Twenty Years Later, Her Warmest Song Still Carries The Summer
We always look forward to CBS News Sunday Morning. Its mix of arts, music, nature, entertainment, history, science and uniquely human stories remains one of television’s gentlest weekly rituals—and today’s “A Summer Song” feature belongs to the one and only Corinne Bailey Rae.
Twenty years after “Put Your Records On” turned the British singer-songwriter into an international star, Bailey Rae sits down with correspondent Seth Doane to look back at the song, the debut album that changed her life and the loss that divided that life into a before and after.
A SUMMER SONG
Put Your Records On—Again
Celebrate 20 years of Corinne Bailey Rae’s sun-soaked debut, revisit the record in full and explore the music that followed her through love, grief and rebirth.
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We have had the pleasure and privilege of seeing Bailey Rae perform live at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood, where the softness heard on her records became something fuller in the room—warm, intimate and quietly powerful without ever needing to shout for attention.
Her self-titled 2006 debut went to No. 1 in the United Kingdom and reached No. 4 in the United States, carrying “Put Your Records On” and “Like a Star” into the global songbook. The album’s acoustic soul, jazz phrasing and emotional openness helped establish an indie-soul blueprint that still sounds effortless two decades later.
Bailey Rae is now celebrating that anniversary with Like a Star: Celebrating 20 Years of Corinne Bailey Rae, a 23-city tour across the United States and Europe. She will perform the four-times-platinum debut album in full alongside songs from the rest of her career.
The CBS conversation reaches much further back than the polished ease of her breakthrough. Bailey Rae speaks about growing up in Leeds and feeling on the margins, while discovering musical permission in artists who seemed to come from completely different worlds. Billie Holiday gave her one kind of emotional language; Kurt Cobain gave her another.
Before the world knew her for breezy soul-pop, Bailey Rae formed a teenage punk band called Helen. That history makes the adventurous turns of later records—especially 2023’s Black Rainbows—feel less like reinvention and more like the return of an artist whose edges were always there.
The emotional center of the interview is the death of Bailey Rae’s first husband, saxophonist Jason Rae, who died in 2008. The loss arrived only two years after her debut had made her famous and profoundly shaped the music that followed, particularly her 2010 album The Sea.
Doane speaks with her not only about grief, but about what comes after it: finding love again, allowing life to regain its volume and understanding rebirth not as forgetting what happened, but as learning how loss and beauty can continue to exist beside one another.
That is what makes this more than a familiar anniversary profile. “Put Your Records On” still carries the sunshine, but Bailey Rae’s story now holds every season that came after it: fame, rupture, mourning, love, motherhood, artistic freedom and the confidence to become stranger, louder and more fully herself.
This is an INYIM Sunday Kind of Love—a song we have carried for 20 summers, and an artist whose life reminds us that warmth does not mean a life without darkness. Sometimes it means finding your way back into the light.
Watch Corinne Bailey Rae’s “A Summer Song” Profile
Corinne Bailey Rae joins Seth Doane on CBS Sunday Morning to discuss “Put Your Records On,” Billie Holiday, Kurt Cobain, the death of her first husband and the life she rebuilt afterward.
Source: CBS Sunday Morning and Corinne Bailey Rae’s official website.
