“Going into that first record, I was kind of in disbelief it was happening at all, and didn’t know if it would ever come out. For this one, I was dying to put something out… I’m 35 now, and I was in my twenties for the first one,” says London-born, NY-based singer/songwriter Cornelia Murr, who dropped her sophomore LP, Run To The Center, this February, nearly seven years after Lake Tear of the Clouds, her 2018 debut full-length. However, during a recent phone chat, she tells me that the gap between LPs was largely due to things like her former label (Autumn Tone) going und and the pandemic, and she did release an EP, 2022’s Corridor, in the time between. “I think the main difference between the records is just that I’m at a difference place in my life,” says Murr.
While this is Cornelia and I’s first encounter (I’m yet to even see her live.), it turns out that we do have a few mutual phriends (or, really more acquaintances on my end). Folk singer/songwriter Cassandra Jenkins – who I last spoke with in 2022, but who actually lived in the same UArts school housing as myself in the early aughts – apparently goes way back with Murr: “Cassandra’s great! I’ve known her for a long time, I sang backup for her a long time ago.” And Lucius — who we met long ago, when they were playing the stages of The M Room, Johnny Brenda’s, and MilkBoy – brought Cornelia along for some of the earliest, biggest, and best performances of her career: “I was touring with Lucius in 2018 and it was my first tour ever, but they wanted to do a tour of beautiful, old, seated theatres.”
Although Cornelia says that she’s not surprised that I haven’t seen her live before: “I hadn’t played a lot in a few years, prior to these record release shows. And they were back-to-back in New York and LA, and they both sold out. They were in really intimate venues, they were intentionally small rooms, and they sold out pretty quickly, with some people buying tickets as soon as they went on sale.” And while the shows went very well, she admits that playing live is still something that she’s getting used to: “Performance, it’s so essential to this job, but it’s so the opposite set of skills of writing and recording, which I feel like is what I do well.”
Following the album release shows, Cornelia hit the road for a little more than a week’s worth of dates supporting French pop duo Papooz. Curious how the live dates went, she admits that every show proves to be its own entity: “Every night is completely different based on who’s there and what’s going on in their lives.” However, she also tells me that even the least promising nights can turn out to be some of the best: “I just played in Toronto, and it was the last date opening for Papooz, and it seemed like a bad show all around. It was awful sound, and the sound guy was watching a hockey game during our set… it was like a Canadian meme [laughs]. But I was blown away afterward by how many fans were there; I think it was the warmest fans we’ve had so far.” She also tells me that she thinks fans are connecting with the new music in particular: “Something about the record gives them the freedom to just sit in the questions they have.”
The new record, Run To The Center, was born during a period when Cornelia relocated to Red Cloud, Nebraska (population: 948) to restore an abandoned house, which provided her with the time and solitude to reflect on her own life with a profundity that few spaces could. The 10 songs that comprise the LP were produced by singer/songwriter Luke Temple, with whom she finished the arrangements and vocals in that “barely livable house with a makeshift recording rig.” Temple is also a former member of Here We Go Magic and longtime friend of Murr: “I’ve known him a really long time and have been wanting to make a record with him for a long time. He’s a friend, so we have a good rapport, and he works fast and I tend to work slow.… He’s such a prolific writer and artist in his own right.” She notes his expertise with synths, which provided them with an “infinite sea of sounds” for the album.
Murr tells me that about half of the songs from Run To The Center were tracks that she and Temple approached largely from scratch, while about half of them were brought to Temple as fairly developed demos, including “Spiral of Beauty”: “I had a pretty fleshed-out demo of that one, I was much more deliberate. I knew how I wanted the drums to sound and everything… It’s about aging and regeneration and beauty not existing in a linear timeline, but a cyclical one.” I refer to the track being the album’s latest single, considering it had an official visualizer drop earlier this month, but Cornelia admits that the super 8 video clip came about largely by surprise after connecting with director Vanesa Moreno when Murr was in LA for the album release shows.
However, Run To The Center does feature four official music videos that Murr is quite proud of, especially that which accompanies ethereal lead single “How Do You Get By.” The video is a collaboration between Cornelia and director Melanie Drew Chambers — a prop stylist and personal friend of the singer/songwriter — and presents Murr tinkering with a dollhouse that features, among other things, a BDSM-friendly bedroom and something resembling the parlor of Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel after shit gets crazy. It also features a leisure-suited anthropomorphic crocodile whose role is more than a little reminiscent of Lynch’s Lady in the Radiator. “There’s a character in it that we referred to as ‘Croc Daddy,’ which came from making the song with the synth sounds, and there was one that was so weird, and we called it ‘the crocodile synth,’” Murr says, laughing.
Run To The Center was released courtesy of 22TWENTY, a label that I admit to Cornelia I had to look up, and whose only other artist with whom I’m familiar is Oracle Sisters. “They are a smaller label and in their earlier stages, they’re also managers and I haven’t had a manager in years,” Murr says of 22TWENTY, whose origins date back to 2018, but who she tells me she thinks have a particularly poignant grasp on the music industry in 2025: “I think they have a good sense of how things are shifting… I really like working with them because they’re really malleable with how things are changing.” She even goes on to admit, “I think labels might not exist that much longer, at least as they exist now.”
Next week Cornelia Murr kicks off the first headlining tour behind Run To The Center, which will have her at our very own Johnny Brenda’s on Sunday, June 8th, which she says she’s quite amped for: “I’m so excited to play! I’ve always wanted to play Johnny Brenda’s!” When I ask what can be expected of the live show, she tells me, “It’ll be a longer set, a pretty big band, five players and me, like I’ve been doing… We’ll travel through older music, as well as the new stuff, and hopefully create some sort of arc in terms of the sound.” Cornelia also says that there’s a relatively big tour coming in September and October that she can’t yet discuss. But she’s anxious to take some time to return to the drawing board, as well: “I’m really excited, because in July and August I’m devoting some time to writing and recording. It’s been a while since I’ve written and recorded my last album.” However, Murr admits that all of the details are definitely up in the air: “I don’t even really live anywhere, because I’m always renting out my place… Life is interesting when you’re broke [laughs].”
*Get your tickets here.
