Raya is London singer Rachel Clark who's been steadily dropping excellent tunes on her Soundcloud for two years but she's hit the jackpot particularly with her latest track Make It Right. Make It Right sounds like it comes from London - it's destined for the clubs, soulful and nods its head to many British dance genres particularly deep house. It's a tune that takes heartbreak straight to the dance floor with a powerful, anthemic vocal accompanied by a throbbing beat. Given the platform it's the type of song that could fire its way up the British charts before making it over the pond here in Aus.
We were so smitten by the tune that we got in touch with Raya to get a brief rundown of the song and pry into some of her influences. Check out the tune below and her answers below.
When did you get into music/what inspired you to get into music?
As I’m sure many people say, I got into music at a very young age! It started with dancing, and not being able to keep me still when ever there was music playing. My parents always had music playing around the house, mainly Beatles, Crowded House, Bryan Adams, and some Cher. My very first musical obsession were The Spice Girls, but luckily that subsided quickly, and I started getting heavily into dance, trance and house music at a strangely young age! I used to make radio shows via a tape recording karaoke machine and play Tiesto and Darude in the background of all my ‘interviews’. Daft Punk was my main musical obsession while growing up, including Faithless, The Prodigy and Basement Jaxx. Along with just loving music and naturally gravitating towards it, I was always heavily into musical theatre, dance and all things creative and so after years at college doing performing arts, dance and music, I ended up moving to London to try my shot at finally being an artist in my own right.
How did this track come about/who did you work with?
I wrote the track a couple of years ago in my kitchen with some basic production knowledge and keyboard skills and left it on my computer! It was only when I was travelling to a function gig that I showed it to Tom Varrall (STILL) who I’ve known for years and has recently become a very exciting up and coming producer in his own right as well as an unbelievable guitar player. He happened to love the sound of the tune straight away and decided to produce it for me! I sent it straight over for him to work on, we added parts and changed structures and melodies around until we were finally happy!
What are your musical influences/Who has inspired your sound?
I'm a huge fan of all the current pop/house tunes out there at the minute from the likes of Disclosure of course, Bondax, Alunageorge, ASTR, Karma Kid etc and they definitely influence my writing quite heavily I think. However, I still feel naturally inspired by all the stuff I loved when I was younger such as Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx plus all the 90’s garage and big female vocal anthems of that time. For the rest of my EP I’m aiming to really stick to my roots but also add some fresh and modern production techniques. Piano house, dance, trance and garage will always be my guilty pleasures. I always write very poppy/R&B melodic vocal lines influenced by this but would like to bring it up to date and even more underground by merging this sound with the likes of people such as Maribou State, Celsius and SBTRKT.
