The Sea, the follow-up to Corinne Bailey Rae’s Grammy and Brit Award-nominated 2006 debut, is an album of “before” and “after”.

The 30-year-old Leeds-born singer was in the process of writing it when her husband Jason Rae, a fellow musician, died suddenly of an accidental drugs overdose at a friend’s flat.

She stopped work for a period, explaining, “All the things that had been important to me just receded. There was no sense of thinking about my career or worrying about it – it was more that I had no concern about any of it.”

But when she found herself starting to make music again, she was relieved to discover there was continuity between the songs written before Jason’s death and those written in the wake of it.

“It was important that they still sounded like me,” she says quietly. “When Jason died, people said, ‘Of course you’ll never be the same’ and I found that really unhelpful. When you lose someone you’ve been making a life with and deliberately evolving into being more and more like each other, there’s a big question about who you are – what’s your identity?

“Hearing these things and thinking, I still like this stuff, I’d make that now, I believe in it now, I’m the same person… it was a big help to me.”

She’d already decided she wanted to make something “heavier and noisier and more undone” than its predecessorm, which spawned the dreamy, hazy singles Put Your Records On and Like A Star, and oddly, the theme of loss had been playing on her mind when she started work. The album’s title song is about a family tragedy that happened before the singer was born, when her maternal grandfather died in a boating accident.

“I found it strange how I was thinking about these things from a completely different vantage point – empathising with someone – and then...” She trails off.

One of the record’s most affecting tracks, Are You There, was written “in a sort of trance” after Jason died. Woozy and lovelorn, Bailey Rae sings: “He’s a real live-wire, the best of his kind, wait till you see those eyes...”

“I was just singing and those words came out, so I was able to stand back and analyse my feelings from a distance. I always feel surprised by how songs arrive. I’m not a technical songwriter. I don’t know my guitar – I play it, but I don’t know what the chords are, so every song I write is magical to me.”

She admits making the record has been a cathartic process and a strangely liberating one too.

“This whole record is so uncalculated and I feel like I really trust it. When we’re playing it, it feels really open and free. I’m working with musicians I’ve known since I was 18, a guitarist I’ve known since I was ten, who was in my first band with me. We’re not locked down on the songs, we don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s not a straightforward pop gig where you’re bashing through songs and they’re all three and a half minutes.

“It’s more live and a bit more undone than that. It’s different every time.”

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