RAYE Opens Up To Apple Music On New Album, Performing With Her Sisters, Amy Winehouse & Independence

Zane Lowe has sat down with seven-time BRIT Award-winning singer-songwriter RAYE following the release of her long-awaited album ‘THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE’ released last Friday 27th March.

In a deeply personal and wide-ranging conversation, RAYE opens up about the years-long journey behind the project, the emotional and physical toll of creating it, and the freedom she found in going independent.

RAYE tells Apple Music about the exhaustive, years-long journey behind ‘THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE’

It took so long to make… It’s a lifetime’s worth of work that’s gone into this album. It’s taken every blood cell. I’m honestly exhausted, both mentally and physically. Not in a bad way, just in the way of if I’ve not been on a stage, I’ve been pouring into this body of work in some way, shape, or form. I also took on the task of wanting to executive producer, write all of it lyrically and melodically from the top-line perspective and work with a plethora of just incredible musicians and big bands and string sections and orchestras and there’s just been a labour of absolute passion and love.

RAYE tells Apple Music about the subconscious rebellion she took with this album, having spent years writing songs for others

I think probably subconsciously, there’s a kind of rebellion in there of the former model of which I existed for so many years of, you know, everything being so simple and so minimal and, having done a serious amount of time, if I do say so myself, honing the songwriting craft from a songwriter’s perspective. You know, turning up as a songwriter in a studio with another artist and I’m just there to help craft what… what the song is we need to craft. And… it being like to brief, it needs to be this long, it needs to be this BPM, it needs to be this and that, you know, and that was a lot of my life. A miserable existence for me. So I think there’s a subconscious rebellion that has occurred in this body of work of being told also for so many years you don’t know who you are, you need to pick a sound. Yeah, because you keep telling me to go in with people I don’t know and write top lines in a day. So how do you expect me to possibly define myself for you unless I have the space to do that?

RAYE on identity, genre, and rejecting limitations

I’m not just one thing. I’ve grown up with many different cultures… my identity is not one thing. So how can you ask me to choose one thing? I think in this record I’ve embraced maximalism… exploring any genre I felt I wanted to. What even are genres nowadays?

RAYE tells Apple Music about the necessity of cutting ties with the label system and the freedom it gave her

Well, you know what, it was the best-case scenario that could have happened in that moment. But in that moment, I think there’s a certain kind of like, you know, resilience you have to have to choose to be an artist or a songwriter or anything in the arts.

You’ve got to hustle, knock on the doors, sleep on the couch, you know. And um, but after doing that for ten or no, seven years in that specific label system that I was in, it for me it was a breaking point of I’ll just be a songwriter for the rest of my life, like I can’t do this.

The great risk was that, you know, you have me in a contract, I’m bound in a contract, you know. And I’m just so fortunate that I think it was a mixture of different things, you know. I gained a lot of attention in the UK, people started contacting me for interviews. And it was a very beautiful moment for me, for the first time I felt like I had some sort of power over my future. And I was able to kind of pretty explicitly say, you know, you know, I’m going to really go on… I’m going to take every interview and I’m going to tell every gory detail. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Total leverage. How does it feel now I’ve got some? I f****** love it. It was a great feeling. And I’m very lucky they let me go as well and it was clean and…

RAYE on independence, reclaiming her artistry and the healing that had to take place

Iit was a really good feeling. That was a great time. I think the second we became independent and, you know, I was aware that we were in this fresh slate, clean slate kind of place. But also therapy had to occur. You know what I mean? Like a lot of healing had to occur, it’s not… it wasn’t a simple, you know, it wasn’t a simple time. When we came out the other side it was a lot of soul searching and then it was kind of like trying to put together a body of work in this fragmented, very fragmented way. A lot of songs from a lot of years past and new thoughts from therapy and new realisations and things like that. Yeah. But also old songs that I’ve had just been in my Dropbox that I was just like… I really love this song and I want to put my name on it and put it out. Like ‘Oscar Winning Tears’ is an eight-year-old song. Like it was and I was like please, I love this.

RAYE tells Apple Music about building the album from scratch as an independent artist

It was literally me, my dad, and we found a distribution company, the one, literally the only place that would take and… and it would take my album as it was and like support me on this journey. Every label I tried to see like would you be down to because I’m like how are we going to do this, you know, I… I don’t know what being independent is. I wasn’t even considering that at first.