Twenty years ago, Corinne Bailey Rae had her first massive hit single—and so far, her only one. “Put Your Records On” was one of the great feel-good anthems of 2006. A warm, breezy celebration of being true to yourself, its core message was simple: keep playing the songs you love, and don’t worry about what anyone else thinks is cool. The single came from her self-titled debut album, which topped the UK charts and reached number four in the US.
At the time, Bailey Rae seemed destined for a long career. She wrote or co-wrote her own material, possessed a voice often compared to Billie Holiday and Minnie Riperton, and her music had a timeless quality. She was also academically gifted—achieving four A grades at A-level. But then tragedy struck, derailing her path. In 2008, her husband of seven years, fellow musician Jason Rae, died from an accidental drug overdose.
She was nearly finished with her second album, The Sea, at the time, but it took another two years to be released. Since then, she has only put out two more albums. While they may not have matched the commercial success of her debut, each has made its own impact: The Sea was nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2010, the song “Green Aphrodisiac” (from her third album, The Heart Speaks in Whispers) was among Billboard’s top 10 R&B songs in 2016, and this year’s Black Rainbow has again been shortlisted for the Mercury Prize.
Now, she is marking the 20th anniversary of “Put Your Records On” with a beautifully illustrated children’s book of the same name. The story follows a young girl named Bea, who discovers the magic of music through her great-aunt Portia. Portia keeps her treasured record collection hidden in the attic and teaches Bea that there’s a song for every emotion, showing how music can instantly connect us to our deepest memories.
We meet at a café in York; she lives nearby in Leeds. Even if you didn’t recognize her, you’d sense she’s a star—dressed in a purple velvet jacket and an African-print jumpsuit, with a calm, quiet presence.
But it wasn’t always this way. “Put Your Records On” was more about willing herself to believe than an expression of existing confidence. Growing up in Leeds, she loved many parts of her life—school, studying, music, family—yet always felt like an outsider. “We didn’t have much money, but we lived in a middle-class area. My dad was Black, my mum was white. My parents were divorced. I was very underweight as a child. I was a Christian. I’d ride my bike to school with my violin in one hand and my hockey kit in the other. I wasn’t cool. I felt really weird growing up.”
It was at church where she finally began to feel she belonged. Yes, she learned about Christianity, but it offered so much more: an education in Led Zeppelin and Nirvana, poverty and social injustice. As a teenager, she worked with homeless people, wrote letters to the government about the genocide in East Timor and apartheid, and wore Dr. Martens when everyone else was into trainers. At 15, she formed a girl punk band called Helen—Kurt Cobain was a major influence on her singing style back then—and performed in nightclubs. “At church, I was actually cool because I was at the centre of things. I played music and started to realize how subjective those perceptions were. I was still the same person.”
It was at a club where she worked as a cloakroom attendant that she met Jason. He was a brilliant saxophonist, two years older. She was an aspiring punk studying English at Leeds University. So much has been written about how they were opposites, she says, but that isn’t really true. Again, it’s about perspective. His life is often viewed through the lens of his death: Jason enjoyed drinking, and on the night he died, he had been out with a friend who was using methadone to treat a heroin addiction. When his friend fell asleep, Jason tried…The methadone. Bailey Rae will never know why. Combined with alcohol, it killed the 31-year-old. After that, he was portrayed as the reckless jazz musician with a death wish, while she was seen as the conservative soul singer.
But she says they were actually very similar. Both had been religious, were academic, and were deeply driven by their music. “He was brought up in a Mormon church and later moved away from it. He earned a first-class degree in jazz studies at Leeds College of Music. He was brilliant—everyone knew that. He was super bright and really funny.” The strange thing, she says, is how sensible he was in everyday life. “Jason was very cautious when he wasn’t drunk. He wouldn’t even take a paracetamol. He was very together.”
She says she didn’t recognize the man described in the newspapers after his death. “I wouldn’t have called Jason wild. I would have said he was really free—and his playing was really free, too. But we were free in the same way. We wanted to be at every party. We were in our 20s, living in a city, and there were so many exciting things happening—plays, poetry, dances.”
Bailey Rae was 27 when her career took off, though she’d already been gigging for 12 years. Suddenly, Stevie Wonder was calling to ask her to sing live on his radio show, and Prince was showing up at her gigs. Yet the largely white male music press dismissed her as dull. Bailey Rae believes this was because she refused to play the game. After all, the 2000s were the era of ladettes, when young women were expected to pose provocatively for magazines like Nuts and FHM, get drunk in public, and provide a spectacle for people to gawk at. Bailey Rae wanted no part of it. “If you deliberately avoided the ‘tits-out-for-the-lads’ angle, you were labeled middle-of-the-road or naive. They wanted you to be messy and sexually available. If you weren’t, they didn’t like it. So you got painted as boring. I thought, ‘Fine, I’ll take it. Prince just came to my show—I’ll take it!’”
By the time Bailey Rae found success, she and Jason had already been married for five years. The biggest change was that she was often away touring. She made sure he could travel with her whenever possible; he and two friends formed the horn section of her band. “We got them to the U.S., to South Africa. I insisted on having the horn section. I remember being told, ‘It’s a mime on Italian TV, Corinne,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, we have to have the horns.’ So I included him as much as I could.” Jason was also finding his own success with the funk band Haggis Horns, touring with Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse.
Then, in March 2008, he died. It was front-page news. Sickeningly, the music press suddenly found Bailey Rae more interesting because he had died in such a messy, “rock ’n’ roll” way. Not that she noticed at the time. She was devastated; music no longer mattered. Nothing did. For the next few years, she struggled to make sense of his death and her life.
“The initial feeling was shock and disbelief, and then it felt like my life was over. I was only 29, but I thought, ‘Well, I’ve had a good run—all these great things happened.’ We’d been together nine years, married, lived together, traveled together, done everything together. So it felt like the end of everything. I was so incapacitated. I didn’t do anything. I hardly left the house. I didn’t work.”
Sixteen years later, the emotion is still raw. “It was incredibly painful. There was nothing else. I kept thinking, how will I survive the rest of my life? I was in such a massive amount of pain.”The pain was overwhelming. I kept thinking, “How can I endure this endlessly?” It felt like a barren wasteland, as if I’d never move past it. I believed my life would amount to nothing. Absolutely nothing.
So how did she cope? “My mum, my sisters, and a few close friends cared for me while I stayed at home. Days blurred into weeks. Looking back a year later, I realized I felt much better and more healed. By two years, I could see how much further I’d come. And after five years, that event…” Her voice fades away.
Her outlook on life transformed. Everything became more vivid and intense. “I became more present. I started to think, isn’t life both beautiful and terrible at once? Anything could happen—the deepest loss or the most beautiful moment—and we have no control over it. I’ve stayed in that awareness ever since. It’s like a strange, beautiful ache.”
Instead of dwelling on her loss, she focused on what they had shared. “I saw my marriage to Jason as something truly beautiful. And in a way, it’s how all marriages are meant to end.” She pauses. “Well, the ones that last. You vow ’til death do us part.’ So I thought, we made it! Of course, it wasn’t the right time, but we didn’t break up because it was too difficult. We were there. We did it.”
Gradually, Bailey Rae rebuilt her life. She finished her second album, The Sea, produced by Steve Brown, a musician who had played with Jason. Though not originally a close friend, Brown played a crucial role in her healing. Slowly, their professional relationship and friendship deepened. “It felt like the volume had been turned up on our friendship,” she says. “Suddenly, I saw him differently.” He became her first boyfriend after Jason, and they married in 2013.
At 38, Bailey Rae became a mother. She and Brown now have two daughters, aged eight and six. “I never expected to remarry or have children. That’s been a real gift.” Do the children know about Jason? “Yes, they know Philip, Jason’s brother, quite well. So they piece it together. I tell them, ‘Before I married Daddy, I was married to Jason.'”
When she returned to performing, she discovered a new audience. “I wasn’t prepared for how many people would bring their grief to me or to a show. The crowd was completely different. When you’ve experienced loss, you’re drawn to things that speak about it because you’re trying to make sense of it. People would stop me on the street or come to my shows and say, ‘This happened to me.'” Was that difficult? “It didn’t feel hard, but sometimes I felt unqualified. I couldn’t counsel them, but it made me realize, ‘Life and death are intertwined. This is it. This is all there is.’ And it felt like music was needed to fill that space.”
She and Brown continue to collaborate, co-producing her last two albums. Black Rainbows, released in 2023, was hailed as a radical rebirth. In a way, it was—a vibrant mix of punk, avant-garde jazz, soul, and black history. But it was also a return to the fearless teenager who blended unlikely genres and wrote about the world’s injustices.
The album was inspired by a visit to the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago.Previously, a museum founded by Theaster Gates featured “negrobilia”—racist memorabilia depicting Black people in grotesque ways. The song “Erasure” is a powerful outcry of anger, reminiscent of early PJ Harvey or Hole. It confronts how the white establishment attempted to erase Black lives (“They Tipp-Exed all the black kids out of the picture/So when they pictured that scene, they wouldn’t be seen”) while simultaneously preserving them through savage caricatures. It also celebrates resilience: “I was so happy these tiny objects existed. The song says they tried to erase you, but here we are making a song about it, and now I’m going to talk at Yale about it, and now this song is going to be on the radio.”
In fact, she has lectured at Yale and the prestigious Spelman College in the U.S. about Black Rainbows and its inspiration. While Corinne Bailey Rae may not be experiencing the commercial success of earlier years, it’s remarkable how her life has expanded—she is now an author, historian, curator of the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, and, of course, a musician. Next, she says, she’d like to make a documentary exploring how her two musical heroes, Billie Holiday and Kurt Cobain, are cut from the same cloth. “They both struggled with heroin addiction and early childhood trauma. They also have this texture in their voices and use it to deliver songs with raw honesty.”
Now, she’s off to meet a lecturer in post-colonial studies and critical fabulation at York University. “Do you know what that is? I’m sure you do,” she says generously. Of course, I don’t. “It’s a research method that uses storytelling to fill gaps in history,” she explains.
“Well, Professor Bailey Rae,” I say, “it’s been lovely meeting you.” She laughs. “Oh, no, no. Honestly, I’m just learning a lot of new things. But I learn to love things.”
As she leaves, she adds, please don’t portray me as a victim or a heroic survivor. “I hope they don’t title this piece ‘Rae of sunshine—Bailey Rae’s pulling herself out of her grief pit.’”
There’s too much going on for that, I reply, but it is a significant part of your life. “I agree. It’s a revelation. That’s the other thing. You can’t just say, ‘It took me nine months and I did some Pilates.’ I want to be honest for people who are grieving.”
Corinne Bailey Rae is guest curator and will perform at this year’s Cheltenham Jazz Festival, running from April 29 to May 4. Her children’s book, Put Your Records On, will be published on March 5 by Fox & Ink.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs based on Corinne Bailey Raes statement about the pressure on female artists to dress provocatively
FAQs About Corinne Bailey Raes Statement on Image Pressure in Music
Beginner Definition Questions
1 What is Corinne Bailey Rae talking about
Shes describing the intense pressure she and many female artists faced in the music industry to present a sexualized image to be noticed and the unfair criticism they received if they chose a more subdued or personal style
2 Who is Corinne Bailey Rae
She is a Grammywinning British singersongwriter known for her soulful jazzy pop music and hits like Put Your Records On She emerged in the mid2000s with a more natural bohemian style
3 What does dress provocatively mean in this context
It refers to wearing clothing deemed overtly sexual or revealing often designed to attract a primarily male gaze rather than expressing the artists own personal or artistic identity
4 What does dismissed as bland or unremarkable mean
It means that if a female artist didnt conform to that sexualized standard industry executives media or audiences might ignore her label her as boring or claim she lacked the star quality needed to succeed
Benefits Context Questions
5 Why would an artist feel pressured to dress this way
Because the industry historically equated a womans marketability with her sex appeal It was seen as a shortcut to media attention chart success and record label support especially for new artists
6 Was this pressure unique to Corinne Bailey Rae
No not at all She is voicing a common experience shared by countless female artists across genres and decades from jazz and rock to pop and hiphop It highlights a systemic issue
7 Whats the benefit of an artist resisting this pressure
The benefit is artistic integrity and authenticity Artists like Corinne Bailey Rae Norah Jones or Adele built massive lasting careers by being known for their talent and music first allowing them to connect with audiences on a deeper more genuine level
Common Problems Examples
8 Whats the main problem with this expectation
It reduces complex talented artists to a onedimensional image prioritizes their appearance over their artistry and creates
