ifitbeyourwill Podcast #180 • Charlotte Cornfield

For Canadians who came of age somewhere along the Montréal–Toronto corridor, Charlotte Cornfield’s music carries a particular resonance. On this episode of ifitbeyourwill, the Toronto songwriter reflects on the cities that shaped her, the Plateau music scene that made a life in music feel possible, and the long road from jazz drums at Concordia to releasing Hurts Like Hell on the legendary Merge Records.
What unfolds is a conversation about creative practice, parenthood, community, and the strange act of looking back at your younger self with equal parts tenderness and humour. Charlotte discusses recording the album live off the floor with a hand-picked band, collaborating with artists she deeply admires, and finding new freedom in songwriting by letting go of the need to always be the narrator of her own stories.
Part music conversation, part Canadian cultural geography, this is a thoughtful look at how places, people, and time shape the songs we carry with us long after they've been written.

Transcript

ifitbeyourwill
Excellent. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of If It Be Your Will podcast.

Fellow Canadian reaching just over to Toronto. I mean, just one province over. I mean, Quebec and I have Charlotte Cornfield coming in from the great metropolis of Toronto. And Charlotte has just put out this great record called Hurts Like Hell. Which was a really cool collaboration. She had a lot of cool collaborators. And how she recorded it, too, we're going to talk about. But this is her first record since becoming a parent. First on Merge. Congrats on that. Merge, what a record label. And it's just such a warm, amazing record that I just want to talk about so much and listen to over and over. But before we start that, Charlotte, I have a foundational question for you. When was it that music happened for you? I know that your parents are very musical and you as well as a small child were, I think it was the French horn that was your first horn thing.

Charlotte Cornfield
Yeah, I played piano. My dad was a symphony musician before he became a music producer at CBC Radio. My mom. grew up with a classical music education too. So I started piano at five and then started French horn at school around grade four or five and then very quickly got into drums and guitar. So for a while I was doing all of those and then ended up moving to Montreal to study jazz drums at Concordia. So I did jazz. But I was just, I can't even, whenever I get this question, I'm like, I can't even remember when it was that I got into music because I've just always been in it. And because my parents always encouraged me, there was no moment of like, I'm going to do this. It was just kind of like what I was into from the beginning.

SPEAKER_00
Right. The boat was going down the river and you're just like,

SPEAKER_01
yo.

SPEAKER_00
What were some of those salient moments when your music started to step forward and be something that you knew that it was going to be a career that you might want to start to forge? Like, were those some salient moments that occurred when your career kind of just was there in front of you saying, here it is, let's get going?

SPEAKER_01
I mean, there are some moments that I can remember, I think, back in high school, putting on my first show with my band, which was all my songs, where I was fronting it and like renting out a venue and selling much tickets and making money off of it. I was like, oh, this is... you know, this is something you can do. This is somewhat viable. And definitely cutting my teeth in the Milan Plateau music scene in Montreal when I was living there for university, just gigging as much as I could. And yeah, and again, just being like, oh, I can make a bit of cash from this. And then it took different forms. It was really when my record, The Shape of Your Name, came out in 2019. At that point, I was already like 30. her 31 and i guess 30 and that was that was the first time i was like okay this is like reaching people's ears this is i i felt i anyway i've had different iterations of feeling like it's a it's a viable career or not but it's oh regardless of that it's always been my path but there have been yeah some moments where it's like clarified for me yeah amazing and i mean i was just looking through your band camp page and i was looking at

SPEAKER_00
me yeah amazing and i mean i was just looking through your band camp page and i was looking at the album Two Horses. And there was a small phrase that popped out at me that I wanted to ask you about where you said it was made in Toronto, made possible by Montreal. What's that dynamic between these two cities? Because they are very close to one another, yet so dynamically different. Can you tell us about that phrase that you put on that first LP that's on Bandcamp of Two Horses? Made in Toronto, made possible by Montreal.

SPEAKER_01
I think about my relationships with those two cities and the relationships between the two cities all the time. My dad grew up in Montreal and is like kind of Anglo -Jewish Montreal. I, growing up, I always thought of it as anytime we visited this really magical place and then living there, I really felt that. And there was a magic, and still is, that exists in Montreal. It's really dense and so culture forward. And it's still a lot more affordable to live there than it is in Toronto. And so leaving Toronto when I left. I was like, Montreal is the city of fun. It's where dreams happen. And I feel so grateful for getting to have my coming of age years, like 17 to 22 in Montreal. And I wrote about it a lot on this record because that time in my life was so formative. But yeah, there comes a time in a Toronto Anglo's life where it's like, if you're going to stick it out of Montreal, it's a... It's a commitment and it's like, are you going to commit to this and learn French and become part of the city at large as opposed to part of just a microcosm community? Or are you going to, you know, end up back down to 401 Toronto with everyone else? And so I think I, yeah, I left. I did go to New York before I came back to Toronto, but I do, I've... So many friends in Montreal, I still think of it as a second home. And Montreal made my life as a musician possible. So when I think about what I wrote then, made possible by Montreal these kinds of dreams and experiences and all that stuff. Montreal had so much to do with it. Amazing.

SPEAKER_00
And Charlotte, has your writing process always been the same? Or has it evolved over time of how you approach writing a song or, you know, having an idea and then, you know, wanting to nurture that idea or shelving that idea? Can you open those doors a little bit into how you go about writing songs, what your process is a little bit?

SPEAKER_01
For sure. Yeah. I think I've always started with free writing. Like I'll just write in a notebook. kind of free write and slowly things will take shape and morph into like a kind of think in verses and write like a bunch of verses and then distill it down into something. And usually the words come first and then the music stuff takes shape afterwards, although there are cases where it happens at the same time. I think a major difference in how I approach songwriting now versus how I used to, I used to wait for the muse to strike, so to speak, and just... wait to feel like I was in a very emotionally vulnerable place and then write. And now I sit down with an intention of writing and just see whatever comes up. And I read Jeff Tweedy's book, How to Write One Song, which is really, he just puts it so beautifully and just making that time to write, even if you don't necessarily go in with an idea, how important it is to just have it as a practice.

SPEAKER_00
Right, right. And does that get more complicated as families grow and things shift in the world? Like, how do you maintain that dedication in saying, I need this certain time or this framing to do what I do?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I'm still figuring it out. I think how I wrote this record is that I had a very focused chunk of time where it was, I think, from September. to December, I made it my job to write. And so that's what I was fully focused on. And I think when I think about approaching the next record, that's what I'll have to do. Be so intentional about that time because it's otherwise like I need to do laundry or I need to vacuum or I need to register for soccer or all of these things.

SPEAKER_00
Right. Totally. Totally. And I mean, does the orientation then of the themes that come up? I mean, obviously those shift over time, but have you found that your voice has changed over time as well? Like how you'll approach, you know, telling a story through songs?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think it has. I think I really felt on writing this record, a letting go of me always being the narrator. Like I kind of took on different narrator roles in this and told stories that weren't necessarily. I mean, some of them were drawn from my life and some of them were things that I made up or absorbed that like really resonated with me. But I think there's like a looseness now to how I approach it. And it's less rigid and more free, which makes it kind of more fun. Yeah,

SPEAKER_00
yeah. And I had read too that you collaborated more with people and even the actual recording of Hurts Like Hell was a different approach you took. Um, where it was more of like a session type of environment. Yeah. Can you, can you expand on that a bit? Like, why did you choose that approach where everything was kind of recorded all at the same time together, as opposed to doing what you had done previously?

SPEAKER_01
Well, I think there's an emotional intimacy that can be in the right hands. And I knew I was in the right hands with Phil Monroe, who I was working with, but it can be captured in that context. And definitely as I started writing the songs and chatting with Phil, this was his idea to do it that way. And it felt very fitting for these tunes specifically. And yeah, and there's a rawness to it that I really appreciate and that I think serves the songs. And I think my last record I had done... A bunch of it live, but there was a lot more like overdubbing. It was just myself and Josh Kaufman, the producer in the studio. So it also felt so good to have a full band in there. And yeah, and just be able to let loose.

SPEAKER_00
Right, right. And like, what does that look like? So you go into studio, you have your musicians there. I guess it takes a while to set everything up, mic and wise. And then is it just hitting record and seeing what happens? Is it not that simplistic?

SPEAKER_01
It's not too far from that. Like, Phil was very adamant about the musicians not hearing the songs until we got into the studio. He had heard the songs because I was sending stuff to him, but he wanted it to feel very fresh. So usually what would happen is I would play the song either at the guitar or the piano, and we would have a little conversation about how we wanted to approach it and then just start playing through it and trying different arrangements until we found something that worked and then do enough takes to... that we got something we liked.

SPEAKER_00
Right, right. And what's the criteria for choosing your musicians that would accompany you?

SPEAKER_01
I think going into it, it was just we knew we wanted kind of people who was playing we really liked and who no matter what we knew would do something cool. So Adam Brisbane, who played guitar and pedal steel, and Sean Mullins, who played drums. Phil's worked with a bunch and so they're very comfortable with his approach of like the live off the floor stuff and that was really great and then Elle Kempner who played guitar and sang and Bridget Carney from Lake Street Dive who played bass are just such amazing musicians with their own like I mean everybody just had their own stylistic stamp on stuff and so just Phil and I were both really excited to just put these people together and see what happened and I'm really happy with. what we got because it just felt really cool and exciting.

SPEAKER_00
exciting. Yeah. And how long was that process? How long did it take to get the whole album down on tape?

SPEAKER_01
Six days, I think, of tracking. And then the only thing that we added after the fact was a couple of guest vocals. So we had Feist, we had Buck Meek, we had Christian Lee Hudson and Maya Friedman sang a guest vocal. parts and that was all that we added after nice and what was the nucleus song like what was the song that was the first like okay here's an idea oh i think i have something i could build a record around what was that first song and why was it so important it was i think it was two songs because they were being written at the same time it was loss leader and long game and i think those two

SPEAKER_00
what was the nucleus song like what was the song that was the first like okay here's an idea oh i think i have something i could build a record around what was that first song and why was it so important it

SPEAKER_01
was i think it was two songs because they were being written at the same time it was loss leader and long game and i think those two just helped me figure out, first of all, I was really excited about them and Phil was really excited about them and they helped kind of like thematically land the record a little bit in this space where it was clear that like coming of age in music was going to be a theme. And there's also, both songs are a little bit like tragicomic and like somewhat funny and there's a tone. to the writing that I felt really good about that tone, and I wanted to sort of roll with that. Right.

SPEAKER_00
And if you could say, here's the thesis of this record, Hurts Like Hell, what are some of the words that you would associate to this record that kind of encapsulate it?

SPEAKER_01
I think it's really written from the perspective of being on the other side of something. From reflecting on lived experiences and like I said, coming of age in music and early love and then like contextualizing it with the present.

SPEAKER_01
and then like contextualizing it with the present. But yeah, like looking at things from the other side.

SPEAKER_00
Right, right. And how are you feeling about the record that, you know, it's out in the ether?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah. How are you finding people, are people getting...

SPEAKER_00
people getting... kind of your intent behind it or you know the direction that like you wanted it to go in or people like I'm getting it like I know that music is so subjective but yeah just from what you've heard and the people that you you know converse with how how are they taking the record and is it hitting the mark of as to what you wanted yeah I think it really is I've been really touched by the reception to it it's been out for a couple of months and I've been getting a lot of

SPEAKER_01
I think it really is I've been really touched by the reception to it it's been out for a couple of months and I've been getting a lot of notes to that effect of the songs really resonating with people, with where they're at or where they were at a particular time. So, yeah, I am really happy with kind of how it's landing. Cool.

SPEAKER_00
And how did Merge get involved? Like, I mean, a lot of listeners, I do a lot of podcasts with artists that are kind of emerging and, you know, finding their feet on the ground. How does somebody go about collaborating with, you know, with a label like Merch? Could you tell us, like, the machinations of how that all came to be? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01
It's kind of like a few ways. They had been familiar with my stuff for a few years. And I was previously on another U .S. record label. And, yeah, someone from their camp had seen me play a show. Somebody knew Phil and it got into Merge's hands and they reached out and I was just very touched because their catalog is, I think, one of the best in music history. Some of my favorite records ever have come out on Merge. So, yeah, I just... And they're very artist forward and have a bit of a punk mentality about things that I appreciate. And everybody there is so great. And so, yeah, I'm really grateful to be working with them for sure. Amazing.

SPEAKER_00
And as we kind of, you know, this album becomes kind of in the rear view, what's forward looking now, Charlotte? Where are you at and what's coming down the pipe?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So I have a bunch of shows coming up, like summer Canadian festivals and then. A lot of tour stuff in the works that will be announced relatively soon. So I'm looking forward to that. And then, yeah, like we were talking about finding that writing space again to enter that creative zone again. I'm looking forward to that.

SPEAKER_00
Right, right. Yeah, and I see you're coming to Pup Montreal. Yeah. In the fall. Yeah. What is that like coming kind of back to Montreal and performing and seeing, you know. your old community and reconnecting and rekindling old friendships and stuff. What's that like for you as an artist?

SPEAKER_01
I love it. I mean, Montreal specifically, I always get so nostalgic when I go and especially playing, like I'm playing at Sotorinia, like so under Sal Rosa, like I've spent so much time at that cluster of venues and especially playing pop, which is, I mean, it's in one of the songs. I wrote it into one of the songs on the record and it's, since I think I played my first Pop Montreal in 2008. So to come back now, can't believe it, but 18 years later and do it again. Yeah, it's pretty cool for sure.

SPEAKER_00
sure. That's amazing. Well, I really appreciate your time today. This has been really fun. These are fast, but we talk a lot about a lot of stuff. We really appreciate your insight into your music. People go check this record out and catch a show if you can. Hurts like hell. It came out a couple months ago, but it's still so resonant in my speakers anyway. And I wish you all the best. I will see you in Montreal. I'm definitely coming to that. Awesome. It's a cool little venue, no windows,

SPEAKER_01
windows, very dark.

SPEAKER_00
And I just wish you all the best with this record. And what's to come next?

SPEAKER_01
Thank you so much, Chris.

SPEAKER_00
Take care. Cool. Thanks for listening.