Interview: Corinne Bailey Rae Adjusts to Fame

(andPOP) - The feeling of success is still new to Corinne Bailey Rae, but even had it never arrived, she says she would still be singing.

"I think I love music, and even if I hadn't become real well known and the album hadn't done so well, I would still do music," the British soul singer tells andPOP on a recent visit to Toronto to promote her self-titled album. "Say the record had been disastrously received, and I had gotten dropped by the label, I would still sort of carry on making music, because I can't really think of anything else I like doing."

Bailey Rae sees other artists who are just in it for the accolades, and she says that is not a way to build a career.

"I just think it's the wrong motivation behind things. And it means you can't make any decisions; all of your decisions will be based on 'will this be popular? Will people like it or not?' And that's not that creative, and ultimately, I don't know how long you can sustain that wave of thinking."

Bailey Rae has been interested in making her own music since she was 15, when she started a band with friends from school in her native England. At that time, she says she knew people her age who were getting signed, so the possibility of her own dreams coming true were not that far fetched.

But it seems fate had other plans. She didn't make it big with her indie band, but instead years later as a soulful female singer/songwriter. She attributes her current success to her passion for her music.

Bailey Rae played a show late last month in Toronto, her second sold out show of the summer at the Mod Club.

"It was great to play in the same place twice, actually, because the first time we played, people were just sort of sussing it out, and you're kind of trying to win people over. They might know one song, and you play the rest and hope they like them," she smiles.

"There was one girl, like five rows back, who knew all the words and she kind of watched the whole gig with her eyes shut; that was a amazing. The fact that people know the songs is a really big thing, and it just gives you more energy on stage."

It seems that Bailey Rae has come around at just the right time; the pop charts have switched from manufactured pop tartlets (like Britney Spears) to more singer/songwriters (such as Bailey Rae, and fellow Brit, KT Tunstall). Bailey Rae says being in music for as long as she has, she recognizes that popular music seems to be a cyclical machine, and that this time, she just happened to be doing the right kind of music when the wheel turned to singer/songwriters again.

"I kind of missed my first time around on the circle, and this is kind of the second time around. It's a perfect time actually for what I do. It's converging with what's popular at the moment," she says.

Many women have claimed Bailey Rae's first single off her album, "Put Your Records On," as an anthem for themselves, something that shocks her.

"I'm happy that people feel that way about the song," she says. "I think it's something I wish someone had said to me when I was a lot younger. You can spend a lot of years trying to fit in with everybody, that's what the song's about - the more you try and fit in with everyone, the more they change. They'll be on to something else as soon as you've caught up with whatever the in thing is, so it's much easier, it's kind of better, to just be yourself and to enjoy that."

Bailey Rae was nominated for three MOBO awards in the U.K. The nominations were especially flattering because they came from a music magazine she grew up reading.

"It's a really serious music magazine as well, you know the front covers are like a retrospective of Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin or The Beatles. It's not kind of who's the latest indie band … So it was really good to be included amongst all those people, and to be considered a serious musician is kind of a goal of mine," she says.

The nominations, she says, were a great honour, but they put more pressure on her second album, coming both from others and from herself.

"I'm putting a lot of pressure on myself, because I want it to be good and I want the songs to be good, and I want the songs to be better and about a broader range of things. I want the music to be a bit left of what it is now, all these things," she says. "So, I've kind of got my own expectations, but it does put a bit of pressure on the second record. Hopefully, I don't think it's an unbearable pressure."

In the meantime, she is still focused on touring to support the first album.

"I never really would have expected this kind of response to any record that I made. I always thought the album was more of an underground record, which would have suited me fine as well," she says. "So, I'm overjoyed that we get to come all this way and there are people in the audience that know the songs. I'm getting to travel all over, the album's doing really, so I'm really excited about that. That's above and beyond what I would have expected."