Corinne Bailey Rae: 'The days were long... I laughed when I felt like laughing and cried a lot, too'

Lost in music, equally at home in front of a small companionable group in a pub, an arena or mud-caked ocean of festival-goers, performing seems to be where she is most herself. She's been on a global tour since the beginning of the year with her band of five old and a couple of newer musical friends. The winter will bring Brazil and Australia; she's excited.

"It's been a great adventure", she says. "In Korea and Singapore they all knew the words of my songs. At one festival in America a few people came up and said they'd never heard of me but had really enjoyed the set. I like winning over fans, playing on a little stage at a festival in front of a smaller crowd at first, but gradually attracting more people and hearing what they think when they've experienced your music for the first time.

"Travelling gives me loads of energy. We never travelled when I was a kid, and I only went on a plane for the first time at 18, so I still find it special."

A couple of years ago, music and travelling were the last things on Bailey Rae's mind. Early in 2008, the Leeds-born singer/songwriter was still surfing the great wave of acclaim and awards that had borne her along since the release of her smash-hit eponymous first album in 2006. For a while she was everywhere, and so was the happy-go-lucky single Put Your Records On.

In March, 2008, her husband of seven years, the respected jazz saxophonist Jason Rae, was found dead at a friend's flat in the Hyde Park area of Leeds, not far from the couple's home. Beside him were empty methadone bottles – his friend was a recovering addict who had been prescribed the heroin substitute. At the inquest the coroner 's verdict was death by misadventure, an accidental overdose of alcohol and drugs. Rae was 31.

Corinne had just started writing material for her second album, but with Jason's death the world went dark. For a good year it didn't occur to her to write or even think of music, never mind miss it. She says she off-loaded the same thoughts and feelings over and over to friends and family.

She was capable of doing nothing, apart from knitting yards and yards of woolly for no particular purpose. "For ages I just sat. Everything that was important before (his death) was dwarfed by it. The days were so, so long. It takes a great deal of time to accept what has happened, and in the meantime I could think of very little else.

"Then I started to look for things to eat up the time, going for walks, being with friends... I didn't feel I wasn't allowed to laugh, though. I've always believed in being honest about your feelings, so I've laughed when I felt like laughing and cried a lot, too. My friends and family have been so supportive, the best."

Corinne and Jason got married when Corinne was 22, after meeting at the Underground jazz club in Leeds, where Corinne worked as a cloakroom assistant while studying English Literature at Leeds University. She'd been in an indie band since her school days at Allerton High School. Since they got together Jason has featured in many songs, whose thoughtful lyrics describe their mutual fascination, their differences, and the growing pains of learning to love.

She writes and performs in a style that defies categorisation. She can be popsy and perky, soul diva, wacky experimentalist and crooningly, intimately jazzy. She was the head girl in Doc Martens who played the violin and loved both Stax and Nirvana. She

deals in crafty lyrics and raw emotion, as in Are You Here, the song she wrote after Jason's death for the long-awaited second album The Sea.

She and her two sisters stayed with their mother Linda after their parents divorced when Corinne was 12. The two sides of the family remained close and dad was just down the road. At school Corinne felt an outsider. "It was the time of bangin' house music, but I liked Radiohead and Bjork. I wore funny shoes, and I was nerdy and churchy." A youth worker at church with very catholic musical taste loaned her the money for a guitar and she repaid him out of babysitting money.

"I had a double life, really. People saw me as not at all cool at school, whereas when I was out playing in an indie band at the Duchess of York at night I was seen really cool. It's all so subjective, and I soon learned that these perceptions are meaningless." The songs that came tumbling out of her eventually led to a record deal with EMI in 2005.

"That was an amazing time because once it started happening, it all happened so fast." She has resisted any attempts to get her to London, though, and is fiercely proud of where she's from. "It's so much part of my identity, and I can write and record songs anywhere, really."

The music did come back eventually. "I started to find myself thinking of things I'd like to say or sing, and began to pick up my guitar. I realised I wanted to finish what I'd started."

The title track of The Sea was written before Jason's death, but deals in untimely death, the story of her maternal grandfather's loss at sea off the east coast of Yorkshire after falling out of a canoe back in the 1960s. Corinne's aunt, then a teenage girl, witnessed the scene. Imagining that young girl's emotions and sense of powerlessness informs the powerful melancholy of the song.

"It was only after we'd recorded everything and put it together (she's co-producer on the album) that I realised just how many images of water there are on there. I was using the sea as a metaphor: it can be so calm and beautiful, yet so wild and dangerous. It can nurture and overpower, and represents love, loss and hope.

"One thing that was important to me was that there should not be a sort of crack down the middle of the album between songs written before and after Jason's death, with lively and optimistic followed by incredibly sad. After all, I'm still the same person as I was before." The haunting Are You Here has no question mark because, she says, there's something desperate about asking the question.

"It's hard to go there in words, but I know the love I feel (for him) doesn't go away. It was deepening with time and is still as deep now as it was then."

Corinne laughs about how the staff at HMV don't know which category her albums fit into and how, on tour in the US, producers of niche radio shows were confused by her widely ranging style.

She also reports, with almost childlike glee, how while performing at a tribute to Sir Paul McCartney at the White House recently, Michelle Obama confided that Bailey Rae's music was on her iPod.

Corinne Bailey Rae has rejoined us – and we're glad.

Corinne Bailey Rae is performing at the Leeds 02 Academy on Sunday, October 10 Box office 0844 477 2000.