Day Fourteen - I'd Do It All Again

 “My heart's an open door…”

You can hear an audio version of this post here.

Today’s song is I’d Do It All Again by Corinne Bailey Rae (hear it here). This song is on Corinne’s album The Sea and, despite the starting point for this project, I didn’t hear this one at Montrose Folk Club (in fact this is the third in this series of 31 songs that I definitely didn’t hear there). It is from the same era in my life though so I am taking it as a tangent (I lived in Montrose 2004-18 and The Sea came out in 2010). Once I’d decided to pick something from this (brilliant) album for this month’s project I had a bit of a debate with myself over whether to pick I’d Do It All Again or I Would Like To Call It Beauty. In the end I went for I’d Do It All Again as it is the track I listened to over and over when I first got the album. Although I’ve never heard any of her songs at a folk club I don’t think they would be so out of place in one. The songs on The Sea are deeply honest about the human condition, they have plenty of sadness (a folk club staple), quite a bit of joy (perhaps less common in folk clubs but it does make the odd appearance), and for me they aren’t so far from, say, John Martyn’s music (and he certainly gets played in folk clubs). Even if you do consider her a pop artist (and I do and I don’t – see below), plenty of pop songs get covered at folk clubs (The Beatles and more). She is a singer/songwriter, after all, she’s just had some pop success.

Perhaps Corinne’s best-known work, in the UK at least, is her single Put Your Records On and the album it came from (2006’s debut Corinne Bailey Rae). Put Your Records On was a proper pop hit (her biggest so far) and the album got a lot of play. Other songs from that debut (Butterfly, Like A Star…) turn up on TV programmes like The Voice so they have obviously made it into the genre ‘songs quite a lot of people know’. I loved the whole debut album and perhaps particularly so because she comes from Leeds (and anyone who followed my Fun A Day writing project last year will know I lived in Leeds/West Yorkshire 1989-2002 and have a strong connection with the area). With Corinne’s first success there was much talk of her working in the cloakroom of a jazz club and I think I probably even have a vague memory of seeing her in that club (but she’s quite a bit younger than me and I suspect she was just coming into nightclubs as I was having to … quietly retire). 

I also liked her from the start because, as well as the pop hit, there was obviously so much more to her than the easy-listening pop star some people perhaps wanted her to be. With backgrounds in all kinds of music (via her church, via her Dad’s record collection, from being in an indie band called Helen in Leeds in her teens), she can pretty much go in any direction (and I think she would probably like to). I remember seeing her Live at St Luke’s performance on TV (recorded in 2006) and she had Led Zeppelin’s Since I’ve Been Loving You in the set (see it here). As someone for whom Led Zep were as close as we got to family unity (both my older brothers liked them and they didn’t agree on much musically) this was an interesting and welcome choice (plus, I had some teenage memories of watching The Song Remains The Same, fairly drunk, in a quaker meeting house back in the mists of the 1980s – Robert Plant was quite the eye-opener, even through a heavy vodka blur). All this meant hearing her going full Led Zep was very exciting (“let your hair down” indeed). To give you an idea of her range, I’ve also seen her covering Stevie Wonder’s For Once in My Life (here). More recently she appeared on a TV programme called Soul and Beyond with DJ Trevor Nelson where they both picked favourite soul music artists. Many of the choices were expected (Aretha, Soul II Soul, Prince, Sade, Marvin Gaye…) but Corinne also threw Elton John* in there (less expected perhaps, but an interesting choice). I’m always interested in talk of soul because, as the youngest in the family, soul (and funk and disco) was the music that I found on my own, that I sang along most to in my bedroom. I think this is one reason I’ve had to mix up the genres in this month’s project (even though the folk club visits serve as a starting point). I’ve enjoyed getting to know folk music over the past couple of decades but I came to it (and it came to me) very late so it feels more like friend than family. My family (musically speaking) are bands like Earth, Wind and Fire, Led Zeppelin, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Funkadelic, The Beatles, and Chic.

As well as a great performer of varied material, Corinne is a very accomplished songwriter and, whilst the songs on her debut were all written collaboratively, the excellent songs on The Sea are all her own work. I don’t have an interview with her but luckily it’s not needed as whilst I was researching I came across her appearance on the BBC radio programme Mastertapes in 2012. In it she talks about The Sea and its songs in some detail (the programmes that feature her are here and here). Of writing The Sea on her own, she said, “I really wanted to see what would happen if it was just me on my own in a room, opening up my mind, or whatever, just playing guitar”**. 

When I first heard The Sea in 2010 I knew, like most people, that her first husband, musician Jason Rae, had died in 2008 (before Corinne was even 30). My own Mum was widowed for the first time, to the sea in fact, at a similar age and it seemed like a story I knew in a way. Perhaps because of this, I (and many others) made assumptions about some of the songs that were completely wrong. The song I’m highlighting today for example, I’d Do It All Again, seemed to be so clearly about the end of her husband’s life but it was, in fact, written before he died and was about “our relationship” and “how to make it work”. Also the title track was written about her Mum’s Dad who died in an accident at sea: “I found out my aunt was there – on the beach. The song’s about things that happen ... how they shape you. At that time I had not experienced loss.” 

Whether you know its origins or not, I’d Do It All Again works for me in so many ways. To me it’s a kind of lullaby (or even celebration) of failure and that can apply to most of us at some point in time. Also I just think it’s a HUGE song – with Motown drama, acoustic intimacy and everything in between. I find it really moving and beautifully structured (gentle, gentle, gentle, lull, lull, build, build, declaration from rooftops, gently back down, stab to the heart… and collapse).

There is so much good in the Mastertapes interview and audience questions – it is really worth a listen. I can’t believe I missed it in 2012 (somehow I heard the Laura Marling edition of the programme but never caught the rest of the series – there has been a lot to catch up on this winter!). Corinne talks about her songwriting: “in general I’m not a classically trained musician ... I find shapes (with the guitar). The guitar is just loads of different shapes ... and now I’ve gone down that route I don’t want to lose the magic of it”. A graduate in English Literature she knows the strengths, and weaknesses, of words too: “sometimes words are useful, sometimes words get in the way. Sometimes words aren’t enough”. And on her singing she explains: “I never thought of myself as a singer because I always had a lot of texture to my voice, it was a bit croaky, it wasn’t that high so I’d always think I love singing, it’s such a shame that I can’t really sing, that’s how I used to feel about my voice. And then I discovered Billie Holiday when I was 12 or 13 and I was like ‘wow’. Then about the same time Kurt Cobain … all these different types of expression. You can bend up to notes, you can be croaky, it can be more conversational. I was just like ‘wow, maybe I can actually do this.’” She’s also, I’ve heard her say on another radio programme, a big Bjork fan. She has impeccable taste.

The songs on The Sea that were written after her husband’s sudden death are Are You Here and my other big favourite on the album I would like to call it beauty. Of the latter she says on Mastertapes: “(When he died) everything stopped in my world. There was a period of nothing. Then I started to hear music again. After that I wrote I would like to call it beauty, after a conversation with my brother-in-law, Jason’s younger brother, asking him ‘what do you believe in?’ and he was saying there is a force, guiding in the universe and he said ‘I would like to call it beauty’ (but in a Scottish accent). ‘I think beauty controls the universe’ – it’s a big thing to say. And so I wrote the song about the intricacy and the beauty and the timing and the way people treat you who love you when you are completely destroyed. There is a massive level of beauty to it.”

Although the album The Sea had success (it was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, for example), it didn’t have the big single of its predecessor and sold significantly less copies (though it’s just as good an album, I think, if not better). It was a difficult second album perhaps (but for very different reasons to the usual – too much to write about rather than not enough). Also the refusal to put out a carbon copy of the first album or to stick to one genre of music can cause barriers. I am sure some people wouldn’t jump to listen to her music because they would consider her a pop act (from Put Your Records On) or might think she is purely an R & B artist. She says: “I definitely think there’s a feeling, certainly in marketing music, of like, it has to be a certain genre … Labels don’t like you to do things that are really broad because then it’s like ‘how do you market it?’” Also, she says: “It definitely doesn’t help a project if it is quite broad in terms of genre but it helps me because I don’t want to miss out any of myself so I really wanted to have all these different styles on (the record).”

Corinne Bailey Rae’s most recent album release is 2016’s The Heart Speaks in Whispers (for my taste all the best tracks are at the end so stay with it). She has also worked on lots of collaborations and turned up on soundtracks (Fifty Shades Darker, so I read). Listening to her lovely Yorkshire accent on the Mastertapes programme, and with all the folk music and writing about folk artists in my mind of late, it made me think how like Kate Rusby she sounded as she spoke (in my headphones). What a great double-header that would be, I thought, to have those two Yorkshire voices in one show (and then I searched online and it turns out Jools Holland already sorted that on his 2005 Hootenanny Show). Ah well, Jools has great taste too (and one hell of a contacts list, presumably).

Back tomorrow with another English songwriter – one man and his banjo (and a few guitars).

*One of the songwriters I’m looking at this month picks an Elton John song as the ‘song they wished they’d written’. Can you guess who that songwriter is?

**This and all the other quotes in this post are from the 2012 programme Mastertapes (still on BBC Sounds).

This post is part of my Songs That Stick project for 2022's Fun A Day Dundee (a community arts project that takes place every January). Anyone can take part (you don’t even have to be local to Dundee) and much of the work can be found on Instagram during January (use #FADD2022). There is usually a real-life exhibition later in the year (though this has been online for the past 2 years). The full list of songs I am writing about this year is here. My first post about why I picked this project this time is here.

If you are interested in my Fun A Day Dundee projects for 2020 and 2021 you can start here and here. They are quite different to this one (a short poem and drawings in 2020 and lots of poems and writing in 2021).