The Prophecy of a Whispering Heart: A
Review of Corinne Bailey Rae’s The Heart Speaks in Whispers
By I. Augustus Durham |
@imeanswhatisays | with thanks to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Monday, May 30, 2016.
On the evening of April 5, 2016, BET
Networks aired the most recent iteration of Black Girls Rock! With its many
celebrants — inclusive of Gladys Knight, Shonda Rhimes, and the #BlackLivesMatter
co-creators Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi — there was a moment
that, unbeknownst to the average viewer, signalled both an ostensible homage to
and a foreshadowing of an untimely death.
With the death of Maurice White on February 3, 2016, the Black
Girls Rock taping united Marsha Ambrosius, Imani Uzuri, and
Corinne Bailey Rae to perform the Earth, Wind & Fire's standard “I’ll
Write a Song for You”. No one could have known that within 16 days of the
broadcast, Prince would die on April 21, and roughly three weeks later on May
13, Corinne Bailey Rae would release her third studio album The Heart
Speaks in Whispers.
Living in the wake of Prince, really in a
post-Prince world, Rae’s album becomes an accounting of Prince, her friend,
living on in perpetuity, and the prophecy of a whispering heart.
What makes the album cool, in what I consider a this-is-for-the-cool-in-you manner,
is its nod to inter-generationality, and that it is an album made for the
matured mind - the adult-at-heart but who is not self-conscious of that fact. With
feature, production, and writing credits given to the likes of KING,
Valerie Simpson (“Do You Ever Think of Me?”), Esperanza Spalding (“Green
Aphrodisiac”), and Moses Sumney (“Caramel”), what the listener recognizes is
that the album, just based on the aforementioned listing, has a sound that
is difficult to capture precisely because the musicians on the album are, for
lack of a more limiting term, free. And this freedom weaves itself
throughout the project.
The Valerie Simpson co-written track sounds as if
it interpolates on
Curtis Mayfield’s “The Makings of You”; the KING tracks solidify their
confirmation as protégés of Prince in that he has imparted upon them the effect
of affect, auricularly speaking, such that when you listen to the album, you
can pick out with ear-point accuracy which songs they have touched; Spalding’s
background singing points to
the sonic d+evolution of Emily, and
perhaps Cora, formerly known as Corinne; and Sumney’s track is mellifluous,
even though it does not reference honey.
At the same time, the album is a departure from a
rather prototypical music industry frame. This is to say, artists often wait
for the second or third album to “experiment”. While Rae’s body of work thus
far has offered solid projects to the general music catalogue, this album feels
and sounds like a return to her self-titled LP but more seasoned.
Maybe it is the case that The Sea, her second
album, was the experiment, as she somehow found a way to produce art after
wading through personal loss. Emerging from the water as a fully dressed woman, no
different than Beloved, Rae stunningly resounds in the liner notes of The Sea,
“God is a mystery and a healer.” That album is indeed a mystery, but listeners
should hear with gratitude this third album instalment from Rae precisely
because a whispering heart likely symbolizes the healing that has occurred and
continues—thanks be to God . . .
The adultness of the album is in its ability to
heal insofar as Rae is not working in excess of her vocal abilities, nor does
her approach to the records—vocally, emotively—take for granted the abilities
of others she has invited to the project. The album is really a gesture to
other hearts to begin the work of the utterance, even as whispered, after
experiencing the mysterious.
This, in turn, brings me back to the moment of that
April evening on Black Girls Rock! Who would have known that a
mystery would have emerged again for Rae in the friend she would soon lose a
week and two days after the cable broadcast? The coincidence of her performance
of that song, on that night, for that event, post-Maurice White, seems like a
portent of how God may in fact be music.
The mystery of that song’s presentation that night
startles me even now because Rae’s album seems like it could in fact be a set
of songs “for” him. Then again, if the mystery catalyzes the healing, and Rae’s
heart is indeed the one speaking in whispers, then perhaps what the album
signifies is not only a set of written songs “for” him, and you, but also that
Corinne, à la Steph Curry, is back.
***
I. Augustus Durham is a fourth-year
doctoral candidate in English at Duke University. His work focuses on
blackness, melancholy and genius.