Review

Culture

Music

27 October 2023

5 min read

Corinne Bailey Rae’s energised and anguished creative journey

Corinne Bailey Rae’s latest album, Black Rainbows, is an atlas of capacious faith. Jonathan Evens explores her inspirations in Detroit, Leeds and Ethiopia.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A black and white portrait of a young woman's head against a dark textured background.

www.corinnebaileyrae.com.

Black Rainbows is the latest album from multi award-winning singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae. Part of a project which also includes a book Reflections/Refractions at the Arts Bank photographed by Koto Bolofo, live performances, visuals, lectures, exhibitions and more, the album is inspired by the objects and artworks collected by artist, archivist and curator Theaster Gates at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago. Bailey Rae attended The Black Artists Retreat there in 2017 and performed in the space. Last year Bailey Rae performed in Black Chapel, the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion designed by Gates. A shared element of their collaborations, work and inspirations are their Baptist upbringings and experiences.

Black Rainbows represents a significant development in Bailey Rae's music and career. By turns angry and reflective, noisy and still, celebratory and keening, original and grounded, the album broadens her musical palette considerably through a marvellous melange of electronica, jazz and punk meshed with soul and R&B. The album ranges from righteous railing against the casual erasure of Black lives and memories to a vision of a world in which we dig our gardens and live, find work and time to dance, in a new utopia. It also extends Bailey Rae’s exploration of and engagement with black history and culture beyond her own experience, through collaborations with Gates and also the Stony Island Arts Bank, which was her inspiration for the album. Her longing, shared in ‘A Spell, a Prayer’, is to arc an arm through history in order to unpick every thread.

Bailey Rae has spoken of the way in which her visit in 2017 to the Stony Island Arts Bank at the invitation of Gates, its founder, transformed her.

“I knew when I walked through those doors that my life had changed forever.”

Two things changed. One was a deeper engagement with the Stony Island Arts Bank's basic premise that black people matter, black spaces matter and black objects matter. The other was developing the confidence, through the example of Gates as artist, lecturer, potter, choir director, business owner, to, as she has said in an interview for Wilful Publicity, just:

"be myself and follow all of my interests and allow all my fascinations and obsessions to come through in my music in the belief that we are all people, and we all have those connections and questions and interests."

Christian Viveros-Faune has written that Gates developed his practice as "an artist-curator-activist", serving "different kinds of communities as an artistic ‘bridge’," out of engagement with the Church, having been both Director of Chicago’s New Cedar Grove Missionary Baptist Church Choir and "an urbanist in Seattle for a Christian mission that ran a housing programme in poor neighbourhoods.” His artistic projects have included processing a 250-person gospel choir he assembled from local churches through the galleries of the Milwaukee Art Museum while singing hymns Gates had scored as a response to poems written by the slave-era potter Dave Drake. The musical offerings of Gates' house band, the Black Monks of Mississippi, also combine spirituals with Zen chants. The Black Monks of Mississippi performed in Black Chapel, as also did Bailey Rae.

His entrepreneurial projects have included the Dorchester Art and Housing Collaborative which consists of 32 units made for those who receive affordable and low-income housing support with a space for theatre and dance, and a mission is to share culture first with the folk residing in the 32 units. Similarly, the bank at 68th and Stony Island was once a vibrant community savings and loan bank but today, through Gates’ intervention, provides the South Side of Chicago with 17,000 square feet of space for innovation in contemporary art and archival practice.

Surprisingly, the kind of faith-informed arts-and-community-connecting entrepreneurship practised by Gates, is not unknown to Bailey Rae through her own background. As a member of Moortown Baptist Church, she was part of Revive, a fresh expression of Church begun by then Youth Pastor Simon Hall. Bailey Rae has said that Hall encouraged the young people in Revive to write their own songs, provided a first guitar for her, and encouraged her to develop a "capacious faith." Her first recordings were on the Revive albums Beautiful Day and Neither Work nor Leisure. Under Halls' leadership, Revive has become a church for people who like Jesus but aren't too sure about church. He has also developed Left Bank as a community arts venue (of which Bailey Rae is a patron) in a disused Anglican church, whilst also setting up The Wren Bakery, a social enterprise using baking and barista training as tools to help women build self-belief and gain transferable skills for employment, and Queer Church Leeds, a community which celebrates LGBTQ+ people and aims to create a safe and open space for both fellowship and discussion.

Bailey Rae has shared her own exploration of faith in her music through songs such as 'I Would Like to Call It Beauty,' ‘Walk On’ and 'The Skies Will Break' and has done so in relation to both grief and celebration. Steve Stockman writes of one such song:

“Love’s On Its Way is a prayer. It begins “Oh Father”, confesses misunderstanding at the great mysteries, looks at the state of the world and then after more confession asks that her response to this world would not be just the prayer but the action of her life."

Black Rainbows ends with a stunningly beautiful track 'Before the Throne of the Invisible God' inspired by a book in the Stony Island Arts Bank about the rock churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia; ancient churches hewn from rock. In an interview with Forbes magazine, Bailey Rae said:

"On one of the pages of this book, it said, it was a picture of a throne that had been made. So it was carved into the wall, solid stone wall. There was a throne and this is where God was meant to sit when God was in the temple. But I really loved that line, the Throne to the invisible God. I thought, before the throne of the invisible God, what else is there to do but kneel? What is the invisible God? What is the thing, the reason, the way we get here, the how, the why, the infinite, the eternal, the thing that makes us all connected?"

This is where Black Rainbows ends. Through its tracks, Bailey Rae takes us on a journey from the rock hewn churches of Ethiopia, to the journeys of Black Pioneers Westward, from Miss New York Transit 1957, to how the sunset appears from Harriet Jacobs' loophole, in order to explore Black femininity, Spell Work, Inner Space/Outer Space, time collapse and ancestors, the erasure of Black childhood and music as a vessel for transcendence. Yet, 'Before the Throne of the Invisible God' is where her energised and empathetic, wracked and anguished, celebratory and creative journey through Black history and the continuing legacy of racism finds its resolution. In a place not of simple submission, but of living the questions raised by a capacious faith where responses to prayer are both the actions of life and also the explorations found on this album.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Mental Health

25 November 2025

4 min read

Pluribus and the problem with “Good Vibes Only”

When only misery can save the world

Joshua Bloor

Joshua Bloor is a pastor, author, and New Testament scholar.

A passenger oeers out and down the aisle of an empty plane.

Rhea Seehorn stars.

Apple TV.

Imagine waking up to discover that the whole world is suddenly happy and whole. Overnight, an alien virus has swept the globe, and its effects are astonishing: everyone joins a single joyful hive mind. Everyone is connected. Content. At peace. The anxious inner voice that once whispered fear and worry is hushed. Humanity, it seems, has finally found contentment.

Except, there’s one problem.

You’re immune.

While everyone else partakes in this glee, you remain fully yourself. Still anxious, still low, still wrestling with the angst of life. To make matters worse, you’re surrounded by legions of the blissfully enslaved. You’ve never felt more alone.

At first glance, this premise sounds strange, maybe absurd. Yet Pluribus (Latin for “many”), from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, is devastatingly insightful. Carol Sturka, portrayed with raw emotional precision by Rhea Seehorn, is the most miserable person on Earth.

During “the Joining,” everyone else is absorbed into a harmonious hive mind who self-identify as “we.” They remain fully functional, thoughtful, and emotionally engaged human beings. They are hardline pacifists, utterly convinced they are liberating humans from conflict, negative emotions, and ultimately, from themselves. In their eyes, they haven’t lost anything. They’ve simply traded their individual suffering for collective contentment. Finally, humanity has become what it was always meant to be—happy! Except they can’t quite figure out how Carol, and a few others, remain unchanged.

Oddly, Carol’s incapacity for happiness becomes humanity’s final hope. Her depression, the very thing that weighs her down, is now her superpower. Carol’s misery makes her immune, yet the challenge she faces is unique: How can she convince people they need saving when they’ve never been “happier”?

Many of us are taught from childhood to avoid sadness— “Cheer up, you’re fine.” In a world of inspirational quotes and booming wellness industries, sadness feels wrong. Yet valuing only positive feelings sets an impossible standard. People end up feeling like they must avoid sadness at all costs. It’s no wonder many of us feel ashamed or anxious when we have a bad day. Like the Pluribus hive-mind, cheerfulness is mandatory, and anything less is seen as “broken.”

Ironically, studies show that the societal pressure to feel happy (and never sad) is linked to poorer mental health. Neuroscientists have found that when children grow up in families where emotions aren’t named, noticed, or welcomed, it actually shapes how their brains develop. The regions responsible for managing feelings and handling stress don’t grow as strongly as they should.

When parents respond to a child’s emotions—comforting them when they cry, delighting when they’re happy, sitting with them when they’re sad—it has the effect of watering a garden. Those emotional pathways in the brain strengthen, deepen, and flourish.

But when feelings are ignored, dismissed, or shut down, it’s like a garden left unwatered. The soil dries. Growth stalls. The neural pathways that support healthy emotional regulation don’t develop in the way they were meant to.

The long-term impact can be significant. Children who aren’t allowed to express their feelings often grow into adults who struggle with anxiety, depression, or chronic stress. Their nervous systems learn to stay on high alert, and regulating emotions becomes much harder than it should be.

Sadness in fact reminds us of what truly matters and what gives our life meaning. Far from being purely negative, it can ground us, deepen empathy, and make joy feel more genuine. Hiding or suppressing sadness actually intensifies it; what psychologists call “amplification.”

Feeling happy, then, is not life’s goal, human flourishing is; living well and doing well. The ancient Greeks had a word for it, eudaimonia, often mistranslated as “happiness” but better understood as “flourishing” or “living the good life.” This way of living life and flourishing includes struggle and growth.

This is where Pluribus makes a dramatic point. By eradicating personal pain, the hive mind also erases depth of feeling. Humanity gains perpetual comfort, but at the expense of authentic connection. Carol’s misery keeps her tethered to reality — she is the only one who can remind the Joined of what love and meaning truly feel like, because she alone remembers what it’s like to suffer. In ending world suffering, they’ve also ended love, since real love includes the possibility of loss and suffering.

As Dostoevsky suggested, suffering is not just pain, it is wounded love. Hell, as Father Zossima claims in Brothers Karamazov, “is the suffering of being unable to love.” This is true on a divine level. Because if God cannot suffer, then God cannot love, either.

With Pluribus, Carol’s desolation becomes a form of resistance—an insistence that authentic human experience demands the full spectrum of emotion. She’s not fighting for the right to be happy; she’s fighting for the right to be real. And with the series still unfolding, one question lingers: can Carol save the world from its own happiness? Can her sadness persuade others that real life includes both the highs and the lows?

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