Words by David C. Obenour
Charlotte Cornfield’s music exists in small, meaningful moments. Beautifully and unassumingly observing details to fill in the settings that surround them. Bringing an audience to the art similar to how an author does. However, Hurts Like Hell exists on the other side of a very large moment for Cornfield. Her sixth album – and first for Merge, was released after the birth of her daughter. In her own words, it has broadened her experience of the world. The album features her broadest range of collaborators yet and a lyrical approach reaching further beyond the singer songwriter’s own point of view. But the details are still there; drawing you into the whispered phone conversation, feeling the September heat out on a Greenpoint street, and unloading gear from an old beater blue minivan.
Off Shelf: This is the first album since the birth of your daughter and you’ve said how that experience has opened you out further from yourself. Listening back to your older albums, playing those songs live, do they hit you any differently given this change in perspective?
Charlotte Cornfield: I would say that they still hit with the same force for me, even though they came out of a different chapter in my life. If anything I have more empathy and understanding for where the older songs came from. When I play them live I try to re-enter that space emotionally.
OS: It’s a weird and challenging time to be alive in a lot of senses – I have to imagine even more complex being a new parent. How are you navigating that? How do the hopes weigh against the worries?
CC: Sometimes I feel a lot of hopelessness and despair about the state of everything. And as a parent I am now feeling it on a larger scale. But in the face of that, the routine of parenting and family life is something that I find very stabilizing and that gives me a lot of hope. I am in a community with many other like-minded families, and there’s such power in that, being surrounded by people with similar values. I listen to a lot of Raffi these days, and he’s got that song, “The More We Get Together.” The more we get together, the happier we’ll be. I really believe that.
OS: I was fortunate to see you at Nelsonville Music Festival just a few years back – when you were a very young family still. It seemed like there was a lot of processing happening in real time. Can you talk about those early days, where your life was so different but you were doing things that were still very familiar?
CC: That was a truly wild time. I remember being at Nelsonville, nursing my daughter right before going onstage and then right after finishing my set. It’s like I was there to play, but she was the main event. But it was so special to have the opportunity to be there with my family and my band, in a nurturing community of folks. Surreal at times but really beautiful. I will never forget finishing our last set and then packing up while Lucinda Williams was starting her set on the mainstage. My partner and I walked our baby across the field listening to “Drunken Angel.” What an incredible moment. There’s such a tether to those early days as a mother. I couldn’t imagine being apart from my daughter at all. It was all so vulnerable. And now things have really evened out and she is very much her own person who understands what I do and wants to help and be involved. It’s so cool to see.
OS: The press release also talks about being on a group chat for touring musicians who are new mothers, how did you find out about that and can you think of any advice that’s really resonated with you from it?
CC: My friend Sima Cunningham from Chicago invited me into the group chat a couple of years ago. She plays under her own name and also with the band Finom and in Jeff Tweedy’s band. Anyway the chat started off with just a few people and then blossomed out from there. Some of us have toured together, hung together, gotten the kids together. It’s really cool. I have received so much valuable advice from the chat, but I think the biggest takeaway for me is that being a mom (while adding some challenges) is such a creative act, and there are so many ways to do it.
OS: This is one of your most collaborative albums so far too, what encouraged you to bring more folks in this time?
CC: I was coming out of a period of spending a lot of time at home with my newborn daughter, and it really felt like it would be the most joyful and exciting thing to do to be in the studio with a bunch of people, playing these songs together. Phil Weinrobe who produced the record really championed that idea too.
OS: With so many others involved, how do you think the album hits differently than your previous ones? What from that do you think you’ll carry forward for future music?
CC: There is an emotional immediacy to the sound of this record that feels very true to me. You can hear all of the musicians feeling the songs in real time, and I think that really serves the lyric. There’s a line in the song Long Game: “More doing, less trying” and I feel like that was my mission statement for this record. Write the songs, play them with other people, no editing, no self consciousness. I definitely want to take that forward with me as I make more records.
OS: I’ve always found your lyrics to be very evocative – you can really live into the places that you sing about. What about conjuring these moments hits you? Are you ever in moments that you feel you want to try and distill within a song?
CC: The moments that I have always found most fascinating to write about are the ones that I get lost in, and they’re often conversations or interactions. Writing about the details surrounding these moments – the geography, the colour of the walls, the quality of the lighting – really sets the scene and makes it feel real, I find.
OS: Do you have any musicians that do that for you? Through a lyric, just bring you into a scene?
CC: Oh absolutely. I’m thinking about the song “Fruits of My Labor” by Lucinda Williams. The way she describes the fruit trees in the verse about “Tangerines and persimmons, and sugarcane” makes me feel like I am in the garden with her, and then with her in her Mercury driving out west. She’s such a visual writer. A contemporary writer whose songs do that for me is Greg Mendez. The small visual cues he uses in his songs really pull me into those moments with him.
OS: Can you tell me about the album cover? What’s it of, who took it, and what spoke to you about the picture and using it?
CC: The photo is a public domain image of a 1978 AMC wagon taken by Christopher Ziemnowicz. Daniel Murphy who is the art director at Merge sent me a bunch of images that called to him after listening to the record. When I saw this one it hit really hard. First of all Daniel had picked up on the blue vehicle thread in the record, which I hadn’t even noticed. There’s a “faded blue wagon” in the song Living with It, and “an old beater blue minivan” in Lost Leader. But beyond that there are so many interactions and moments that happen in cars, so that’s one of the threads that ties the record together. And what I love most about the photograph is that it makes me want to know what just happened in the car. What was the conversation that took place before the driver and passenger exited the vehicle?