In the summer of 2007, Corinne Bailey Rae headlined the Jazz World stage at the Glastonbury festival. It was a fitting finale to a whirlwind 18 months spent promoting her eponymous debut album. Released in February 2006, it became one of the pop soundtracks of the summer, reaching No 1 in Britain, gatecrashing the US charts at No 4, and selling nearly four million worldwide.
"I just ran off the stage and leapt in the air," she says of Glastonbury. "It was like, 'Yes! I've finished!' I'd had offers to do shows in Australia and Brazil, but I just wanted to draw a line on that record with the Glastonbury gig and move on."
Corinne went home to her house in Leeds and began writing songs, just her and her acoustic guitar. One of the first she finished was called The Sea, a powerful elucidation of loss that was based on a family story that had been passed down to her about her grandfather's death in a boating accident. It climaxes with the lines, "The sea, the majestic sea, breaks everything, cleans everything, crushed everything, takes everything from me."
She says now, "I don't know if there was something in the air or what, but the songs seemed different, a bit darker. With The Sea, I was just thinking about loss, about the impact losing your father would have on you as a child, how one event that big could colour your life, bleed into everything else and force you into a certain shape."
Another song she wrote around that time was called I'd Do it All Again. It was written after an argument with her husband, Jason Rae, a gifted jazz musician who often played saxophone in her band. It was a testimony to the strength of her love for him, a song about how nothing, not his restlessness or the occasional rows it precipitated, could ever make her question that love.
"It was written literally just after me and Jason had this massive disagreement, a big argument, a bad one," she says now, faltering. "Almost as he was leaving the room, I just sat down and wrote it. It's just about how I felt about him at that time. Even right in the middle of the worst times, I remember thinking that I would choose this exact life again, that I would do it all again. It was me saying, I'm not wishing myself out of this situation. I'm 100% committed to this person. I don't have any regrets about this relationship even though there are all these difficult times."
I'd Do it All Again begins: "Oh, you're searching for something I know won't make you happy/Oh, you're thirsting for something I know won't make you happy…". It sounds now like a plea, a calling-out to someone to accept the life they have been given. "I just wanted him to be content," she says.
She wrote I'd Do it All Again in January 2008, and "just kept on writing and trying out ideas". Then, on Saturday 22 March, she was in a taxi in Leeds when her phone rang. A voice she did not recognise said that it was the police, that they had been trying to contact her all day, and that they needed to speak to her in person.
"Life changes fast," writes Joan Didion in the opening lines of her extraordinary memoir of loss and grief, The Year of Magical Thinking. "Life changes in an instant." And this how it was for Corinne Bailey Rae when, on the side of a road on the outskirts of Leeds on an otherwise ordinary day, a female police officer told her that Jason had been found dead in a flat in the city.
"The police asked me to meet them at a certain place so the taxi had to do a U-turn and go back the way we came," she says now. "I always think of that moment when I had to turn back. My life was going in one direction, then, in an instant, it was turned around."The coroner's report found that Jason Rae, aged 31, had died of an accidental overdose of methadone and alcohol. He had gone for a Friday night drink with an acquaintance, James Sheasby, in a pub in the Hyde Park area of Leeds and returned to Sheasby's house. Sheasby had left Jason asleep on the sofa when he had gone to bed in the early hours of Saturday and, when he got up late that afternoon, had been unable to wake him. Sheasby, a recovering heroin user, had been prescribed methadone as part of his rehabilitation and three empty bottles of the heroin substitute were found beside Jason Rae's body (police were happy that Sheasby had not given Rae the methadone, and that he had co-operated fully with their investigation). The coroner described Rae as "a naive user", which brought a strange kind of comfort to the young widow who was struggling to make sense of a death that seemed so random, so senseless.
