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.

Article

Character

Culture

Idolatry

Psychology

31 October 2025

6 min read

Jacob Elordi wants more shame, Zadie Smith says it’s useful—what if they’re both wrong?

Shame may be necessary, but only if it can be defeated

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Frankstein stares our from his covered face.

Jacob Elordi plays Frankenstein's monster

Netflix.

I’ve been thinking about the nature of shame a lot recently. Both professionally and personally, it’s a topic that is demanding my attention. It’s following me around, insisting that I look it in the eye, shoving and nudging me – taunting and tempting me to finally snap and wrestle it to the ground. I guess that is the very nature of shame, isn’t it? It’s always so stubbornly there.

I’ve also noticed that it seems to have elbowed its way into cultural conversations; it’s been putting a real PR shift in, seeking rehabilitation in public discourse.

The actor, Jacob Elordi, was recently interviewed by the Wall Street Journal. Kind of interesting, kind of not. The sliver of it that really caught my attention was when the interviewer asked Jacob,

‘What’s one lost art that you wish would come back in style?’

To which Elordi replied,

‘The art of shame. I wish people could experience shame a little heavier’.

Gosh.

It makes sense that this was Jacob’s answer; the interview was conducted to promote Frankenstein, Guillermo Del Toro’s new movie in which Jacob Elordi plays Frankenstein’s monster. So, I get it. He’s been consumed with what components make up a monster, endeavouring to literally turn himself into one. He’s been ruminating on the recipe of evil, and perhaps he’s found one key ingredient – shamelessness. Maybe Jacob, having dwelt on such, has subsequently looked out at the not-so-fictional ‘monsters’ wreaking havoc and has diagnosed the same thing, a distinct lack of shame.

It's a solid thesis.

It reminded me of another recent interview, this one with the acclaimed author, Zadie Smith. She said,

‘Shame gets a bad rap these days. I think it’s quite a useful emotion, corrective on certain kinds of behaviour… I assume people – including myself – are just deeply, deeply flawed. And so, shame is usually quite appropriate on a day-to-day level… shame is a kind of productive thing to create change. I guess I do believe that. I know it’s definitely a Christian emotion, that’s why it’s so out of fashion. But I always thought it quite productive in the gospels, that idea that you assume that you are entirely in sin. I always assume that.’

I half agree with both Jacob and Zadie. In a way, I’d be a fool not to. Not to mention, proof of their thesis.

I cannot deny that I am, as Zadie points out, deeply, deeply flawed. There is a crack in everything I do, a fracture in all my best intentions. And yours, too, I’m afraid (but I have a feeling you know that). There is a brokenness to us, a breaking-things-ness. To each and every one of us, ‘hurt’ is both an adjective and a verb – something we feel and something we do. The things I want to do, I never manage. The things I don’t want to do, I seem to manage every day. I am falling short, missing the mark – I am so fallibly human.

To acknowledge such is not only obvious, nor is it simply ‘useful’, as Zadie suggests. It’s inherently spiritual, it’s paradigmatic.

Last summer, I hosted an event at which Francis Spufford, one of my most cherished wordsmiths, playfully quipped, ‘I’ve heard original sin (the notion that we are, as Zadie notes ‘entirely in sin’) described as one of the few theological propositions which you can actually confirm with the naked eye’. ‘Sin’, Tyler Staton similarly writes, ‘is simultaneously the most controversial idea in Christianity and the one most universally agreed upon’.

There’s something deeply wrong with the world. We all know that.

Which, presumably, is what Jacob Elordi is getting at – he’s observing bad people not feeling bad enough about the bad that they do, or worse still, the bad that they are. A healthy dose of shame is the medicine that this world needs, he suggests.

Oh Jacob, I sympathise with that. The thing is, I have a hunch that the presence of shame makes as many monsters as the absence of it.

And Zadie, I wonder if shame births as much destruction as it does ‘correction’.

While I agree with you both that, in a world as broken as ours, shame needs to exist in some form or another, it also needs an antidote. It’s a dangerous substance; toxic and destructive. Don’t let it fool you, don’t be over-generous to it – shame may (in its most moderate and appropriate forms) be an acknowledgment of the disease, but it is not the medicine. It could only ever be ‘useful’ if it is, ultimately, defeatable.

At least, that’s my – admittedly very Christian – conviction. That’s my take. I can’t pretend that it’s not as theological as it is sociological in its underpinnings.

I’m relatively new to the liturgical aspects of my own faith tradition (that is, the formalised scripts, actions and rituals that have long fuelled religious experience) , so I have the pleasure of not being numb to them. When I read the ancient words of ancient prayers, they shoot right through me, particularly these ones:

‘Almighty God, our heavenly Father, we have sinned against you and against our neighbour in thought and word and deed, through negligence, through weakness, through our own deliberate fault...’

Ouch.

As I read those words, week in and week out, my brain creates a helpful montage for me – whirring through the countless ways in which I have failed – in what I think, what I say, what I do. I’m confronted with the ways that my breaking-things-ness has leaked out of me through my negligence, it’s spilled out of my weakness, the force of it directed at others through my own deliberate fault.

Oh yes, I’m well acquainted with the emotion of shame.

But the only thing productive/appropriate/corrective about falling on my face in shame, is that there is a mercy that can scoop me up. It’s not hopeless, you see? There’s a mend-ability. There’s an antidote to shame; there’s a balm for its burn. There’s a bewildering love that banishes shame from within me – there’s a rescue route from its toxic spiral.

The moment that shame is acknowledged, its presence verbalised, its power felt – is the very moment it needs to be neutralised. It cannot fester, it cannot be afforded the loudest, nor the last, say.

And so, to Jacob Elordi’s interesting wish – that ‘people could experience shame a little heavier’, and to Zadie Smith’s fascinating thesis that ‘shame is a kind of productive thing to create change’- I hear you. I see what you’re getting at. But I can only ever wish people to experience the heaviness of shame if it means that they are more sensitive to the feeling of it being undeservedly lifted off them. That’s where change happens. That’s the medicine.

So, Jacob and Zadie, let’s agree to half-agree on this one, shall we?

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 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

Pledge now