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.

Article

Attention

Culture

Digital

22 April 2025

5 min read

Let me level-up about playing games on my phone

Like all art, there's no standard for 'good', but good art doesn’t leave you puzzling over how you wasted an hour.

Mark Gilbert

Mark is a research mathematician who writes on ethics, human identity and the nature of intelligence.

Onur Binay on Unsplash.

Earlier this year I got a bit too into a mobile phone game. In the game, I was master and controller of a small virtual grid of assorted shiny objects. By the flick of my finger on the screen, I’d swap the objects to try to match groups together. If I did this in the right way, then the matching objects would merge into shinier ones which would help me win the game. I’d want to know what the next shiny thing would be and how I could use it to beat the next level.

I first started playing on my commute to work – usually I like to read or write and listen to music and sometimes to catch up on emails – but on that day I felt too tired for any of that. The puzzles started easy but got gradually harder. They were challenging enough to occupy the mind, but never felt too taxing, and the satisfaction-hit from each small win along with the visuals and sound-effects made me really want to keep playing. On the train home, it felt easier to just open the app and play a few levels than do anything else. I’d start the journey by telling myself I’d do a few levels and would do something else, but I’d easily spend the best part of the journey rearranging shiny objects.

I knew this wasn’t ideal. I’ve come to see my commutes as a rare unfilled moment, each a scrap of time, a space to read and think, and I was filling this gift with a pixellated dopamine hit. I’d try to stop and bargain with myself – setting a limit of say five levels per journey, but knowing this to be an arbitrary number, I’d blow straight through it. There are other empty moments, waiting for the bath to run or once the children are in bed, but these other scraps are empty only in appearance, and I started to play in these too.

My phone has a ‘sleep mode’ which tries to mitigate the by now well-documented negative effects of phone use on sleeping – lower sleep quality, duration and interference with circadian rhythms. In sleep mode, you choose a time – after this the colours of your phone will be replaced by black and grey. I started using this feature, thinking that at least if I dulled the bright colours to greys then I’d take the enjoyment out of playing and it’d be harder to tell the shiny squares apart. It was a good try, but it didn’t work. I learnt to tell the grey objects apart, and played on.

Mainly, what I'm not doing when I’m glued to my phone is engaging with life.

You’ve heard it before, but our devices are not that good for us – excessive smartphone use fuels depression, anxiety and insomnia, and the average teenager spends seven to eight hours a day in front of a screen. Smartphones are closely related to social media - a recent study found one in six adolescent girls showed signs of social media addiction. Smartphone use has become a well-worn topic with a familiar set of talking points: How lucky we are to have all the world’s knowledge in our pocket; how bad we should all feel about being so distracted; how smug we can feel about the fools stuck to their phones. These discussion points aren't new - many of the concerns about smartphones and screen-time started decades earlier in response to TV and video games.

These concerns are certainly valid, but I find it easier to consider what some of my smartphone habits are stopping me from doing. I'm not sure I'd advocate that we all stop using smartphones - having easy access to the Internet is a huge convenience, but I do pause to think about what I'm not spending time doing when I obsessively scroll or click. I'm also not convinced that all mobile games or even all social media use is bad. Computer games can be entertaining and thought provoking. Like all art, there's no globally agreed standard about what's good, but good art doesn’t leave you puzzling over how you wasted an hour. What differentiates social media and certain phone games is their business model – your time and attention is their revenue stream.

Mainly, what I'm not doing when I’m glued to my phone is engaging with life. If I put the phone down, I could be more attentive to the people I'm with – be able to listen to all the subtle ways we tell each other how we are – in short, I could be more fully present. I could read books, and I could read whole magazine articles or news stories on my phone, actually stopping to read rather than scrolling from headline to headline. Or I could do nothing and just be, undisturbed. If I’m commuting, I could enjoy the scenery or just let my mind wander. And I can remember that even in the quietest moments I'm not alone - God is always alongside us, and we can always spend time and speak to Him in prayer. Even for a few short moments to lift up the joys and troubles of the day.

“Well”, you may say, “That's all very nice hearing about these possibilities I could enjoy if I clawed back time from social media and freemium games. But how do I actually do it!?” Most of the answers I’ve found to this involve either stopping the habit completely – deleting the app or even not having a smartphone, or else they involve enforced periods away. Some have found that a digital detox of several days or weeks has helped to reset their relationship with tech, others set fixed times in their day when they can and can’t use their devices or certain apps, and some observe a “digital sabbath” where they intentionally avoid or reduce technology use for a full day each week.

As for me, my only way out was to delete the shiny object game, losing all record of all 1,500 completed levels. Given that I rejected my own help by outsmarting “night mode”, I doubt moderation would have helped. Unsettlingly, my fingers and part of mind really seemed to miss it. As I unlocked my phone, I’d feel a tinge of absence, as though checking my emails or messages didn’t have the same grip as matching colourful blocks

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Give now