Few songs have entered the “summer jams” pantheon over the past two decades with as much force as Corinne Bailey Rae’s sunny, breezy “Put Your Records On.”
You can tell because the song just hit 1 billion streams on Spotify.
“When I wrote it, I was young myself, but I was also going back in my history to when I was a kid myself,” the British artist said in an interview. “In my parents’ house, flipping through my dad’s 45s, putting the records on to see what they sounded like.” Rae grew up in Leeds, a city in Northern England with an active music scene.
“Put Your Records On,” and her self-titled debut album, are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year. Rae is marking the occasion with a tour that will include all of the songs from “Corinne Bailey Rae,” as well as other songs from her discography. The tour will stop at the Roxian Theatre in McKees Rocks on Wednesday.
“I haven’t played the whole record in its entirety since since the first album campaign. So I’m just kind of going over the songs with my band and letting them know certain corners that we never get to on that album,” she said.
In addition to highlighting that album, which has sold more than 4 million copies, Bailey Rae is also excited about the children’s book “Put Your Records On” that she recently published, featuring illustrations by Gillian Eilidh O’Mara. She will be stopping at some bookshops around the country as part of this tour.
“It was so much fun. It really was so much like writing songs,” she said of writing the book. “Where I’d just lie in bed at night and get an idea, and then jump out of bed and go scribble it down.”
She said the book is about the power of music. “I love the idea that through these four songs, this young girl could discover her great-aunt’s record collection, and that through those four different songs, we could explore four different emotions.”
Bailey Rae has released three albums since her debut, including 2023’s “Black Rainbows,” an acclaimed record that marked a somewhat different creative direction for the artist.
“I just felt so much freedom making that record,” she said, adding that “it started in a really unintentional way” — by visiting a cultural center in Chicago, the Stony Island Arts Bank.
The center is a “17,000-square-foot home for exhibitions, free artistic programming, residencies, and radical archival stewardship of undercared-for Black cultural objects,” as described on its website.
Bailey Rae spent time exploring the artifacts and archival pieces at the bank, examining images of Black beauty queens and lesser-seen objects from Black American history.
“When I left there, all I could think about was all the things I’d seen, and all the stories there, some of which were incomplete,” she said.
So she set out the research the stories and make them into music. “It just came pouring out and I found I could access the songs through all the different musical styles that I’ve grown up with.”
She wants Pittsburgh fans to know that this may be their last chance to hear all of her debut album. “This is specific to this moment. I want people to know that if there’s a song on there that’s one of your favorites and you want to hear it live, we’re going to be doing the songs and really celebrating and honoring that record at this show.”
Corinne Bailey Rae will perform at the Roxian Theatre in McKees Rocks on Wednesday. Tickets: ticketmaster.com.