Corinne Bailey Rae

“I think I just really, really love singing.”

“I find it easy to relax, but I'm always thinking about songs.”

“I don't respond well to time pressure - when you're in the studio, with the clock ticking, and the record company's waiting for you to lay a golden egg. Wherever it is my music comes from, it just doesn't show up when the pressure is on.”

“I recognize that my voice is kind of quirky, and I don't have a lot of range. But I use it kind of in a conversational way, like Billie Holiday, I guess.”

“Being a musician is quite cerebral - there's a lot of sitting around.”

“American music has become really heavily stylised and focused on production. With producers like the Neptunes and Timbaland, it's so much about the backing track rather than the song.”

“Chaos to me is really important in music.”

“With 'The Sea,' I was just thinking about loss, about the impact losing your father would have on you as a child, how one event that big could colour your life, bleed into everything else and force you into a certain shape.”

“You know, I think that nature has such a powerful message about moving from dark to light, and bitterness to sweetness.”

“I never stop working on songs.”

“Punk and jazz are the opposite ends of the same spectrum because they are both looking for freedom and they give musicians the right to take music in their own directions.”

“When I was singing in Helen, the style was to have a really unusual voice. The order of the day was to have emotion and passion and a recognizable style.”

“I loved music from a young age. At school I played the violin but I didn't sing much; there was an expectation of the kids in the choir that they'd have really pure tones, and my voice had all this texture to it. The anodyne soul of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey was in the charts and I couldn't relate to it.”

“All the changes you go through personally really affect the music you make, and my music on the one hand is personal and the other it comes from my lived experience and the interaction with the world around me.”

“I rode my bike to school, I was the head girl, I played the violin, was really nerdy. I was really underweight, so I was really skinny and under-confident. But I had Doc Marten boots! So I was a bit of an outsider. And clever as well.”

“I've written a soulful record but it's informed by my sort of indie guitar past.”

“I hate the way make-up feels.”

“People make assumptions about me based on my music. I've literally had people stop me in the street: 'You are so sweet. I bet you haven't had a bad thought in your whole life!' I'm like, 'Really? I hate to disappoint you!'”

“In my own studio, I can just lock the door and record myself, do layers of vocals not knowing how they are going to turn out, and just scrap it if it doesn't work. It's my space. I'm running everything.”

“My first flight was to Majorca as a 17-year-old and I went to Seattle to visit a friend after that. But the first time I really ventured out abroad to Canada and Japan as well as to Europe, to France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, was to promote my first album.”