On the crest of a wave - Stephanie Rainey is set for global success
Stephanie Rainey received a crash-course in the complicated side of success when her single Please Don’t Go became a huge hit in 2015. Among other things, the Cork songwriter’s emotion-packed ballad was informed by the death, a decade previously, of her one-year old cousin from meningitis. In the public imagination song and tragedy became entwined. She recalls experiencing a twinge of remorse.
“There was an element where maybe I was a teeny bit guilty about the whole thing,” she says. “Suddenly I was on a plane to LA or New York. And what had got me there was this really heavy thing.”
Three years later Rainey (31) is in a more optimistic place. Her latest release, Question Mark, is performing well and she is looking forward to an appearance at this month’s Music Cork industry event.
Music Cork, returning to the city after a successful debut in 2017, brings together leading record business figures, with a line-up that this year includes Isaac Green, a senior A&R executive at Columbia Records (see interview, overleaf) and Nigel Elderton, chair of the UK’s Performing Rights Society.
The aim, say the organisers, is to provide a “unique opportunity in Ireland to listen to the best industry professionals talk about their work and experiences, see the best new talent perform and enjoy plenty of opportunities to network”.
Rainey will be one of the higher profile artists in attendance. Since its release in August 2015 Please Don’t Go has clocked up an astonishing 700,000 YouTube views and millions more on Facebook and many strangers have reached out to tell her how it has helped them with their own grief. She wrote it as therapy for herself – now it has become a figurative shoulder upon which thousands have cried.
“I didn’t know how to process it,” she recalls. “If I told you I was sitting at home jumping for joy, I would be lying. There was an element of worry.” The concern wasn’t solely for her brother and sister-in-law and their still raw pain.
In the accompanying video – the one that caught fire on social media – individuals hold up pictures of loved ones whom they have lost.
It’s heartbreaking and, as the clip went viral, Rainey realised she had to protect her collaborators from a prurient media.
“The phone was ringing… Buzzfeed, Reuters… They wanted a lot of information about the people in the video. I told them that whatever is in the video was what was there for them to have. I felt very worried for the people who were in the video, who ended up being amazing. I felt very guarded. It’s still hard for my brother. In every interview I am inevitably going to be asked about Please Don’t Go. It’s tricky for them – they read about it. Sometimes you say things in interviews and it’s paraphrased another way.”
Please Don’t Go put Rainey on the pop map. The Glanmire songwriter had been earning a living as a guitar teacher (along with occasional stints as a waitress). But with the song going viral and achieving heavy airplay in Ireland, she was approached by Warner Music (home of Ed Sheeran), to whom she is now signed.
Her career is divided in two: before Please Don’t Go and after it.
“I’d been going up to Dublin to perform at singer-songwriter nights – just to do something outside of Cork,” she says. “Driving home at two in the morning, I would ask myself ‘what am I doing?… How long can I keep sustaining this?’ It was really getting to me.”
Thanks to Please Don’t Go , she no longer has to worry if anyone is listening. Rainey had another big with with Sorry , which came out just before Christmas, while latest single Question Mark is doing well too.
“Please Don’t Go was amazing – the crest of a wave. But it’s when that calms down that the work begins. It’s not easy to create those moments.”
In the old, pre-music streaming days, she would probably have been pressured into rushing out an album to capitalise on the track’s impact. In every probability, it would have consisted of a dozen or so variations on the same theme (such is the way of rush-releases) and might have sank without trace.
Happily, the industry has changed and today singles – and a place on a Spotify playlist – arguably count for more than record sales. That’s why she is taking her time over an LP and, for the moment, focusing on individual songs. In this post-album age, the consensus is that steady as she goes is the smartest way to build a long-term fanbase.
“Music has changed a lot,” she says.
I’ve been fortunate enough. I got to build it in a way that I’ve wanted. I’ve been putting out singles, as opposed to an album. I got that kick start with Please Don’t Go . Afterwards, that’s when the real work begins.
The song and its impact is still something she lives with – a life-altering event she continues to process.
“I get messages everyday from people,” she says.
“If you are grieving there is a certain [finite] amount of time that passes during which you can talk to friends about it. [Please Don’t Go] lets people get into a room and have a really good cry but not feel alone. You can connect to the people in the video and maybe empathise with their stories.” Rainey has been obsessed with music for as long as she can remember. Her father was a fan of Dylan and Neil Young. As a child she’d asked him to sing her “one hundred songs” at bedtime. He’d start on one or two and typically nod off himself. One that she remembers is After The Gold Rush, Neil Young’s phantasmagorical paean to Mother Nature.
Later, when her friends were into The Spice Girls and Boyzone, all she wanted to talk about was Cork songwriter Jimmy McCarthy. Her mother was seriously ill at the time (she has since recovered) and as a treat her father arranged for her to meet McCarthy after a concert at Cork Opera House.
“I spent a lot of time in a make believe world when I was on my own, always wanting to be playing music, always wanting to sing,” she recalls.
“I was always writing little poems and songs.” She had, even then, set her heart on a career in music. But she was chronically shy – an issue that would resurface in her twenties.
“I was really self-conscious,” she really.
I could never sing on school on my own… until I went to secondary school… In first or second year, I think, the teacher basically said, ‘you are doing a song’. It was a mass – a Latin song.
The old anxiety returned as she tried to get her career off the ground. She’s honest that, before Please Don’t Go, it wasn’t happening for her.
She played everywhere she could, tried to make contacts, put out an EP. Nothing seemed to stick. Never especially confident, she was soon wracked with self-doubt. Would she be better off packing it in?
“I was putting myself under so much pressure. Whenever I did a radio thing, I felt like I couldn’t swallow. I thought it was really fruitless.”
With Warner at her back, things are different now. She’s gone to LA for songwriting sessions with top industry professionals and embarked on several successful Irish tours.
More than that, she’s at ease with herself and with the idea of success. Were Please Don’t Go to break through today, she would be in a far less anguished place.
“I’ve grown so much – I would feel different about it. I can reflect now in a more relaxed state of mind. We did something great. I would let myself enjoy it a little bit more.”
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