by David Wilikofsky
Like many of us, Charlotte Cornfield spent 2020 in solitude. She spent those months of quarantine working on a new set of songs to follow up her last album, the Polaris longlisted The Shape of Your Name. The resulting music was personal and introspective, emblematic of the time of its conception. As the world began to open up, Cornfield headed to a Montreal studio with friends (including Alexandra Levy of Ada Leda and Suuns’ drummer Liam O’Neill) to bring the songs to life. The resulting album, Highs In The Minuses, is remarkable. It’s an introspective album of personal reminiscences that still manages to feel universal.
Though Cornfield is ostensibly an indie rock artist, her writing feels out of step with current trends; it reminds me more of the straightforward storytelling that you’d find in country music than anything in the contemporary indie rock canon. Her songs are carefully observed vignettes and personal reminiscences, more short story than song. Like any master of that form, Cornfield writes with precision; she adds just enough detail to animate each one. Her summer abroad staying in a “Kensington cave that was her room” is filled with visits to the bodega for gum, Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee and biking to Brighton Beach. A three legged cat she is babysitting yowls and scratches as she carries it home in a box. Her bike precariously dangles from the roof of her car as she takes a much needed trip out of town. Each song sparkles with these types of minute, carefully observed details, bringing them to life.
It’s easy to think of these songs as autobiography because of how lived-in they feel. Cornfield’s vocals have a conversational feel, half sung and half spoken, and the low-key arrangements never divert attention from her lyrics; the entire album unfurls like a warm reunion with an old friend, catching up and reminiscing about old times. Cornfield isn’t telling you these stories, she’s inviting you to inhabit and experience them with her. You feel unbridled optimism of her youth on “Out of the Country” each time the chorus “That was my south Brooklyn summer / Marching to the beat of my own drummer” kicks in. You feel the sense of loss on “21”, where she mournfully sings about missing an ex. You relate to the creeping anxiety described in “Headlines.” You feel everything she feels across these eleven songs.
It’s always hard to say where the line between fact and fiction lies in art. The best artists are able to straddle it, spinning out art that hums with the energy of life. Across Highs in the Minuses, Cornfield proves herself to be one of them; whether or not they happened, these songs are real, and Cornfield has generously allowed them to (re)live them alongside her.