Blackpool’s own Rae Morris has been a brave and brilliantly honest songwriter in the UK’s music scene since her debut album Unguarded came out in 2015. Her new record Rachel@Fairyland hasn’t deviated from her mission to explore and push boundaries, swaying away from the usual blueprint drawn by major labels, it’s a concept record written about the north and serves as her third album out next month on July 8th.
Speaking recently with The Guardian’s Rachel Aroesti, Morris described the new album as a “Rose tinted” view of the north as a friendly “Mary Poppins-esque” universe. It springs from a yearning for the transparency of her childhood origins in the busy and often confounding London life she’s now grown into. Living in Primrose Hill with her partner Benjamin Garret (popularly known by his artist/producer name “Fryars”) in an impossibly cool house they designed together, her new life is at quite an odds with her humble Blackpool beginnings. The sense of longing is most keenly felt on “Running Shoes” where “the blueberries grow, And the internet’s slow“, where “the animals graze on the hillside for days“. It’s a touching serenade to the colloquial Britain she misses and sometimes romanticises about returning to, especially at the thought her newly born daughter might end up with a posh southern accent “I think she’ll sound like she’s from Primrose Hill, and I’ll just have to deal with it“.
Her new album is also inspired by difficulty. Signing to a major label at just 19, Rae has been in the game far longer than her 29 years suggest. Competing with the likes of label buddies Ed Sheeran and Clean Bandit was naturally a tall order and likely a toxic environment to be dropped in so young. 2 albums later, like so many signed to huge and unobtainable standards, she was dropped, with Rachel@Fairyland her first new record since the split. It’s a time she reflects on critically now, evaluating the bizarre and inappropriate ways older male label execs would try and guide her career, she tells Rachel Aroesti “Not in any other area of your life would someone say: ‘You’ve got a really great smile, you should put that out there more. I wonder if you wear a crop top whether that would help?“.
Out the other side of it now, with a brilliant and empowering new album on the way, Rae seems to have channelled this adversity into the best work she’s made so far. You can catch her at any of the UK shows below and grab your tickets here.
