by Nick DeRiso
Corinne Bailey Rae isn’t the same singer, maybe isn’t even the same person, that she was at the time of her celebrated 2007 debut. Three Grammy nominations, including one for best new artist, couldn’t shield her from this world’s knifing truths: Her husband, 31-year-old saxophonist Jason Rae, would be dead of an overdose just a year later.
But whereas Bailey Rae’s most recent longplayer, The Sea, was framed as a catharsis in the wake of that shattering moment, The Love EP (to be issued on Jan. 25, in advance of Valentine’s Day) seems more about moving back into a new acceptance of love’s great promise, as well as its great risks. This five-song cycle boasts such an emotional specificity, even while featuring nothing but cover tunes. Bailey Rae doesn’t settle for the easy notion, and that’s saying something considering she includes something as candy-coated and familiar as Paul McCartney’s Wings-era smash “My Love.”
First, to her take on Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” Listening to those curly-cue keyboards and brilliantly phrased, come-hither lyrics, it’s hard to believe more people haven’t tried to remake this synth-driven innuendo-bomb from 1979. They may yet. But few will match Bailey Rae’s lazily intriguing sensuality, something that turns the original’s urgent masculinity on its ear.
Conversely, who knew that anyone could transform schmaltz like “My Love” into something so tender, so Stevie Wonder … so sexy? Bailey Rae repeats the chorus — my love does it good to me — with a smiling contentment that would shame your average workaday afterglow.
Bailey Rae goes on to explore a more turbulent emotion with Belly’s “Low Red Moon,” beginning with this tornadic riff that pushes her into a menace as pleasant as it is new. “I think you are beautiful,” she sings in an intoxicating purr, then: “I think you are strange.” Her conversational take on Bob Marley’s “Is This Love,” more in keeping with her blast-off debut hit “Put Your Records On,” is delicately affectionate — like something shared just before drifting off to sleep in another’s arms.
The Love EP ends with an extended live take — and this doesn’t seem like a great idea — on “Que Sera Sera.” Doris Day? Really? But, again, complex new emotions roil once placid waters. Starting things off like a melancholy gospel elegy, Bailey Rae turns one line — “will I be lonesome, day after day?” — into a complex narrative.
John McCallum then joins her in a bluesy, almost stratospheric update of the chorus. That segues into this crashing soul-jazz release, as the band tears into a tasty, redemptive rhythm. The tune concludes to lengthy applause, and Bailey Rae and Co. eventually return — like someone who can’t let go of a crush — for another go at “Que Sera Sera.”
And they once more, somehow, find fertile new ground: McCallum hits a groove on the line “whatever will be,” finding the perfect closing theme for a recording about adult passions, and adult questions.
This is the sound of a lover who’s seen some things. And Corinne Bailey Rae’s new EP, while so deftly sidestepping this made-for-greeting-card holiday’s expected smootchie cliches, is better for it.
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