Well, this was certainly a unique event. Tonight I paid my first visit to Vibiana, a building in the Little Tokyo section of downtown Los Angeles that originally opened in 1885 as the Cathedral of Saint Vibiana. The only reason I know that little bit of backstory is because of my membership to the Los Angeles Conservancy. They're the ones who helped prevent its demolition by striking a deal with the Catholic Church: The Vibiana could stay while the city gave the Diocese an even bigger chunk of downtown land so they could build a great big huge new cathedral called Our Lady of the Angels. I've been inside that. Cool place. It's a complex really, not just a single structure. I was in the cathedral proper, and it is something else, even if you're agnostic like me.
Vibiana's part of a complex too. One of the buildings there is used as the Little Tokyo branch of the L.A. Public Library. The complex isn't nearly as big as Our Lady of the Angels, but it's got this courtyard with lots of greenage and whatnot. That's where I hung out when I got there. The Vibiana doors weren't open yet, but they had two or three of those mobile cash bars. Nice. And the weather tonight was perfect. Seventy-ish or so. The sun itself was out of sight behind the office towers, but its influence lent the dusk a balmy orange-blue that made nursing a couple Fat Tires that much more relaxing.
Tonight's concert featured the young African British singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae. If you don't follow the new stuff coming out these days, it's very possible you haven't heard of her. She's done all of two albums, the second one, The Sea, having only come out in January of this year. That said, she made quite a splash with her debut self-titled full length four years ago. It got nominated for a whole bunch of awards, both here and in the UK. The song "Put Your Records On" was Grammy nominated for Best Song, the album itself was nominated for best of the year, and Corinne was nominated for Best New Artist. Suffice it to say that The Sea came charged with much anticipation and expectation. That's the thing about sophomore acts, right? If your freshman act was totally awesome, audiences expect the same degree of awesomeness every time.
About the concert itself, it was put on by KCRW 89.9 FM, a public radio station operating out of the basement of Santa Monica Community College. It's basically L.A.'s local NPR flagship, although USC's station, KUSC 91.5, broadcasts NPR news as well. They mostly play classical music, though, which is great, but I still gravitate to KCRW because they play all kinds of stuff. The collective tastes of their DJs, who are beholden to no one since, again, it's a public station, span the spectrum more than any other station I've ever come across. They sponsor concerts quite regularly, but once in a while they'll put one on with more hands-on involvement, in terms of helping pick the venue and having one or more DJs host the event. If you take a look at my blog's archives, you'll see that I wrote about two KCRW concerts in April and July 2008 featuring Sia and Moby, respectively. Both of those took place at the Malibu Performing Arts Center (MPAC) and were formatted such that the performer would do a bunch of songs, then get interviewed by a KCRW DJ, and then do another set, capped off with an encore. KCRW put on one more show that year at MPAC with the same format. I think it was with k.d. lang. I didn't go only because it fell on a Sunday in October. Sundays during football season are generally reserved for just that: Football. Anyway, the k.d. lang concert was the last such KCRW concert at MPAC.
Tonight's concert at Vibiana was the first one since those three where they followed the same format. One of the KCRW DJs, Anne Litt, hostess of Weekend Becomes Eclectic, gave the intro. Corinne came out to much applause and performed four songs. KCRW DJ Jason Bentley, who hosts the weekday morning show Morning Becomes Eclectic, joined Corinne onstage. They sat in pedestal chairs and chatted for about a half-hour. The second set had three songs. As we gave our standing ovation, Jason Bentley yelled through the mic that if we kept it up long enough, Corinne might come out for an encore, which of course she did, but only for one song: Her cover of "Que Sera, Sera."
I learned quite a bit about Corinne from the interview. Jason kicked it off by telling us her history with KCRW, how KCRW was one of the first, if not THE first, American radio station to play her stuff. Corinne confirmed that KCRW was for sure the first and it's pretty much thanks to them that American audiences got to know her. This is a recurring theme with KCRW. They discovered Beck, Coldplay, Jem, and many, many others. Jem's backstory's pretty awesome. Originally from Wales, she was living in London toughing it out as an assistant concert promoter at some radio station. While visiting friends in L.A., she stopped by KCRW's offices and left her one-song demo on the receptionist's desk. Nic Harcourt, who at the time was both the music program manager and host of Morning Becomes Eclectic, and as such got tons of unsolicited demos all the time, listened to it, liked it, and played it on the air. That led to Jem getting signed by ATO (Dave Matthews' label). The demo song became the title track of her first full length, 2004's Finally Woken. Stories like that abound in KCRW's history. Corinne's discovery is another link in that very inspirational chain.
They talked about her childhood. Corinne was born and raised in Leeds. Mom was a white English gal, Dad was a black Caribbean. She grew up surrounded by music in what she calls the "boring Leeds suburbs." Her first instrument of choice was violin, which she played from the age of five to fifteen. At fifteen she started playing in an all-girl rock band called Helen, influenced by bands like ZZ Top and Aerosmith. It was only then that she started taking music seriously because Helen attracted serious attention. They became the first indie band signed by Roadrunner Records, a heavy metal outfit that has since become famous as the home of, among others, Slipknot. She had a youth minister who encouraged her and her friends to branch out, which is when Corinne got an auto harp.
Unfortunately, Helen didn't last. One of Corinne's bandmates got pregnant and never came back. The group dissolved. Corinne went to college, got a degree in English lit, did odd jobs and whatnot, and practiced her songwriting on her own time. She didn't have any contacts in the biz, so there was nothing for it but to send out as many demos as possible. She was persistent as hell, until one of her demos landed in front of the right pair of ears at the right time.
Jason said the last time he saw her was "right down the street" at the Staples Center for the Grammys in February 2007, when she was nominated for all that stuff mentioned above. While she didn't win anything, she did come back to the Grammys in February 2008 thanks to being nominated for an album she did with Herbie Hancock called River: The Joni Letters. Released in the fall of 2007, it's basically an album of Herbie Hancock doing his usual magic on the piano, only this time covering a bunch of Joni Mitchell songs. Each song has a different person on vocals, folks like Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones, and Tina Turner. Herbie invited Corinne to join him on the title track. Sounds like a collaboration made in heaven, right? The Grammy folks thought so too. Only this time, it didn't just collect nominations, it won a couple: Album of the Year and Best Contemporary Jazz Album. Corinne said she remembers how Kanye West was sitting on the edge of his seat when they were about to announce the winner of Album of the Year. He was also nominated in that category and was apparently convinced he'd win. So he was all ready to get up and head for the stage when....upset! River was definitely the dark horse. Kanye wasn't the only one expecting Kanye to win. Lots of people were. Corinne was blown away. The night before the Grammys, she was at a dinner with folks like Herbie as well as Wayne Shaw. According to Corinne, Herbie had a certain gleam in his eye. She wonders if he knew they had a fighting chance. No jazz album had won Album of the Year in quite some time. While Corinne never did get to meet Joni, she did hear through the grapevine that Joni was thrilled with her cover of "River."
But of course that was Herbie's show. Going back to the 2007 Grammys, she's not only not upset at all about losing, she was tickled to death just to be there. She said it was "surreal" to be surrounded by all those famous people she grew up listening to. She got to meet and collaborate with John Legend (she provided the vocals to his "Coming Home") and John Mayer (ditto John M.'s "Gravity"). After the party was over and she went back to Leeds to write more songs, she'd occasionally stop and wonder: "Wow, was I really there with all those awesome people?"
Speaking of more songs, the next thing Jason asked her about was her second album, The Sea. Tonight's gig at Vibiana marks the beginning of her The Sea tour. The band touring with her is the same that recorded the album with her, which doesn't always happen and for which Corinne is quite grateful. This includes Steve Brown, who co-produced most of the album with her. When she finished The Sea, she knew she wanted to tour with people she knew well and felt comfortable with. For most of the studio work, it was mainly her, Steve, and one other guy. They'd never played some of the songs until it was time to record. Corinne described the recording process as separating the songs into layers and then putting them back together again. She wanted Steve and the other guy in the same studio space working off each other with the vocals being central instead of something added at the very end.
She had no idea what the album's title would be until she'd written and recorded everything and listened to it. The title track has quite a poignant backstory. It's inspired by the true story of her mom's sisters witnessing their father's (Corinne's maternal grandfather's) death at sea. They were standing on the shore while the poor guy was out in a boat and drowned. Tough stuff, huh?
Speaking of tough stuff, Jason's next question was about Corinne's late husband Jason Rae, who passed away a couple years ago from a drug overdose. The new album's opening track, "Are You Here," seems to be an invocation of a spirit. Corinne agrees, but it wasn't until after she wrote it that it occurred to her that she'd just written a song about him. Jason took the question further and said the song could be about the connections between all of us in music. Just as Corinne subconsciously wrote a song about her lost love, perhaps this song is about how we all look for those musical connections subconsciously, that we need those connections as therapy to survive in this tough boat called life.
Corinne said she just wanted to sit on her own, write the songs, and see what happened. That she didn't come up with an album title until the end is indicative of how The Sea came together. Half of writing it was listening to it afterward and being surprised to find herself thinking and feeling those things. Song writing is amazing, she said, because you express something and then look at it and become surprised at how you felt. By the time she reached the chorus of "Are You Here," she felt the song had become "intense and heady and overwhelming."
One experience she related was going to a flower shop in Leeds, one of her first outings after spending a great deal of time alone with her songwriting. She saw a woman putting up tuba roses. Corinne put her head in the bucket of flowers and found it "intoxicating and really heady." When she smelled it, she said she wanted that smell in the song. It was a good image of love and how love could be overwhelming and intense. When she wrote the chorus, "Are You Here" became more universal and less personal. The song helped her organize her thoughts, but she hoped the song would be useful to other people. Corinne thinks pop music should ideally address all aspects of life and what people go through. As she put it, there's "more to life than meeting people in nightclubs or whatever." Amen.
Another song Jason asked about was "Closer," the second song Corinne performed tonight. He called this slow jam his new favorite song and described it as "very Earth Wind and Fire-esque." Corinne loves it too and described it as a "quiet and intimate, sexy song." Originally it was even slower and more intimate (that is to say, much longer). Her main man Steve Brown did the orchestration and the string parts and the horns, which she praised as "gorgeous."
Jason also asked about the title track, which Corinne ended up using as the closing piece tonight. She said she wrote it a long time ago. It was one of the first songs she wrote for the album. This led her back to the auto harp mentioned above. She found an auto harp in a junk shop. It was the first time she'd ever laid eyes on one. The way you use it is, you press buttons, and the auto harp will simulate string sounds and mute strings as well. Corinne loved it. She took it home and started writing about the family story she grew up with, her grandfather dying in an accident at sea. It was only recently that she found out her three aunts were at the beach when it happened, on the shore watching their father drown. Based on her own experience losing her husband, she knows how a traumatic event can shape you and influence you and crush you. But at the same time, she says, she's a hopeful person and believes you don't have to stay crushed. So "The Sea" is about to what extent you can change the way you feel about events and about things that have happened to you. Nice.
And that about does it. It was a pretty cool event, and the venue was awesome. Here's hoping KCRW doesn't let another two years go by before doing another one of these.
Tracks
Are You Here
Closer
Like a Star
Love on Its Way
[Interview]
Put Your Records On (Corinne dedicated this song to twelve-year-old Sophia in the audience, who drew her a picture and gave it to Corinne before the show. This is the one from the first album nominated for Song of the Year)
Little Wing (Jimi Hendrix cover, Corinne introduced it as one of her favorite Hendrix songs)
The Sea
Que Sera, Sera (Doris Day cover, she introduced it facetiously as "this song by Doris Day that Sly and the Family Stone did an amazing cover of," then she said the title almost under her breath.)
Vibiana's part of a complex too. One of the buildings there is used as the Little Tokyo branch of the L.A. Public Library. The complex isn't nearly as big as Our Lady of the Angels, but it's got this courtyard with lots of greenage and whatnot. That's where I hung out when I got there. The Vibiana doors weren't open yet, but they had two or three of those mobile cash bars. Nice. And the weather tonight was perfect. Seventy-ish or so. The sun itself was out of sight behind the office towers, but its influence lent the dusk a balmy orange-blue that made nursing a couple Fat Tires that much more relaxing.
Tonight's concert featured the young African British singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae. If you don't follow the new stuff coming out these days, it's very possible you haven't heard of her. She's done all of two albums, the second one, The Sea, having only come out in January of this year. That said, she made quite a splash with her debut self-titled full length four years ago. It got nominated for a whole bunch of awards, both here and in the UK. The song "Put Your Records On" was Grammy nominated for Best Song, the album itself was nominated for best of the year, and Corinne was nominated for Best New Artist. Suffice it to say that The Sea came charged with much anticipation and expectation. That's the thing about sophomore acts, right? If your freshman act was totally awesome, audiences expect the same degree of awesomeness every time.
About the concert itself, it was put on by KCRW 89.9 FM, a public radio station operating out of the basement of Santa Monica Community College. It's basically L.A.'s local NPR flagship, although USC's station, KUSC 91.5, broadcasts NPR news as well. They mostly play classical music, though, which is great, but I still gravitate to KCRW because they play all kinds of stuff. The collective tastes of their DJs, who are beholden to no one since, again, it's a public station, span the spectrum more than any other station I've ever come across. They sponsor concerts quite regularly, but once in a while they'll put one on with more hands-on involvement, in terms of helping pick the venue and having one or more DJs host the event. If you take a look at my blog's archives, you'll see that I wrote about two KCRW concerts in April and July 2008 featuring Sia and Moby, respectively. Both of those took place at the Malibu Performing Arts Center (MPAC) and were formatted such that the performer would do a bunch of songs, then get interviewed by a KCRW DJ, and then do another set, capped off with an encore. KCRW put on one more show that year at MPAC with the same format. I think it was with k.d. lang. I didn't go only because it fell on a Sunday in October. Sundays during football season are generally reserved for just that: Football. Anyway, the k.d. lang concert was the last such KCRW concert at MPAC.
Tonight's concert at Vibiana was the first one since those three where they followed the same format. One of the KCRW DJs, Anne Litt, hostess of Weekend Becomes Eclectic, gave the intro. Corinne came out to much applause and performed four songs. KCRW DJ Jason Bentley, who hosts the weekday morning show Morning Becomes Eclectic, joined Corinne onstage. They sat in pedestal chairs and chatted for about a half-hour. The second set had three songs. As we gave our standing ovation, Jason Bentley yelled through the mic that if we kept it up long enough, Corinne might come out for an encore, which of course she did, but only for one song: Her cover of "Que Sera, Sera."
I learned quite a bit about Corinne from the interview. Jason kicked it off by telling us her history with KCRW, how KCRW was one of the first, if not THE first, American radio station to play her stuff. Corinne confirmed that KCRW was for sure the first and it's pretty much thanks to them that American audiences got to know her. This is a recurring theme with KCRW. They discovered Beck, Coldplay, Jem, and many, many others. Jem's backstory's pretty awesome. Originally from Wales, she was living in London toughing it out as an assistant concert promoter at some radio station. While visiting friends in L.A., she stopped by KCRW's offices and left her one-song demo on the receptionist's desk. Nic Harcourt, who at the time was both the music program manager and host of Morning Becomes Eclectic, and as such got tons of unsolicited demos all the time, listened to it, liked it, and played it on the air. That led to Jem getting signed by ATO (Dave Matthews' label). The demo song became the title track of her first full length, 2004's Finally Woken. Stories like that abound in KCRW's history. Corinne's discovery is another link in that very inspirational chain.
They talked about her childhood. Corinne was born and raised in Leeds. Mom was a white English gal, Dad was a black Caribbean. She grew up surrounded by music in what she calls the "boring Leeds suburbs." Her first instrument of choice was violin, which she played from the age of five to fifteen. At fifteen she started playing in an all-girl rock band called Helen, influenced by bands like ZZ Top and Aerosmith. It was only then that she started taking music seriously because Helen attracted serious attention. They became the first indie band signed by Roadrunner Records, a heavy metal outfit that has since become famous as the home of, among others, Slipknot. She had a youth minister who encouraged her and her friends to branch out, which is when Corinne got an auto harp.
Unfortunately, Helen didn't last. One of Corinne's bandmates got pregnant and never came back. The group dissolved. Corinne went to college, got a degree in English lit, did odd jobs and whatnot, and practiced her songwriting on her own time. She didn't have any contacts in the biz, so there was nothing for it but to send out as many demos as possible. She was persistent as hell, until one of her demos landed in front of the right pair of ears at the right time.
Jason said the last time he saw her was "right down the street" at the Staples Center for the Grammys in February 2007, when she was nominated for all that stuff mentioned above. While she didn't win anything, she did come back to the Grammys in February 2008 thanks to being nominated for an album she did with Herbie Hancock called River: The Joni Letters. Released in the fall of 2007, it's basically an album of Herbie Hancock doing his usual magic on the piano, only this time covering a bunch of Joni Mitchell songs. Each song has a different person on vocals, folks like Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones, and Tina Turner. Herbie invited Corinne to join him on the title track. Sounds like a collaboration made in heaven, right? The Grammy folks thought so too. Only this time, it didn't just collect nominations, it won a couple: Album of the Year and Best Contemporary Jazz Album. Corinne said she remembers how Kanye West was sitting on the edge of his seat when they were about to announce the winner of Album of the Year. He was also nominated in that category and was apparently convinced he'd win. So he was all ready to get up and head for the stage when....upset! River was definitely the dark horse. Kanye wasn't the only one expecting Kanye to win. Lots of people were. Corinne was blown away. The night before the Grammys, she was at a dinner with folks like Herbie as well as Wayne Shaw. According to Corinne, Herbie had a certain gleam in his eye. She wonders if he knew they had a fighting chance. No jazz album had won Album of the Year in quite some time. While Corinne never did get to meet Joni, she did hear through the grapevine that Joni was thrilled with her cover of "River."
But of course that was Herbie's show. Going back to the 2007 Grammys, she's not only not upset at all about losing, she was tickled to death just to be there. She said it was "surreal" to be surrounded by all those famous people she grew up listening to. She got to meet and collaborate with John Legend (she provided the vocals to his "Coming Home") and John Mayer (ditto John M.'s "Gravity"). After the party was over and she went back to Leeds to write more songs, she'd occasionally stop and wonder: "Wow, was I really there with all those awesome people?"
Speaking of more songs, the next thing Jason asked her about was her second album, The Sea. Tonight's gig at Vibiana marks the beginning of her The Sea tour. The band touring with her is the same that recorded the album with her, which doesn't always happen and for which Corinne is quite grateful. This includes Steve Brown, who co-produced most of the album with her. When she finished The Sea, she knew she wanted to tour with people she knew well and felt comfortable with. For most of the studio work, it was mainly her, Steve, and one other guy. They'd never played some of the songs until it was time to record. Corinne described the recording process as separating the songs into layers and then putting them back together again. She wanted Steve and the other guy in the same studio space working off each other with the vocals being central instead of something added at the very end.
She had no idea what the album's title would be until she'd written and recorded everything and listened to it. The title track has quite a poignant backstory. It's inspired by the true story of her mom's sisters witnessing their father's (Corinne's maternal grandfather's) death at sea. They were standing on the shore while the poor guy was out in a boat and drowned. Tough stuff, huh?
Speaking of tough stuff, Jason's next question was about Corinne's late husband Jason Rae, who passed away a couple years ago from a drug overdose. The new album's opening track, "Are You Here," seems to be an invocation of a spirit. Corinne agrees, but it wasn't until after she wrote it that it occurred to her that she'd just written a song about him. Jason took the question further and said the song could be about the connections between all of us in music. Just as Corinne subconsciously wrote a song about her lost love, perhaps this song is about how we all look for those musical connections subconsciously, that we need those connections as therapy to survive in this tough boat called life.
Corinne said she just wanted to sit on her own, write the songs, and see what happened. That she didn't come up with an album title until the end is indicative of how The Sea came together. Half of writing it was listening to it afterward and being surprised to find herself thinking and feeling those things. Song writing is amazing, she said, because you express something and then look at it and become surprised at how you felt. By the time she reached the chorus of "Are You Here," she felt the song had become "intense and heady and overwhelming."
One experience she related was going to a flower shop in Leeds, one of her first outings after spending a great deal of time alone with her songwriting. She saw a woman putting up tuba roses. Corinne put her head in the bucket of flowers and found it "intoxicating and really heady." When she smelled it, she said she wanted that smell in the song. It was a good image of love and how love could be overwhelming and intense. When she wrote the chorus, "Are You Here" became more universal and less personal. The song helped her organize her thoughts, but she hoped the song would be useful to other people. Corinne thinks pop music should ideally address all aspects of life and what people go through. As she put it, there's "more to life than meeting people in nightclubs or whatever." Amen.
Another song Jason asked about was "Closer," the second song Corinne performed tonight. He called this slow jam his new favorite song and described it as "very Earth Wind and Fire-esque." Corinne loves it too and described it as a "quiet and intimate, sexy song." Originally it was even slower and more intimate (that is to say, much longer). Her main man Steve Brown did the orchestration and the string parts and the horns, which she praised as "gorgeous."
Jason also asked about the title track, which Corinne ended up using as the closing piece tonight. She said she wrote it a long time ago. It was one of the first songs she wrote for the album. This led her back to the auto harp mentioned above. She found an auto harp in a junk shop. It was the first time she'd ever laid eyes on one. The way you use it is, you press buttons, and the auto harp will simulate string sounds and mute strings as well. Corinne loved it. She took it home and started writing about the family story she grew up with, her grandfather dying in an accident at sea. It was only recently that she found out her three aunts were at the beach when it happened, on the shore watching their father drown. Based on her own experience losing her husband, she knows how a traumatic event can shape you and influence you and crush you. But at the same time, she says, she's a hopeful person and believes you don't have to stay crushed. So "The Sea" is about to what extent you can change the way you feel about events and about things that have happened to you. Nice.
And that about does it. It was a pretty cool event, and the venue was awesome. Here's hoping KCRW doesn't let another two years go by before doing another one of these.
Tracks
Are You Here
Closer
Like a Star
Love on Its Way
[Interview]
Put Your Records On (Corinne dedicated this song to twelve-year-old Sophia in the audience, who drew her a picture and gave it to Corinne before the show. This is the one from the first album nominated for Song of the Year)
Little Wing (Jimi Hendrix cover, Corinne introduced it as one of her favorite Hendrix songs)
The Sea
Que Sera, Sera (Doris Day cover, she introduced it facetiously as "this song by Doris Day that Sly and the Family Stone did an amazing cover of," then she said the title almost under her breath.)
