Charlotte Cornfield explores her journey toward motherhood on her latest album.Colin Medley/Supplied
Toronto songwriter Charlotte Cornfield’s new record, Hurts Like Hell, begins with Before, a short, meditative song of affection. By alluding to the time before a universe-shifting relationship only in the negative – “Before I made my way to gate nine, before I took off on time and never left you behind” – she effectively obliterates, if just for a few minutes, the concept of a reality prior to it.
Warm, resonant piano mimics the swell of a heart recognized while sparse drums nod to its beat, and Cornfield ends things with a coda that seems to not only sum up the phenomenon she’s been quietly singing about but also helps pull it into being: “Real love, no fantasy; real love, no fantasy.”
Thirty or so minutes later, Hurts Like Hell will end in this familiar way, with the hushed Bloody and Alive and another never-be-the-same-again moment: holding her daughter and looking into her eyes for the first time.
For Cornfield, whose album The Shape of Your Name was longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize in 2019, that song marks the “turning point for me into parenthood and family life,” she says. “A very dramatic moment that then led to this really lovely day-to-day that I’m now living.”
En route to that moment, Cornfield earned a degree in jazz drumming, booked the Burdock Brewery’s Music Hall for a spell and was called Canada’s “best-kept secret” by Rolling Stone in 2022. Hers has been a life lived in music – since releasing her debut EP in 2008 as a teenager, she’s collaborated with Leif Vollebekk, Amy Millan, Joel Plaskett and members of Broken Social Scene, among many others.
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The “no fantasy” of Before is about as pithy and accurate a way of describing Cornfield’s overall songwriting position as may be possible. Her moving fragmentary realism is often heavy but just as often shot through with plenty of humour, both wry and awkward, and inventive phrasing that borrows as much from hip-hop as country. Even when she’s assuming a narrator’s voice, as happens numerous times on Hurts Like Hell, the specificity of her words and images turn the line between writer and speaker fuzzy.
“I really feel the voice on this record is coming from being on the other side of something,” Cornfield says. “So some of the songs are personal to me, and some of them are stories that resonate with me, that aren’t necessarily my life, but that I loved inhabiting the characters of.”
The “real love” part has been spilling into Cornfield’s life for some time now, and Hurts Like Hell tells all about it in the stormy blast of gratitude on Lucky and the urgent Kitchen, where she finds herself taken aback by an ecosystem of feeling she didn’t know existed: “Who knew that it could come natural – grounded and factual, passionate and actual.” In a lot of Cornfield’s performances on the album, she seems to be working at making these feelings more sculptural, less ephemeral.
From 2019: Musician Charlotte Cornfield writes lullabies for the scorned
The medium is the message, as usual. The actual creation of Hurts Like Hell – which is also Cornfield’s debut for the legendary indie label Merge Records (it’s out on Next Door Records in Canada) – was also an act of “real love.” Inspired by producer Philip Weinrobe’s habit of reaching out “in a totally nonhierarchical way” to people whose work he loves, Cornfield asked for a lot of help, musically. The artists answered – Leslie Feist, the Dirty Projectors’ Maia Friedman, Big Thief’s Buck Meek and Christian Lee Hutson all lend their voices to the project.
“But then also, in order to pull this all off, I needed help with child care, and my family has been hugely supportive,” Cornfield says. “It’s a real ‘takes-a-village’ situation now, and I’m just really aware of how. I feel very lifted by community, and I feel like community is an essential force in my life.”
Just before that sea change instant in childbirth’s aftermath described in Bloody and Alive, Cornfield takes a sweeping look back with the loose Long Game. She recounts playing gigs on a nylon-string guitar at 19 and at POP Montreal, touring via train and bus, and the late nights of a youth turning into a full life in music, describing the experience of writing the song as: “Now I’ve been everywhere,” she sings. “I’m Hank Snow.” She describes writing the song as going on a journey and not knowing where it was going to end.
For those who’ve been listening since Cornfield’s early days, perhaps it would’ve been more clear. A record like Hurts Like Hell, backed by its impressive support system, seemed inevitable. A dip into formative memories often makes it clear what one wants to bring into the future. Cornfield resolves to hold on to a few things in the final lines of Long Game: “More doing, less trying/ More truth, less lying/ More breathing, less sighing/ More living, less dying.”
“It’s looking back and saying, ‘I’m accepting this for what it was and for everything it gave me,’” Cornfield says. “‘And I’m looking forward with a different perspective.’”