Corinne Bailey Rae Is Back! New Music, The Sunlight Tour

Corinne Bailey Rae is finding joy in being catapulted back into her life as she knew it before the pandemic. Traveling. Rehearsing with her band. And, very importantly, touring.

The Leeds-born musician rose to the tops of charts worldwide in 2006 with her hit single “Put Your Records On.” Since then, she has continued to write ballads and feature music in films like Fifty Shades. Bailey Rae also survived her first husband after an accidental overdose, remarried and gave birth to two daughters. Between grief and finding joy again, the past years have had a profound impact on Bailey Rae.

Now, she’s working on new music and getting ready for the Sunlight/Sunlight! Tour, which is her first solo U.S. headlining run in more than five years.

New Music: Archives, Love and Experimentation

Bailey Rae’s new music project takes large inspiration from time spent at the Stony Island Arts Bank, a contemporary arts space and archive on Chicago’s South Side.

The building previously served as a loan and savings community bank until the 1980s. It had been abandoned for decades and began crumbling, with the roof collapsing, until social practice installation artist and University of Chicago professor Theaster Gates purchased the building in 2012. He revitalized, renovated, and reopened it in 2015, turning it into the stunning arts and community space it is today.

“I was really humbled to be in that space,” Bailey Rae said. “You can’t look away. So many of the [racist] tropes and lies and stories and myths began in art… it’s like going to the root of racism, getting to see evidence of it and how widespread these objects were, like the postcards. It’s so complex, the history, but it’s so fascinating.”

Current collections in the archives include materials from the Johnson Publishing Company, publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines; the Frankie Knuckles Collection, a personal vinyl collection from the godfather of house music; and a collection of approximately 4,000 objects of “negrobilia,” which are racist collectibles that use stereotypical images of Black people.

The objects, stories, and history in the archival collections have been inspiring Bailey Rae’s new music. She expects to release the upcoming project some time in 2023.

Like all of her music, this upcoming project will also be laced with love, which she calls one of her “transcendent experiences.”

“Love is an extremely grand thing for me. That’s my experience at the moment with having been a widow at 29, and then getting married again and getting to have a family,” she said. “I thought that certain aspects of my life were over. And then here, I find myself in all this newness and freshness.”

Love, she said, has been behind her new phase in life of belief and excitement. “Those love feelings that lift you up and put you outside of time… they inform a lot of my songwriting. That feeling of just being lost in it, outside of this moment and in the eternal.”

Bailey Rae’s music often defies expectations for genres. She is diving deeper into that now by letting go of her own rules for this project. “It’s been a real nice process to think what happened if I didn’t make rules for myself, what happened if I just let the stream of consciousness happen?”

The Sunlight/Sunlight! Tour

The Sunlight/Sunlight! Tour kicks off this spring and summer. Bailey Rae will perform in the U.K. as well as major U.S. cities like New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco.

“I really miss playing music,” she said. “I didn’t realize how much a part it was of my identity, playing with other people and getting lost with other people.”

Bailey Rae is looking forward to being in person again, connecting with new places, seeing old friends, and “all the spontaneous things that happen when you’re having dinner with a person that don’t necessarily happen when you’re exchanging emails.”

“All of that,” she said, “that’s been great to see those green shoots coming up again.”