CORINNE Bailey Rae doesn't seem like the kind of person who shouts at the telly. The soft-voiced songwriter, who has produced musical honey with songs such as Girls Put Your Records On and Like A Star, projects a thoughtful image, not that of a ranting Goggleboxer. However, the Leeds-born musician explains she does exactly that.

“My mum is really political,” she says, smiling. “When we were young she would takes us on marches to boycott South Africa and apartheid. We marched against Thatcher and the Poll Tax. My mum was always very aware. I remember doing a science project on Why Is Africa Poor and she would tell me about how cash crops being forced to grow, which were used to create dependency.

“What this meant was every time we watched TV, whether it was the news or adverts, my mum would provide a commentary – ‘Oh, look, that’s ridiculous, just look at what they’re wearing’. She would comment on how pointless an ad for floor cleaner was. She didn’t know what she was doing was critiquing, deconstructing the film she was watching, but that’s exactly what she did.

“I didn’t realise this at the time. I just thought this was how everyone watched TV. It was only later when I lived in student halls and watched TV with student friends and I’d be talking all the way through Hollyoaks and taking it apart that it was pointed out.”

Bailey Rae laughs. “I didn’t know you were supposed to watch TV and not make a noise,” she says.

Corinne Bailey Rae is far from the stereotypical pop star of today, those handed songs by record company executives, full of meaningless words layered on to predictable tunes. Bailey Rae, whose new album The Heart Speaks In Whispers is on release, is different in that her lyrics are thought out and thoughtful, suggesting a huge appreciation for the basics in life.

But then the 37-year-old grew with an awareness little could be taken for granted. Her parents, her father Caribbean and her mother from Yorkshire, split when she was young.

“My mum was a teaching assistant on a fairly low wage, my dad self-employed. We never went abroad. We didn’t have a phone, or a car. We didn’t get new clothes, except at Christmas. In terms of world poverty we didn’t struggle but I guess we did suffer in a British sense. And when the Poll Tax came in that was a really big thing.

“I remember one time my mum saying, ‘I’m just going out for a bit. If anyone comes and tries to get in and take our furniture don’t answer the door.’ It was a big thing to have someone demand £100 from you.”

Bailey Rae’s first album sold a million copies. But she can’t forget her roots. “We didn’t have a car, so we’d go to Roundhay Park [in Leeds] for holidays because it was free,” she recalls.

Did she experience any problems linked to growing up mixed race? “Yes, I definitely felt different, but lucky in that I didn’t experience racism too badly. People would call you names but I felt that didn’t go too far into my identity. And there are mixed race kids on both sides of my family, my mum’s and dad’s. My sisters and my best friend being mixed race really helped. And I lived near Chapeltown, which has a big Caribbean population.”

Bailey Rae adds: “I read loads, by the likes of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison and essays exploring black identity. I came to realise that blackness had been defined in opposition to whiteness but then you learn that blackness and whiteness are actually very close, and geographically the Africans and Europeans originated a few miles apart, just south of Portugal.

“I felt there were a lot of black writers asking why I should be limited in terms of how you identify yourself. When I was a kid I was described as half-caste, then brown, then black. But now I like to say my dad’s from the Caribbean, my mum’s English. I feel I’m of the white, working-class Yorkshire tradition, but equally I’m Afro-Caribbean, and these two identities constantly shaped me.”

Bailey Rae smiles as a thought occurs. “Football is amazing to me," she say. "I’m not so keen on the sport itself, but what I love about it is the ethnicity seems not to be mentioned. Players are now described by their nationality and I love how teams are so integrated.”

Politics, it seems, seeped into the young Corinne’s soul at around the same time as music. “I studied violin from the age of six. I’d do music lessons at school, then orchestra after school, I’d be in the orchestra on Saturday morning and I’d play music at church on Sunday.

“Every day was a music day. And I really wanted to do music professionally from the age of 15. I’ve always taken it seriously.” She adds, laughing at her own intensity: “I would get upset if the guitarist in our band took a holiday. And when we got to sixth form and hadn’t been signed I felt disappointed and old that our indie band hadn’t made it by then. We really wanted to be on Top of the Pops.”

Did she never feel like forgetting music for a while and going off to chase boys? “Well, doing music and chasing boys ran hand in hand,” she grins. “The music scene in Leeds was a very male scene. Because my parents were divorced and I lived with my two sisters, I loved a male presence in my life. I loved the male sense of humour, being teased, all of it because it was so new to me.”

She adds: “And I was in a band which included my two best friends and my boyfriend. It was as if we were taking on the world.”

Bailey Rae however wanted more from life than music and male attention. She wanted to learn and studied for a degree in English literature at Leeds University.

“I was really interested in the storytelling nature of literature, the idea of learning more about history and politics, about how history is re-told. I loved learning new words, of new authors. I was really academic at school, and now I wanted to learn more. I was drawn to a life of contemplation in a library, surrounded by learning.”

University wasn’t nirvana, however. The demographic left Bailey Rae a little gobsmacked. “I’d never been around so many middle-class people,” she recalls. “I had never met rich children and then you meet these kids who have such a different perspective. I thought, ‘How can you think these thoughts?’”

Bailey Rae’s academic drive didn’t curtail her musical dream. One day she’d be humping a Vox speaker cabinet around, the next day it would be a stack of novels. She had chosen to study in her home town because it was an opportunity to keep her band together. “That’s right. And while studying I landed work in a jazz club. That was really formative for me as well.” And life-changing. She met her husband at the club, Scots saxophonist Jason Rae; they married in 2001, when she was 22.

“We’d do gigs at the weekends, and we played on Monday afternoons doing a little set, doing other people’s songs and that was nice as well.”

Bailey Rae loved the duality of her life, the learning and the performing, gradually developing her own sound and voice. It wasn’t a huge surprise when fame arrived in 2005 with her hit single, Like A Star. She was 26 years old and appeared to have the world at her feet but in 2008, her 32-year-old husband Jason died of an accidental overdose of methadone and alcohol.

Two years later, she released her second album, The Sea, “a dense, jazzy contemplation of loss and grief” that earned her a Mercury Prize nomination.

Isn’t every great songwriter usually inspired by losing love – or finding love?

“Yes, that’s often the case because and emotional connection with someone is so rare and so powerful. It’s a bit like the film Gravity, we’re all on a planet spinning through infinite space and the idea of being able to reach out and catch hold of someone, when you find that the sense of connection is."

Bailey Rae found that connection again with producer Steve Brown. The pair had been friends for years, but fell in love and married in 2013.

In recent times, her musical influence has continued to expand, and she has performed recently in the US, China and South Korea. Tomorrow, she's in Glasgow, playing Oran Mor in the west end.

“I've played there before and I love coming back to Scotland," she says. "I love coming back to Glasgow, I love the architecture, the culture.”

Does returning to Scotland produce a bittersweet experience, a reminder of her late husband, who grew up in Aberdeen?

“Yes, but I’ll always feel this connection to Scotland. I’ve been back many times, especially to Aberdeen where my family lives. And Scotland will always been really special to me. I feel partly Scottish. I learned so much history from Jason, I heard so many stories, and I learned of a real independence of spirit.”

Bailey Rae adds: “I’ve followed the independence debate since. I really like Nicola Sturgeon, I love how she speaks and her power and I was impressed by the independence referendum. Scotland is so familiar to me.”

Her voice is sincere when she says she’s so happy she can relay her emotions into great new songs such as Stop Where You Are ("Stop where you are/Under fading stars/This is the world we’ve made/There is no better place ...")

“Songwriting keeps me in touch with myself," she says. "It makes me think. And when the feeling of something comes through you have to pay attention to it, or it may go next door to someone else.”

Bailey Rae continues to live in Leeds, and has her own recording studio, despite stints in the States. She also keeps close to the political window and talks of Brexit and the calamitous impact. “How can you not care about politics? Our family was so political we imagined the sky was going to be a different colour the day Labour got in [in 1997]. But of course it wasn’t even slightly different. And I’m also interested in politics of the workplace, feminist politics, the idea of the personal being the political. That’s what I love to do in songs, to reveal my particular world and community.”

What does her album title – The Heart Speaks In Whispers – mean? “It means there is so much chaos and noise around. There’s a worry our inner voice won’t be heard. It’s about listening to our dreams and subsconscious and not being bombarded by anything that threatens our identities.”

The conversation and her reflections evoke thoughts of a recent interview given by The Who, when Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend bemoaned the fact no-one writes good songs these days except rap artists. Pop songs, said the rockers, have nothing to say any more.

Clearly they weren’t thinking of Bailey Rae, the telly-shouter. But the songwriter agrees with their overview. “Music is more about pace and production. And I agree about hip hop. But I still believe songs can carry a message, and a melody and harmony.”

“And you know," she adds, with a magnanimous smile, "it’s good to get trashed by your heroes. It makes you work harder.”

Corinne Bailey Rae plays Oran Mor, Glasgow tomorrow (October 31) at 7pm. Tickets cost £25 (www.ticketmaster.co.uk). Her album, The Heart Speaks In Whispers, is out now