The Herald - The Herald Magazine
I got used to the grey sky. Then I went to LA and realised, ‘Oh, the sky is quite high’
Ambition, Rae Morris has realised, is not a bad thing. “I think there’s a big difference between being ambitious and being overly confident. I used to get that mixed up in my head. I used to get scared of being confident. I always had a massive fear of being arrogant. But then I realised being ambitious is just being focused on achievement and wanting to leave something behind.”
And so Rae Morris is ambitious but not arrogant. She is also 22 years of age, doesn’t get to spend much time in her hometown of Blackpool, and is listening to a lot of Indian music via Spotify playlists.
She is young enough to say Paolo Nutini at the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool was one of the first gigs she ever went to and old enough to have supported Nutini at the iTunes Festival last year.
You may have already heard her vocals on records by Bombay Bicycle Club and Clean Bandit. But later this month she releases her debut album Unguarded, recorded in Los Angeles with Ariel Rechtshaid best known for his work with Vampire Weekend and Haim, on the Atlantic record label. An ambition realised.
It’s her voice that you’ll notice first. You can hear it at its best on tracks like Do You Even Know? and Skin on the album. Warm yet capable of soaring. Perhaps no surprise given it was hearing the likes of Feist, Dusty Springfield and Kate Bush that opened her eyes and ears to what was possible. “I didn’t realise ladies could sing that way. My mind was just blown and I’m still obsessed.”
Morris’s songs match internal emotional landscapes (“A lot of those early songs were written in Blackpool and I was still figuring out how to take myself to places that made me happy”) to state-of-the-art electronic pop. The temptation then is to place her as a northern English version of New Zealand singer and songwriter Lorde. She certainly has the hair for it.
There is certainly the same rejection of pop’s tarnished coinage of brazen sexuality too. “At the beginning a lot of the videos were me sat at the piano and I’ve moved away from that and added movement because the time is right. Everything I’ve done has been a progression.
“I’ve been really lucky to have the time to find out what I was comfortable with. I’ve had three years working towards the album and in that time I’ve been able to go: ‘That’s what I like. That’s what I don’t like.’”
And anyway, she says, she reckons things are better now than they have been maybe not so very long ago.
“People really want to see you being yourself. People want you to look comfortable. There’s nothing worse than watching a video where you can tell the artist is not being him or herself. Now we’re really lucky because there isn’t as much pressure to be somebody you’re not.
“I feel like people want to see you being the interesting individual that you are.”
With the release of Unguarded, Morris can say she has added to the small but select group of Blackpool pop (alongside the work of Karima Francis, Little Boots and Pet Shop Boy Chris Lowe).
There’s something about the low grey skies of the town that she has always found inspiring, she says. “I kind of got used to that grey sky. I thought that was what everywhere was like until I went to LA and realised ‘oh, the sky is actually quite high’.”
Take that image as a metaphor for her future if you’re so inclined. Unguarded is released on January 26. The single Under the Shadows comes out on January 11. Rae Morris plays King Tut’s, Glasgow, on February 3.
TEDDY JAMIESON