The other day, RAYE was rewatching one of her old interviews. On screen, a much younger version of herself — dyed blonde hair in untamed coils, ambition sparkling in her eyes — spoke about her then-out-of-reach career dreams. “My voice was a little bit squeakier,” the 28-year-old British pop powerhouse says now on a sunny March afternoon in Los Angeles, laughing fondly at her teenage tenacity. She mimics how she used to sound: “I’m like, ‘I just need a shot,’ ” she recalls. “I was so young and hungry.” She’d eventually get that shot — but not for many excruciating years, and not in the way she’d once expected. It didn’t come in 2014, when she first signed with Polydor Records and felt, at the time, that she’d made it. Nor did it come in the years she spent under that contract, when other, more powerful people placed her lifelong goal of making an album on the eternal back burner.…