Corinne Bailey Rae Backstage At The Roots Picnic

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Speaker 1: The Questlove Show is a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's Questlove, and this is the Questlove Show.

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Speaker 2: And back in 2024, Team Supreme and I had Kareem Bailey Ray on the show.

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Speaker 1: I'm such a major fan of hers.

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Speaker 2: So when she performed at this year's Roots Picnic in Philly, we caught up.

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Speaker 1: With her backstage for this mini episode. It was quick and casual.

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Speaker 2: We were both running around like crazy, but I want to encourage all of you to catch Kareem on tour and check out her new children's book, which is aptly titled Put Your Records On, which came out.

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Speaker 1: Earlier this year. And I got a copy and I don't even have kids. So, you know, it's that good.

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Speaker 2: We talked about the book, the song and the tour in this 20 minute bonus beat. All right.

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Speaker 1: Enjoy y'all. Hey, what's up, y'all?

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Speaker 2: This is Questlove, and this is the Questlove Show doing another mini-episode. We are live at the Roots Picnic here in the beautiful Republic of Illiduff 2026. And we are here right now with a dear friend of mine. I've followed her career and been a massive fan of hers forever.

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Speaker 1: I guess I can say decades. Oh, yeah. And not....

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Speaker 2: I learned that I got to take the word old out. So I was told to use the word honored. So, yeah, but we're here right now with the one and only Corinne Bailey Ray.

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Speaker 1: Thank you for having me.

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Speaker 3: Thank you for having me.

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Speaker 1: Great to see you again.

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Speaker 3: Good to see you.

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Speaker 4: All right.

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Speaker 2: So, of course, you are here finally to celebrate your 20th.

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Speaker 1: That's right.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, 20 years since my debut record. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: And so, like, what does that mean for you to.

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Speaker 2: return to this because oftentimes I know many an artist whose first album they kind of cringe on because they really haven't gotten their footing yet on who they are as a person. But like, talk to me about the process that leads up to your debut record and what you wanted to do creatively.

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Speaker 4: I think the record for me was, it was a kind of culmination of all my musical threads at that point. Like I'd grown up in classical violin and And I had worked in a jazz club and I'd been in an indie band. And this was really my first time in the studio where I was singing, but I was like up close on a microphone and I had the headphones and I was able to really hear my voice.

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Speaker 2: Right.

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Speaker 4: And so, so much of it was really sort of intimate and confessional and conversational because I wasn't like, you know, like over loads of guitars. And so it kind of took on that character, but it's been great to me to go back to these songs and see like, the seed of a song that I feel like I've then written three songs that kind of turn into something else now. So I can see the seeds in Seasons Change where it really wigs out. I can see like some of the stuff I did on Black Rainbows or, you know, in Enchantment. I can see songs I've done about spells and transcendency. And so it was good to say, oh, it's still me, you know, sort of go back and be like, I recognize myself. And I found it easier to sing as I'm glad I've done some work. And so it was good to revisit the songs.

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Speaker 2: What's the creative approach that you're doing with this record? Like oftentimes when I do anniversary projects, for instance, when Jay-Z was celebrating the 10th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt, I told him, hey, let's do the album backwards. The same with, you know, we did like, an anniversary show, whatever. And I figured out a creative way to, to do the record.

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Speaker 1: For you though.

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Speaker 2: Like, how are you, is this more or less about the feeling of the beginning of your career or are you doing the album start to finish soup to nuts?

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Speaker 4: I'm doing the album start to finish, not in the order that I recorded it, but I'm sort of doing it from here. So I think, okay, so if I am this person, this woman who is in this moment of sort of creative freedom and and wants to stretch out, and wants to be responsive to an audience, not kind of like, oh, it's three and a half minutes, then it's on to something else. So really, so many of the songs are just like stretched out and kind of spread out, so hopefully people will be happy. It's like, they know the song, it's not like a super fast reggae version, or it's like being turned into a drum and.

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Speaker 3: Bass or something.

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Speaker 4: It's like, the groove is familiar, the song's familiar, but then it's going to go somewhere else, and it'll be different every single night, and then it's going to sort of come back, so.

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Speaker 2: I was going to ask, is there a temptation? Well, here's the weird thing. Like, I would always remix our songs.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: But then I guess, like, you know, Miss Lauryn Hill sort of took over the definition of, like, remixing a song. You know, I've heard at least five different configurations of her music, of interpretations of the songs, which, you know, is interesting.

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Speaker 1: But how tempting was it to.

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Speaker 2: not given to the urge to remix or update or, you know, basically to stick to the script as your fans first got to meet you. The way that, you know, how tempting was it to not want to just turn it upside down and try something new with the material?

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Speaker 4: I think that it gets turned inside out at a certain point, the music. So I think in a song like Season Change, it has this kind of like, mantra like kind of repetitive, um, you know, choral thing that I feel like in any moment we could break that down and be hymnal or we could like wig it out and give it an epic guitar solo and try and be celestial, you know, just like, so I feel like in all the songs I'm saying, this is me, but also like, I see how the riff for I'd like to can also sit with the riff for use me or whatever so we can sort of like we can be in there for a minute to sort of say like yeah I made this record when I was in my 20s but I you know grew up with this music it's my dad's record collection I worked in a jazz club to sort of say in different contexts like I'm giving a nod to you know I've put in these vocals I like I want us to be like Sly Stone it has to be like I don't want to slow it down here and then I want the drum to come back in time so we haven't we haven't lost any time and so I feel like I'm faithful to the songs but I just want to like loosen their, you know, stays a little bit.

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Speaker 1: Got you.

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Speaker 4: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Now, when we last spoke, you were at the end of your astounding Black Rainbows album. And, you know, I guess when I, the time before I last spoke to you, you were just at the beginning of unleashing that out into the world. So it was good, like going on chats and social media to be like, wait a minute.

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Speaker 1: Like, next to Jay-Z's Afro, I.

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Speaker 2: Think hearing you sound sonically different was one of the most shocking pleasures I had of watching people respond to, wait a minute, what's this?

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Speaker 1: Like, where did this come from?

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Speaker 2: One, how cathartic was that entire experience of bringing that album to the stage? And I got to see it at least once. maybe three shows. And, you know, it felt so spontaneous. And, you know, like, how did it feel to get that out of your system and to bring to people?

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Speaker 1: Like, what were the responses?

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Speaker 4: It felt incredible to let that music through and let it out of myself. It felt like it was a test, really. I thought, okay, the audience, they're either going to hate this or... you know, who's going to still be here? Like we definitely played a jazz festival where it's like, were more people here at the beginning than at the end of this set, you know, but it was so important to me because the stories in the record was really important to me, you know, being able to tell the story of Harriet Jacobs and not just that, being able to tell her story in North Carolina where I thought, you know, at the start I'd say, she's an enslaved woman and she hid out in.

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Speaker 3: Her grandmother's crawl space.

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Speaker 4: And I'd say for seven years and I expect the audience to say, yes, we know we learned about this in school. You're not telling, you know, why are you sort of English explaining our history? But instead the audience would gasp because they didn't.

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Speaker 3: Know that story.

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Speaker 4: And it had gone from being a bestseller to being discredited. And now people don't know her story. So I felt it's a huge weight of like, I felt like I was sort of honoring the people in the stories. And then I felt like I was getting to be all myself and my sort of ancestral selves too, you know, like, so it was really big for me. It was very emotional. I played with a great band. I worked with Melanie Charles, who's such a brilliant artist. And so, yeah, I just felt like it was just no hiding at all. It was really, really freeing and magical.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. So was there ever a time period where... Okay, if you happen to be in a marketplace... in which you know what they're expecting, but they don't know what you're.

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Speaker 1: About to give them. Did you ever have it in like an.

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Speaker 2: Emergency queue where it's like, all right, put your records on in three, or season change, two, three, or did.

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Speaker 1: You stick to your guns?

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Speaker 4: We had a disclaimer kind of thing, you know, when we saw the ticket. So it's like, we're doing, it will be Black Rainbows, like the whole album. We tried to spell it out to people. It's like, if you want to hear Put Your Records On, you're going to be disappointed. I definitely did a show where there's a man on the front row saying.

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Speaker 3: Put Your Records On!

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Speaker 4: You know, he really wanted to hear that song. And now I'm doing this tour. It's like, here's all those records. Here's all those songs. But yeah, we kind of spelled it out on people's tickets. It's like, this is a different adventure. It's smaller venues. It's more intimate. And I feel in the way the right people came, people who wanted to hear it.

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Speaker 2: So one of the coolest things about your creativity is you're pivoting outside of music and you wrote a children's book.

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Speaker 3: That's right, I did.

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Speaker 2: Of which I would like to think, like as a person who's wrote, I mean, I think I'm on book 10 now. Yes. Writing a children's book is one of the hardest things on earth because.

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Speaker 1: You have to be very specific with the language.

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Speaker 3: Yes, and concise, right?

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Speaker 1: Oh, it's one of the hardest things.

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Speaker 2: Like, I can write something the size of the Quran in my sleep, but writing a children's book is hard. Tell me about the creative process.

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Speaker 1: Of you writing.

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Speaker 2: One, why write a children's book now? And tell me about the process of it.

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Speaker 4: I think it was important for me to do now. You know, I have young children. I tell them stories all the time. They travel with me. And so many times we're in the back of a van for two hours. or we're sitting in a queue to get on a plane. So there was like, mommy, tell me a story. And I think I always have to just kind of think of something in the moment. And I love the idea of a young person learning from an elder in their family, being invited to their record collection, you know, come up these stairs to this loft you've never seen before. And it's full of records. And this woman's been collecting them since she was a kid. And the idea that there's a song for every feeling you've ever experienced, right? Like every child's, that can lock into the sort of specificity of whatever they're going through.

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Speaker 3: And someone can say like, you need to hear this.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: Or you got to hear this. And when you hear it, you're amazed.

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Speaker 4: You know, I remember hearing Juliana Hatfield sing that song about, I hate my sister. She's such a bitch. And I remember being like, she's talking about jealousy. She's talking about sibling rivalry. I didn't know anyone had made a track like that. So, so I feel like I wanted to make this song where this girl's almost in this kind of like wonderland of songs. And I really wanted the challenge of, writing about songs, you know, how do you, how do you explain, how do you give texture so that it's going to make someone want to go to jump in the line, Harry Belafonte. And then like, how do you, How do you tell that story? And again, how do you make it concise for kids? So I loved doing it. I love the illustrator, Jillian. And it was a great challenge for me. I'm happy that it turned out.

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Speaker 2: Is there any other creative pivots that you're curious to place your feet in?

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Speaker 1: Always.

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Speaker 4: I mean, that's a challenge for me where I feel like I'm doing a project now where I think, oh, it's not really my main album.

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Speaker 3: It's just like a different.

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Speaker 4: thing and um it's really geographically specific and um i kind of imagined a place i kind of imagined the place i wanted to do it so it's all been informed by sort of thinking about being in this particular space and it's i'm writing a short story and the short story is going to kind of tell the album it's hard to explain but i like challenge just things that keep you the last thing you think of at night right or the first thing or you're living through life and you think oh, I could put this thing in it, you know, and things that wouldn't necessarily link up. Like, yeah, I love to thread together things and pull them into something.

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Speaker 2: I don't know how it came to be, but it's like, you know, the insane amount of times I listen to Black Rainbows wondering what your next move is going to be. But I'm also under the impression that Black Rainbows was very of the present era. It was more of a cathartic exercise for you. Where are you right now in terms of what you're going to musically offer us next?

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Speaker 4: I think musically, so much of the writing is coming out of sort of spontaneous.

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Speaker 4: Delivery or so you know I really love Amber and Paris from the band We Are King they're incredible so when we get together I feel like we get through a door like sometimes when you do co-writing with someone I mean I find co-writing so painful because of my self-consciousness just like rears up but with.

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Speaker 2: Them wait you're saying are you a good collaborator.

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Speaker 3: Or I feel like I'm a terrible or you're an introvert.

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Speaker 4: Yeah I'm a terrible collaborator yeah I'm sort of like doing this you know when I should be doing like But with them, because I feel like we're family, we just kind of like make a thing. And it's like we don't notice that two hours has gone by.

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Speaker 2: Right.

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Speaker 4: But the tape's been rolling and then something will be in my mind. So I'm enjoying writing in that kind of a way.

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Speaker 2: Okay.

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Speaker 1: And how far are you to the process?

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Speaker 4: I have quite a lot of songs I haven't started recording. But yeah, I'd say like I'm working on two separate things. This is like this album.

00:15:04
Speaker 3: Weird thing. And then a record.

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Speaker 4: Okay.

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Speaker 3: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: And how long is the tour happening right now that you're doing for that?

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Speaker 3: I just did that. Well, this is the third day of the tour.

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Speaker 1: Okay.

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Speaker 3: And it goes right through. We finish at the Royal Albert Hall in October.

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Speaker 1: Which, you know. Have you played there before?

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Speaker 4: I've played, you know, like three songs here, two songs there, but not like, this is my show.

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Speaker 2: So is the Royal Albert Hall kind of like your Carnegie Hall?

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Speaker 1: Absolutely. Okay.

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Speaker 3: Absolutely.

00:15:32
Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 3: So when they said I was doing it, I was like, Do you think.

00:15:35
Speaker 1: People will come?

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Speaker 3: And it's like, yeah, it's nearly sold out. And yeah, I'm very, very happy.

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Speaker 1: What date is the Royal Albert Hall date?

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Speaker 3: It's the 26th of October.

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Speaker 1: Is it different doing shows in your homeland than it is?

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Speaker 3: I think.

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Speaker 1: What do you feel when you do a show in.

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Speaker 3: Well, I wonder what you feel doing shows here.

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Speaker 4: You know, I feel like when I'm in Leeds, especially, that I have no sort of, like, mystery or artifice. I feel like people are like, oh, I went to school with her.

00:16:04
Speaker 3: Oh, she saved me.

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Speaker 1: And they're judging you?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, they're like.

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Speaker 4: So you really have to just be like, okay, I know you know me because I used to work in this bar.

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Speaker 1: Right.

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Speaker 3: But now I'm here. So you have to be really open and raw.

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Speaker 4: But London, I always feel like I feel like an outsider to London still, but I feel a lot of love from people in London. So I know once I'm there in that space, I'll be like, I've waited a long time to get this building. 20 years with this record. Everybody just wants to see me do those songs. And I think that's, again, like a massive amount of freedom then.

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Speaker 2: Well, you know, here's to another 20 years and another 20 years.

00:16:39
Speaker 1: And, you know.

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Speaker 2: I couldn't be more happier to see your evolution as an artist and as a creative.

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Speaker 1: And you're one of my favorite artists.

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Speaker 2: And I'm so glad we finally got you to the Roots Picnic.

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Speaker 4: Yes.

00:16:51
Speaker 1: Thank you very much.

00:16:52
Speaker 3: Thank you for having me. I had an amazing time.

00:16:53
Speaker 1: Thank you, Corinne Belly Ray.

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Speaker 4: Thank you.

00:16:55
Speaker 2: It's Corinne Belly Ray. And, you know, we will see you on the next Go Round the Quest Love Show.

00:16:59
Speaker 1: All right. Peace. Questlove Show is a production of iHeart Radio.