Raye Isn’t Letting Stolen Song Books Slow Down the Making of Her Next Album: ‘I Will Relentlessly Pursue Creating Music I Love’
On her 27th birthday, Raye was sitting at home in South London when she realized her car had been stolen. In the trunk were the original songbooks for her highly acclaimed debut album, “My 21st Century Blues.” The thief also left with Raye’s only copy of the initial ideas and notes for three or four songs she had finished writing for her sophomore album.
A few days later, Raye, who was surprisingly relaxed about the incident, had a message for the thief: “Keep the car, but please burn the notebooks.”
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“I had a lot of brilliant poems and titles and phrases and words,” she says now. “I was starting to explore the idea of writing the lyrics to melodies. Melodies are an abundant thing you can always play with, but the lyrics are different — they’re so important.”
On “My 21st Century Blues,” Raye showed the world what pop stardom can look like when an artist gains total ownership of her vision. It came together after Raye spent years co-writing hits for major stars — including Beyoncé, Ellie Goulding, Charli XCX, John Legend and Rita Ora — but her own recording career was stymied by an unsupportive label that was essentially gatekeeping her career, trying to force her into styles of music she didn’t feel.
Then in 2021, she got out of her deal and went independent, working with the Orchard’s Human ReSources to finally release her long-delayed debut, which has garnered her Grammy nominations for both best new artist and songwriter of the year.
The experience has transformed Raye into a leading advocate for songwriters, and her words and actions inspired Variety to honor her with the Hitmakers Triple Threat of the Year award (singer-songwriter-champion). After all of the challenges in her career, she finally got her flowers this year in her home country, winning six of the seven Brit Awards for which she was nominated, breaking a new record for an artist in a single year and matching the career totals of Michael Jackson, David Bowie and Oasis.
On the stage of the Brits, she used one of her acceptance speeches to call out the high-powered people in the room — which was filled with label chiefs and other top executives — to share master-recording income with songwriters. Multiple people involved in the creation of songs receive such percentages, called “points on the master,” including artists, labels and producers — but rarely songwriters.
“Music is one of the biggest and most present saving graces,” Raye says. “You can revive a dead and miserable room with a song, and the people creating those songs — the silent people who no one knows about — need to be protected. There are less gatekeepers in the industry now than ever, and I really believe that everyone involved in the creative process of making a song should receive a reward for that.”
Raye offers more than a few solutions to the issue: “You can grant them net royalty points – whatever you would spend on a music video, on marketing a song, on plugging it to radio; take all of that and give it to everyone involved so they get to eat and profit from their work.”
Though Raye emphasizes the money and manpower it takes to sell a record, “a songwriter’s due shouldn’t be on the table,” she explains. “Royalty points are so important. It’s not just ownership over something you created and contributed to – it’s not money up front, it’s money if.”
Pivoting from the subject of things being taken without proper recompense (including her car), Raye is optimistic about what’s next.
“When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade,” she says. “Losing and winning and trying and failing only to try again, it’s a part of life. And then maybe by a miracle, you get to succeed every now and then. I will relentlessly pursue creating music that I love. And now I get to go away for as long as I want and write a second fucking album.”
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