Daisy and Olivia chatted to Rae Morris before her gig last Saturday, the last in the tour of her second studio album, “Someone Out There”.
“Glad to finally be here!” Rae laughs, weaving her way onto the bench in her bright red tracksuit an hour before her performance. Indeed, it has been a performance months in the making, having been moved from the original date in March to this chilly September day. After a couple of minutes of small talk, she elaborates. “It’s a bit odd to be here, stuck on the end of festival season,” she says, “but it’s going to be really cool performing as a full band again, and luckily my fans have been totally cool about it. It’s going to be good.”
If Jonathan Higgs of Everything, Everything is to believed, we have a lot to look forward to, tweeting ‘Rae Morris can sing any note, even if her head is upside down’
Watching Rae play in the Rescue Rooms, it was easy to see why Higgs chose to draw attention to this particularity of her performance. Only rarely was she confined to the space behind her piano, the demands of her new music drawing her out and across the whole stage to lead the audience in an endlessly energetic journey through love, emotion and rebirth. It seemed miles away from the calm woman sat across from us, warming her hands around her pre-performance cup of tea. “It’s funny listening back to that first record” she muses about her first album, Unguarded, “to me now it just sounds so naïve. I feel so much older now, well, not that much older,” she laughs “but I… oooh there’s a wasp!” Once the offending insect had removed itself and it is once again safe to sit around the table, she continues. “I feel like that maturity comes across in the new album. I learnt a lot touring, and when it came to writing I kind of realised that it doesn’t have to be an emotional outpour – I could tell a story, other people’s stories, and I really loved that”
Tell other people’s stories she did, to beautiful effect. ‘Dancing With Character’ took us swaying to the working men’s club in Blackpool, as she told us, through a man’s memories of his wife, memories he holds in the movements of the jives and swings they danced together for years. ‘Someone Out There’ tells of Rae’s own reaction to receiving a box of gifts from one of her fans. “They were beautifully embroidered scarves; it really touched me that someone would have taken that time for me, a stranger,” she tells the audience. “So, yeah, I wrote this because I think it’s important to remember that even if we don’t know it, there are people out there that care about us a lot more than we would ever have thought”
It is clear Rae treasures the symbiotic relationship between herself and her fans. When asked if she worried at all about losing that closeness as her fanbase grows, “No! Not at all!” was her resounding, animated response. She goes on, “I think if anything it’s been the one consistent thing throughout my career, that I’ve been able to speak to my fans whether it’s after gigs, setting up merch with my mum and dad… I think that relationship is so important. It’s the only way I know of doing this”
And for the fans inspired to make their own music? “I feel like I need to sit down for 10 hours just to have a good chat about this,” she sighs. “It’s a crazy industry; you encounter so much at 17/18/19 that you just wouldn’t anywhere else at that age… I guess with that my main bit of advice would be just take it slow. When you’re an 18 year old from Blackpool, where I’m from, you just need a bit of your own space to figure it out. You don’t need anyone trying to push you into anything”
Featured Image- Unknown photographer, In Review image- JK Photography
Video- Rae Morris official youtube
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