When Corinne Bailey Rae lost her first husband, Jason Rae, to an accidental overdose in 2008, she was left without a true sense of direction — or inspiration for that matter.
“When you’re in a relationship with someone, it’s so much about tearing down the walls between you two that you sort of confuse what is you and what is them. When you lose them, you question: ‘What is left of me?'” Bailey told People of finding love after loss.
“There was no specific turning point,” she said of recovering from the overwhelming heartbreak. “Imagine silence, and then slowly the volume gets turned back up on life.”
As for how she picked up the pieces, the “Put Your Records On” artist revealed she found solace in the comfort of close friends, including Japanese multimedia artist Yoko Ono. “I’d see interviews of people who’d been widowed. I’d be looking at the picture of, like, Yoko Ono, thinking, ‘Does she look happy?'” Rae said of Ono, who became a widow in 1980, when her husband, John Lennon, was shot to death. “And I’d look and think, ‘She does; she looks happy.’ Just the possibility that I could, in some distant point, be happy meant a big deal to me.”
However, over time, the 37-year-old found love again in friend and producer Steve Brown. “I found myself wanting to spend loads of time with him. You don’t even know what’s happening; you’re just like, ‘I want to hang out with him all the time,'” she said. “If you aren’t comparing the person you meet to the person you lost — and that’s a definite stage — you’re not thinking about what has come before, you’re just thinking about the newness.”
In 2013, the lovebirds tied the knot. Most recently, the dynamic duo co-produced her latest release, “The Heart Speaks in Whispers.”
“I would love for people to take encouragement and hope from the record, I really would,” said Rae. “Because people talk to me about their experiences. And I say: ‘The way it feels now, it’s not always going to feel the same way.’ I feel like no one ever says that. You feel like, ‘I can’t live in this pain.’ But you can and you will. It won’t last forever.”
