How satisfying has it been to witness the transformation of Rachel Agatha Keen?<\/p>\n
Five years ago, the singer – better known as Raye – made a bid for freedom, cutting ties with record label who’d forced her to make generic dance tracks she dismissed as “really boring”.<\/p>\n
Liberated from those constraints, her emotionally-charged, instantly catchy debut album My 21st Century Blues showcased an artist of remarkable depth.<\/p>\n
Powered by singles like Escapism and Oscar Winning Tears, it won a record-breaking six Brit Awards, including album of the year, which resulted in Raye “ugly crying on national television”.<\/p>\n
So how do you follow that up?<\/p>\n
Speaking to the BBC last year, she admitted to a momentary crisis of confidence.<\/p>\n
“When you haven’t written for a long time, you start being extremely self-critical. So I was hating everything I was coming out with,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I think the pressure is always going to be there, no matter what. But the luxurious thing now is that the pressure comes from me – because that wasn’t the case in the past.”<\/p>\n
That anecdote tells you a great deal about This Music May Contain Hope, a concept album about overcoming heartbreak and self-doubt and internet trolls and stupid men.<\/p>\n
Rather than surrender to those setbacks, Raye saddles up and sets off in search of happiness. Musically-speaking, she comes out swinging.<\/p>\n
“There’s a there’s a thing I miss in in pop music today, which is that kind of Motown feeling, that classic feeling, that analogue feeling,” she told me last year. “So I was really excited to really, really experiment with that quite vividly.”<\/p>\n
The spirit of old-school jazz, blues, big band and soul inhabits the record, which stretches out over 71 minutes, as Raye flexes her compositional muscles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How satisfying has it been to witness the transformation of Rachel Agatha Keen? Five years ago, the singer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360745,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[146,85,46,409],"class_list":["post-360744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}