Corinne Bailey Rae shares new single ‘SilverCane’

Ahead of this week’s Mercury Prize announcement (for which her superlative 2023 album ‘Black Rainbows’ is shortlisted), Corinne Bailey Rae has returned to share her first music since the LP’s release, with new single ‘SilverCane’. 

Taking a minimal approach that foregrounds eerie electronics, the track is an extension of the ‘Black Rainbows’ project; as is the case with the album’s other songs, its subject matter was inspired by the objects in and stories told by Chicago’s Stony Island Arts Bank archive of Black history. 

Explaining more about the inspiration behind ‘SilverCane’, Corinne has commented: “Known as ‘Black Wall Street’, Greenwood was a wealthy district of an oil town at the turn of the 20th century, with 600 black businesses, including hotels, a bus company, restaurants, 21 churches, a hospital and post office. Several prominent families owned private planes.

“The destruction of Greenwood came in 1921 with a well-documented enactment of white supremacist violence, the first incidence of domestic firebombing in US history. But this song celebrates Greenwood before that; the families, the freedom, the confidence, the feeling of having created a place away from hatred and fear. There is an ominous feeling in the background as we, the listener, know what is coming.”

Listen to ‘SilverCane’ below.