Corinne Bailey Rae shares new song ‘Erasure’ exclusively on seven-inch single
British soul-pop singer Corinne Bailey Rae has released a brand new song, ‘Erasure’, exclusively as the B-side to her seven-inch version of ‘New York Transit Queen’.
Rae had previously released ‘New York Transit Queen’ earlier this year along with the track ‘Peach Velvet Sky’. Both songs are set to appear on Rae’s upcoming fourth studio album Black Rainbows.
“Some of the themes of ‘Erasure’ are concerned with the erasure of black childhood so I wanted it to be unhinged and witchy, allowing broken down collapsed mental health in,” Rae shared about the new song in a statement. “How else do you sing, ‘They put out lit cigarettes/Down your sweet throat/They fed you to the alligators’?
“I saw scores and scores of postcards of children escaping from alligators, and the threat of children being fed to them,” Rae explains. “Some plantations were surrounded by alligator swamps. I saw what looked like a small sculpture of a boy with his mouth open sitting on a potty. He looks like a toddler who’s really struggling, crying because he’s trying to use the toilet.”
“As a mother, I feel such a huge connection to this boy that’s not a real boy, but it stands in for many children who are in discomfort and needing the love of a mother. But then I looked closer and realized that the potty detaches, and it was an ashtray. People put out cigarettes into the throat of a child. I thought ‘What kind of world is this where this piece is made for white amusement?’”
“I also saw a picture in a photography book called Hard Art, about the hard rock scene in DC in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It showed all these rock bands like Bad Brains playing a local housing project in DC,” Rae added. “There was this photograph of a band playing, and some in the audience were kind of folding their arms, not quite sure about this music. But there was this little black girl on the front row, and she’s looking at the lead singer with this expression of pure glee on her face at this rule-breaking noisy music.”
“She’s just enraptured. I thought, ‘I wish I had seen this photograph when I was screaming in my indie band Helen, and I was the only black girl, not just in the band, but in the room,'” she concluded. “I felt a lot of anger when I was there because I was peeling back a kind of truth that I hadn’t known.”
‘Erasure’ is set to be released on streaming platforms with the rest of Black Rainbows on September 15th. Check out ‘New York Transit Queen’ down below.
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