Corinne Bailey Rae's soul music

The Grammy Award winner Corinne Bailey Rae is marking a milestone in her musical career with a book to inspire the next generation to find the music that moves them

Corinne Bailey Rae is marking an important anniversary this year. The single that helped launch her global career as a singer and songwriter is 25 this year. “Put Your Records On”, from her 2006 debut album, is a very special record for the artist and her audience, so it’s fitting that she has passed it forward, hoping to inspire young readers to find their music, the songs that resonate.

She began thinking about the book while she was looking after her children. “I was breastfeeding the two kids and that was taking up a lot of time. When you’re feeding there’s just loads and loads of thinking time,” she says. “I was just thinking about music and emotions and how linked they were for me and how everything you’ve ever felt is in a song somewhere. I remember as a kid thinking, ‘how does Bananarama know how I feel?'” What she was mulling over was that sense of connection songs can give us – the realisation that someone else has been here. “It makes you feel less alone in the world.”

Corinne Bailey Rae. Portrait by Ulrike Rindermann

So, Put Your Records On is the culmination of a lot of hard thought – both for the story and the songs within it. The story is about a little girl called Bea who goes to visit her glamorous Aunt Portia every weekend. Then, one day, she is taken up to the attic – a wondrous room packed with rare treasures, including a vinyl collection. “I liked the idea of this intergenerational story – to have a bridge from your world and your everyday to someone else’s.”

Aunt Portia adds a distinctive voice to this story – she’s had a rich and interesting life and she’s happy to share wisdom. As the story progresses, she becomes more magical, more exotic – her cape positively sparkles. “I had that. I’ve got loads of aunts that I really love. Between my Dad’s sisters and my Mum’s sisters and the uncles that have married. They were shiny and exciting to me and they shared a lot of things with me,” she says. “So I loved the idea that this woman could be that for Bea.”

Growing up in Leeds, Corinne Bailey Rae remembers music as just a normal thing you did at school. “Everyone sang. There were music lessons when you picked up a percussion instrument and played.” She loved the violin, and was given bigger instruments as she grew, but it became more difficult. Then her sister brought home a classical guitar from school – at around the time Nirvana where getting popular. Music making was there to see on MTV Unplugged, and that started something because she could deconstruct what was being played. “I saw bar chords visually for the first time. And I thought, ‘I want to try that’.” DIY and real, Corinne Bailey Rae was starting her music journey. “Indie was really important to me – that you could make this music yourself.”

It was a church leader who helped her acquire her first guitar. “He showed me an advert in the paper and it was something like £110 or £120 and I couldn’t afford to pay that. So he bought it for me and I paid him back over about two years. I’d bring in £7 and he’d just say ‘oh, just buy me a pizza’. It was really good to have that instrument and just to feel the world was my oyster – to be set off on that journey.”

Corinne Bailey Rae's soul music — *Put Your Records On* provides a shortlist of songs that mean a lot to Corinne Bailey Rae. Each describes a mood, an emotion and a place in time. Illustration by Gillian Eilidh O’Mara

That combination – a generously supplied secondhand guitar, MTV Unplugged and Nirvana made Corinne Bailey Rae feel she belonged in music. “That grunge scene was coming to the fore. It was so important for me. As a working class kid, to be able to say ‘Mum, I’m not going to keep bugging you now about getting a £50 Nike rucksack, which you can’t afford. Now I can go to the Army & Navy and I’m going to buy a blue canvas bag, bleach this bit and stick my old Brownie badge on it’. And suddenly I’ve got the coolest bag in school.”

Now, all those years on, in helping other children find their own inspiration she’s chosen a shortlist of four songs in the book, each one describing a particular emotion and place in time. Harry Belafonte’s “Jump in the Line” reminds her of the fun they all had dancing round the kitchen. “There’s a crazy energy to it,” she says. At the other end of emotions is “Bridge Over Troubled Water” – not the original but the powerful Aretha Franklin cover. “I wanted to have an Aretha Franklin because I connect so deeply with her voice,” she says. “She’s just one of the greatest singers of all time.” But that song is also important – she hopes it might be a “trail of breadcrumbs” for children who decide to check out the songbook of Simon & Garfunkel, and then maybe move on to Paul Simon.

Writing sparely comes more naturally for a songwriter – used to distilling down – and Corinne Bailey Rae’s English degree came into play. “It helped me put a focus on particular moments or particular phrases and keep it going.” But it wasn’t all straightforward – she credits her US Editor, Lauri Hornik for keeping things on track. “I’d send her these big drafts and she’d come back and say, ‘Remember, it is a children’s book. We don’t need all this description because there will be drawings’.”

It was Lauri Hornik who helped pair author and illustrator, after presenting a shortlist of three. “Instantly, I fell in love with Gillian’s work. She had done a lot in nature, she’d done a lot that I think is magical.” Indeed, Gillian Eilidh O’Mara’s textured and rich illustrations add much to the magic of this narrative, which transports readers from a cluttered attic room to somewhere far more magical.

Corinne Bailey Rae is also reader of the audiobook, something she found very moving. “I put a lot of time into it. I wanted to get the tone right. It was a really serious undertaking. I’m reading some kids to sleep around the world that I’ll never meet.”

Behind the book there remains the song, “Put Your Records On”, now the grand old age of 25 but freezing a moment in time. It still resonates for the singer songwriter, capturing an emotion, a joy, from her own childhood.

Corinne Bailey Rae believes it’s important for children to know what music can bring – helping us to navigate complex feelings, from joy to sadness, and know other people have felt this way too. “Music just puts its finger on something in you that you didn’t know was there. It’s painful, but it’s healing, it’s beautiful, it’s transformative. I wanted to talk about that in kids’ language.”