COULD HAVE DONE ANYTHING, OUT MAY 12, 2023 VIA NEXT DOOR RECORDS
WATCH / SHARE “YOU AND ME” HERE
BUY / STREAM “YOU AND ME” HERE
PRE-ORDER COULD HAVE DONE ANYTHING HERE
“Cornfield is a sharp-eyed songwriter, who…is particularly adept at both reinforcing and undercutting the emotional core of her narratives with quotidian detail and slacker silliness.” - Rolling Stone
“Charlotte Cornfield is a songwriter like few others, so able to deftly create in her songs an emotional resonance that when plugged in, hits us all right where we can share in her memories.” - SPIN
“The beautiful thing about Charlotte Cornfield's music is how she is able to make stories so personal to her, feel personal to you.” - Exclaim!
Photo Credit: Brittany Carmichael // DOWNLOAD HIGH-RES
Charlotte Cornfield, “Canada’s best-kept secret” (Rolling Stone), announces Could Have Done Anything, her new album out May 12, 2023 on Next Door Records. In conjunction, she shares a fantastic lead single/video, “You and Me”. Could Have Done Anything, the follow-up to Cornfield’s break-out hit Highs in the Minuses, is a testament to this uncommon life and all its possibilities, an acknowledgment that the best musicians can turn fleeting moments into timeless songs. Every year’s a kind of coming-of-age, and over these nine magnetic tracks, Cornfield begins yet another chapter.
Whereas Cornfield’s preceding albums were made in familiar settings, with troupes of friends, this time she reached into the unknown, contacting producer Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman). She jumped into an old Subaru, driving seven hours south to the Hudson Valley. The car didn’t have any A/C; she had only recently earned her license; and she had never met the producer she was driving down to meet. Cornfield and Kaufman would convene in Upstate New York, first at the stained-glass-tinted Dreamland Recording Studios, then at the nearby Isokon Studio, run by engineer D. James Goodwin (Kevin Morby, Whitney) and assistant engineer Gillian Pelkonen. Four people, one album, six days; Kaufman and Cornfield (who went to school for jazz drums) played every instrument themselves, from ringing guitars to cozy piano, Hammond B3, pedal steel and synthesizers. The resulting sound is at once elaborate and unrehearsed; there’s a sense that it’s coming together—and coming alive—at the very moment it’s being made.
Intimacy and absence go hand-in-hand on Could Have Done Anything: the theme repeats on the unfussy love-song “You and Me”, with its tale of tour and homecoming. ‘You’re sunkissed in your Subaru / Picking me up at Terminal 3,’ she sings—and, later, ‘two bikes on a pavement path / ice cream cones and epitaphs.’ Some love is as simple as this: liberating, easy, like piano and guitar in two-step. “I’ve been trying to write a song like this for a long time,” Cornfield said. “A catchy love-song, with cars. Where it feels like the narrator could go anywhere and do anything.” The accompanying video was beautifully animated by Ben Sloan.
WATCH / SHARE “YOU AND ME” HERE
BUY / STREAM “YOU AND ME” HERE
That was the spirit of this record: connection, possibility, acceptance. “Don’t be afraid to take a left,” Kaufman would say. Even with the small things: layering programmed drums over real ones; wandering around the tracking room with a pair of claves in your hands, adding random, surround-sound echoes, or turning a ballad about broken friendships into a song about seeing Stephin Merritt in 2010. Throughout, Cornfield tried to channel the energy of her favorite classic records, from Tapestry to Blood On The Tracks to Car Wheels On A Gravel Road—albums where the listener is simply carried by the songs and the playing.
After six days of recording, Cornfield went back to Canada, with a new album to mix and master. Another day-long drive; another homecoming; and one more thing, too, which would arise a little over nine months later: the singer’s first baby’s due April 2023. Anything can happen.
PRE-ORDER COULD HAVE DONE ANYTHING HERE
COULD HAVE DONE ANYTHING TRACKLIST
1. Gentle Like the Drugs
2. You and Me
3. In From the Rain
4. The Magnetic Fields
5. Cut and Dry
6. Nowhere
7. I Dream Of
8. Could Have Done Anything
9. Walking with Rachael
CHARLOTTE CORNFIELD TOUR DATES
Thu. July 6 - Sun. July 9 - Winnipeg, MB @ Winnipeg Folk Festival
Thu. Aug. 31 - Sept. 3 - Dorset, UK @ End of the Road Festival
CHARLOTTE CORNFIELD ONLINE
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