Lessons on love from Corinne Bailey Rae's debut twenty years later

Long title, but this week marks the 20th anniversary of Corinne Bailey Rae's debut album, one of my favorite albums ever. So let's talk about it.

Before we jump into today’s post, here are some notes you may have missed:

1. A short interlude: a few recs for the week

2. Love deserves its soundtrack

3. Last, current, next reads with bookwild

4. Reading List: If I ruled the world by Amy DuBois Barnett

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Corinne Bailey Rae for Billboard UK

Hi friends —

If you were to ask me one musical thing I miss, it would be VH1 Soul.

Before Spotify and Apple Music, my music discovery came from the same places: my stepbrother, who was a hip-hop head, my cousin and her coworkers at the hair shop, and my grandparents’ house, on the big screen, watching VH1 Soul.

Through VH1 Soul, I discovered so many of my favorite artists: Van Hunt, Algebra Blessett, India Arie, Musiq Soulchild, and Corinne Bailey Rae.

I can still remember the first time I saw the video for Corinne’s debut single, “Like a Star.” I was sitting on the couch next to my grandparents’ bird, Shasta, while my grandpa sat behind his bar at the back of the room, snacking on nuts. When the video came on, I had so many thoughts: Who is this? What is this song? OMG I love this song.

And just like that, my Corinne Bailey Rae infatuation began.

After watching that video, I went home, did my research, and borrowed my mom’s car to drive to Borders to buy her debut album with my hard-earned Limited Too paycheck (what a time). I memorized every word. I wrote the lyrics in my journal. I used them to paint a picture of what I wanted adulthood to feel like. Love so pure it gave you butterflies. Love so certain it made you sing about it.

Twenty years later, I’ve experienced some of what she was singing about, and the album still stands. With its twentieth anniversary here, I’ve been thinking about why. I think it’s because of the story it tells about love. It shows that love doesn’t have to be heavy. It can be whimsical, vulnerable, optimistic, even when it’s complicated.

So let’s talk about the lessons on love I learned from this album, twenty years later.

Whimsy & Butterflies: Love is allowed to be playful

The first thing this album taught me is that love can be a little ridiculous. Giddy. Uncertain. Charming. Cute.

“Trouble Sleeping” is basically one long melodic negotiation with your own heart. Don’t say that I’m falling in love. We’ve all been there, lying awake, trying not to name something too soon.

“Call Me When You Get This” captures what comes right after — that early stage where you’ve opened your heart just enough and now you’re waiting, pretending you’re not waiting. These lyrics live in my heart permanently:

“I’ve got all this poetry now I didn’t know then I kept inside / Guess I had never seen anything beautiful / Till I first saw you asleep at night / And I have often wondered who / Who could love you the way I do?”

And “Daydreaming,” her rendition of one of my all-time favorite Aretha Franklin songs belongs here too. She doesn’t try to recreate the original. It’s spacious and contemporary, with minimal production that lets her voice stretch and breathe. Every time I hear it, I picture myself driving down the Pacific Coast Highway, windows down, hair in the wind, not a single thought in my head. It might sound a little descriptive, but that’s how it makes me feel. It’s a song that creates room, and sometimes that’s exactly what love needs.

The settled feelings of love

The second lesson is what love looks like after the butterflies settle.

“Like a Star” is where that shift happens. Corinne wrote it about her late husband, Jason Rae, and you can feel the steadiness in every line. It’s not about falling. It’s about having arrived. The song doesn’t announce itself. It simply shows up and stays.

In an interview with Billboard UK, she said it felt more like her true voice, conversational and small, not what you might think of as a traditional pop voice. That intimacy is what makes it endure.

“Seasons Change” and “Till It Happens to You” taught me something just as important: love can shift. People can grow apart without some dramatic catalyst. Change doesn’t erase the time you shared or the feelings that were once real. The lyrics of “Till It Happens to You” still make me tear up when I sing along because the writing is so vivid I can feel every emotion as if it’s happening to me.

The love you make lives longer than you expect

Twenty years is a long time.

Long enough for an album to tell the story of a love that no longer exists in the same form. Corinne has said her debut lives “on the other side of a divide between my two adult lives.” She lost Jason in 2008. Listening now, knowing that, shifts something.

And yet “Put Your Records On” is still playing in elevators. People still whistle it without realizing they are. She wrote that song about confidence. About her ethnicity. About putting on your favorite record and letting it carry you.

She wrote a song about feeling invincible, and it made millions of people feel exactly that. Twenty years later, it still does.

Sometimes I think about that girl on the couch next to Shasta, watching a music video in a family room that felt safe and full. She didn’t know anything yet about grief. Or marriage. Or how relationships can change shape.

But she knew how a song could make her feel.

Twenty years later, that’s still true. And for me, that’s what this album is. A beauitufl record of love, and relationships and an album I will always stan forever.

If this album is your literary soundtrack, these are the books that belong on the same shelf:

• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith — For the whimsy and the butterflies. A young woman falling in love while learning who she is, romantic without tipping into saccharine.

• One Day by David Nicholls — For the slow burn and the longing. Two people orbiting each other for years, all missed timing and unspoken feeling.

• Heart the Lover by Lily King — For when love gets quiet. A love triangle that echoes across decades, and the weight of what we carry from the people we’ve loved most.

• Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje — For what endures. A decades-spanning love story about loss, transcendence, and finding yourself on the other side of heartbreak.

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A few more things for the week:

Today is the four-year anniversary of my grandmother’s passing and her are some of the words I wrote about her in the past — truthfully, I miss my girl. I have now watched Flo’s Tiny Desk five times. It’s the harmonies for me. Tayari Jone’s new book, Kin, is out this week and for Tayari all roads and all novels lead to Atlanta. I have been watching FX’s Love Story, based on the relationship between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette and not only does the love story make me blush, but the clothes and the music make me so happy. Here’s a playlist that captures the music from the show. Good read on switching to Audiobooks. I’m not fully there yet, but I am listening to one audiobook at least a month.