or Tina Turner just moving to Sweden because it's like this is way better, you know, yeah, or Switzerland or Sweden were one of those. Yeah, just people escaping the particular type of American racism, which one that comes out of that long standing segregation and just the amount of brainwashing around you know, we are different, inherently different people's you know, all of that racial constructs that's so powerful in America. I think it is nice for but people to come to Europe. I'm not saying it's not a land without racing, but it's different, different flavor. But even just the difference really makes you realize how subjective and constructed the whole thing is. Yeah, we're going to take one last quick break and then come back with more from a conversation with Karinn Bailey Ray. We're back with the rest of my conversation with Karinn Bailey Ray. Let's talk about Peach Velvet Sky. Yeah, you used to work in the jazz club, correct, Yes, I used to work in the jazz club. So when I was at university, I worked in this jazz and soul club called the Underground. And first I was collecting the coats to hang up, and then I was working behind the bar, which was the really good job because the bar was opposite the stage, so as you were working, you could just be watching all these incredible jazz musicians come through and and brilliant bands, you know, remember Royers playing there on time or like cast Latina All Stars, you know, like lots of like they would always get Cuba musicians and Terry Callier. You know, you could just kind of watch and learn as well as lots of you know, people from there. There's another beautiful, yes, soulful, yeah, singer songwriter, just I got it out of control, you know, yeah, Terry Callier, Yeah, yeah, so beautiful, and that's sensitivity. I think of John Lucian as well, you know. But Peach Felt the Sky I had written because I saw lots of copies of this one book in the Arts bank, and it was a book that I had read as a teenager, as a book that been sent to me by my American aunts. My dad's got four sisters. Everybody came here from Saint Kitts, and then two of them moved to New Jersey when they were in their early twenties, and so they were my American aunts, and they would send me, you know, books or stuff, clotheschool aid sometimes or like Barett's from my hair. But they my aunt Joyce sent me this book and it was called Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as part of a six six Narratives early African American narratives. And I read it and I was just so struck by this woman's story that she had grown up on this plantation in eighteen thirteen. You know, she grew up under the authority of her parents, and then as she got a little bit older, she realized she was in this institution, you know, from which there was no escape. There was an authority above her parents that she couldn't you know, violate at all. And then later on in her life, the ownership of her change so that she had this master, this new master, who was also the local doctor. But he developed this obsession with her, and he believed himself to be in love with her, so he would be always trying to pursue her and you know, sort of sexually aggress her. And Harriet Jacobs ended up having two childs children in her teens, with a local man, a white man who her grandmother had put her in touch with to see if he could help her. And he obviously, however, I don't know the exact situation of their relationship, and even how she writes it, it seems as though this is a you know, a love relationship. But they have two children together, and this incenses this doctor even more, you know, this master, and he he's violent. At one point, he's very violent with one of the children. He throws the boy against the wall and he's in a coma for days, and she realizes she has to get away, and she realizes shees she has to get her children away. So she makes it seem as though she's fled to the north, but in fact, she's hiding out in the crawl space above her three grandmother's storehouse on the plantation. You know, it's not big enough to stand up in, but she can crawl, and you know, her grandmother can let her out to the store, has to move around. Obviously, she's feeding her. And she waits until the coast is clear, and she until he's expended a lot of effort and money and time looking for him. Enough so she stays in this crawl space for seven years. And while she's there, she bores this hole in the side of the buildings, a wooden building, like this tiny hole, so that people can't see him, but she can see out. So she can look out and see see her children playing because her grandmother brings her children nearby, or she can hear you know, passing comments, you know, things that might be pertaining to her freedom. You know, she's got enough light to sew buy And I just when I saw it in the autsbag, I reread it because I thought, what's this like now to read as an adult, to read as a woman, to read as a mother, And it was just, you know, it's so much a story of waiting and patience and resilience, and just think of someone's mental fortitude to be able to make a prison for yourself in effect, so that when you do eventually escape, you're safe and you can. You know, she send for her children, and she does. She ends up setting up a school with her daughter for children leaving slavery in eighteen sixty five. And I was really drawn to this story. In one time, I was trying to get to sleep and I thought about this loophole that Harriet Jacobs had. You know what the sky looked like from her loophole, You know what the sunset looked like, and how wide and vast it seems when she eventually found her freedom. Wow, it's beautiful. And the chords on the song are beautiful. I don't know how it developed into like that sort of what kind of rapturous, gorgeous song that it became, but it's like all the elements of that are just beautiful, and that it's sort of in terms of production value, the least sort of adventurous, but it's but it's like all the musically, it's it's all there. But it fits in between these two songs that are just sort of you're like, how does it fit? That's the whole kind of thing about this record to me, it's like, how the fuck does this song? This song? But it's beautiful. It's always make the track older, like it's so one thing would be a palette cleanse for the other. So just when it was sort of too you know, overwhelming, then I do something beautiful and then but then I want to do something you know, I just wanted to keep I don't know, just keep changing the mood, I guess. But yeah, with Peach Veelmetsky, I wrote that on guitar, but it was much more of a simple, you know, folk song. And then when I worked with Steve Brown, who worked for a long time him also married to he has a really really good ear and he's he's a jazz musician, so I guess the song kind of developed this extra rich nurse and the more much more complex harmony because of what he was sort of putting in, And so we would just rehearse it together and I'd say, come on, and needs record it, and he say, it's not you know, we haven't got it yet. We don't want to record it until it's like we're doing it on stage, and that's how we ended up doing it. So it felt risky to me because I normally like to sort of track things as you go along and then almost say well this, you know, it worked and it's down now. So we were just putting lots of rehearsals that I can. I'm glad you did because your vocal performance and that is phenomenal. It's like, really, god, damn you know, I mean, that's a tough vocal performances. Thank you you really, Nail. I really feel with these stories there's so much bigger than my own personal story. You know, when you think of Harriet Jacob and surviving this this sexual aggression, and then you know her parents die and she's a slave girl, and then she's a teenage parent to this man who he says he's gonna free her children, but he hasn't, he hasn't done it yet, and he goes on to be his prominent politician, and then and then she she's constantly got this man. And then how to how to escape it and thinking of doing it, and then there's that's seven years. I can't get round that sort of you know, she could just scream out in the middle of the night and it would completely blow a cover. It's like, how does she hold on and hold back and kind of slow herself down for that amount of time, but then gett into this very active you know, getting on a boat going north. I just think of what's kind of gone on in her mind. You know, she's so to me, the thing of mental health was I was really sort of thinking of in the song, and you know, are they only points where she just becomes sort of maddened? And it's slightly cracked by just that. You know, eventually while she's in there, they try and get home by putting her children in prison. You know, your mother's so unfeeling. How can she not come from the north when she knows you're in prison and she just is holding this line. It's this huge gamble that she takes. And I'm really fascinated by her. She lived in her eighties Harriet Jacobs. But you mentioned earlier there's sort of other songs that you've written for this project that you planned to put out in some way, shape or form. How far along with that are you. I think at one point I was working at twenty on twenty songs all at the same time, and I thought, this is just crazy because none of them are going to get finished because I know what I'm like, and I was just take too long. So yeah, so then I just thought, right, just focus on these ten because they're close to being finished, and leave the other ten for now. So yeah, I guess I'll go back to them and revisit them. But I mean they all came around about at the same time as the rest of the song say it would be beautiful, they're another project related to it. And it's great to hear you talk about this stuff, you know, it's like it's refreshing to hear someone who's connected to the world through art and the way that you are on this record. Thank you very much. Yeah, it has really been an obsession. And I say that, you know, there's so much in there. There's so much in that bank. You know, there's twenty six thousand books and all those stories and all those You could just look at a newspaper article or someone staring out for a photo or find you know, a little stitch, handmade black doll and just you know, it's like they're all objects that have come to us through history for you know, how do they get here? And you know what have they observed? And I just find the whole thing really fascinating. And you know, there are obviously so many, so many of the questions that the objects are asking are still questions and still hotly debated things. Now. I think the fact that the history wasn't done was the thing that made me interested in it as well. Cool. Thanks so much for putting the record out. Thanks for taking the time to chat. Thank you so much. She's been really great to talk to you. Thanks to Krin Bailey Ray for explaining the inspiration for her newest album, Black Rainbows. You can hear it, along with our favorite songs from her, on a playlist at broken record podcast dot com. Subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Tolladay. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by Anny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.