Aussie R&B queen Jade MacRae is back with a new album Handle Me With Care
Jade MacRae has performed with many Australian acts including Cold Chisel, Jimmy Barnes and Renee Geyer. Now, the singer has a new music life and project to share with fans.
Music
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Jade MacRae is a queen to members of that formerly secret society of old-school soul and R & B music worshippers in Australia.
Her popularity ripples further into a wider pool of rock, pop and R & B fans by virtue of her star presence and undeniable vocal as a featured singer or backing vocalist with many acts including Cold Chisel, Jimmy Barnes, Renee Geyer and for the past five years, as a member of American blues rocker Joe Bonamassa’s band. Lovers of celebrity singing competitions would recognise her from mid-2000s series It Takes Two which ran for three seasons on Seven.
While a regular presence on our stages, MacRae had early success with her solo singles So Hot Right Now and You Make Me Weak in 2005 from her ARIA award-nominated self-titled debut record.
But the 2008 follow-up album Get Me Home didn’t do the business on the charts and shook the singer and songwriter’s confidence.
She rebranded in 2012 as the electro-soul artist Dune but she abandoned that project after ending her marriage to rapper Phrase (Harley Webster) who had been a big champion of her artistic shift. It was only two years ago MacRae decided to resurrect her recording career with Handle Me With Care, the album she has dreamt of making for 20 years.
“For a number of years I had abandoned the notion of doing a solo project again,” she says. “But it really helped me to get through the painful process of divorce; it wasn’t just the marriage ending but the creative marriage, so trying to find my feet on my own again was the hardest part.”
So MacRae didn’t do it alone. She wrote the songs for Handle Me With Care with her musical parents in mind. Her jazz pianist father Dave and vocalist mother Joy Yates are all over the record and she credits them for partly influencing the album’s classic soul sound.
“We’ve never done a whole record together so part of the crafting of the songs was to keep it in that space where all three of us were relevant,” she says. “I could tell they really had to work at it (to take direction) but they would politely say ‘OK’. My mum takes every liberty when we’re on stage together, singing the lead along with me, and there’s no point in being anything but amused about it.”
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MacRae is also a beloved sister of another extended musical family whose members include Mahalia Barnes, Prinnie Stevens, Darren Percival, Gary Pinto and Dragon’s Mark Williams, with most of them lending their talents to the songs. “I was not in a healthy place a few years ago (after the divorce), I was worn down by it all and I wouldn’t have survived without all of those people,” she says.
The soul queen is living in Oregon, waiting out the COVID-19 storm. She was on tour with Bonamassa when the pandemic struck and decided to stay in America with her now husband Alex, a member of the touring party.
“We decided to stay here together or we would have been separated indefinitely,” MacRae said.
Handle Me With Care is out now.