Photo by OJ Slaughter
Every Friday, we’re here to remind you of the Boston artists we love and think you oughta know.
If everyone manifested at the success rate of Miranda Rae, we’d all be well on our way to achieving our dreams. The R&B singer-songwriter got her start at open mics at the House of Blues in Florida and quickly connected with the producers behind DNA|AO to create her 2016 debut EP, Defying Love. During the short time she’s been back in Boston, she released her sophomore EP Excuse My Baggage, was featured on $ean Wire’s Internal Dialect, sang backup vocals for Oompa’s Cleo release show and Najee Janey’s set at the Boston Music Awards, and performed her own set at Oberon. She says, “At the 2018 Boston Music Awards, I didn’t know any of the nominees. I didn’t know anyone. Then in 2019, I knew people in the audience, I knew people on the stage, and I was on the stage. This all just happened from summer 2019 until now.” It wasn’t long after she thought, “I’d like to perform at The Sinclair” and “I hope I can do a show at Oberon,” before those dreams became reality.
Singing has always been in Miranda Rae’s blood. She says there are home videos of her growing up in Cambridge, Roxbury, and Dorchester singing songs from the radio on key (but with adorably mumbled lyrics). Family lore claims she sang “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” as a toddler. Now that she’s writing songs of her own, she’s come to understand how to write a song structure, which in turn, makes it easier for her to perform. She’s also learned how recording and performing are two different beasts. “My respect to recording artists because I thought you just walk into the booth and that’s it,” she laughs. “I thought, ‘I’m a good singer. I don’t need all this stuff,’ but it’s totally different…You’re doing a performance through your voice on the track, and it has to have the same emotions because [the audience] can’t see you.”
The emotional concept behind Excuse My Baggage is about the ways you carry your past with you. Although she might bring her baggage into the next relationship, she’s done being a person who just accepts anything, and she wants to be better. When she asked her mother about her own baggage, her mother left her a 4-minute voicemail poem that Miranda Rae featured on the track “Baggage,” saying, “You may, like me, recognize the new person as not the old, and does not deserve to hold the past crimes. But if we don’t acknowledge and release the past abuse and neglect, the new person will be on the vibration we have not personally resolved and will most likely be in first place to the old dance.”
Photo by OJ Slaughter