Afire in the Cornfield

A small beautiful 2023 album, and a quasi-peek behind the Polaris Prize process curtain.

In the Crritic! spirit of whatnot and miscellany: As a member of the Polaris Music Prize jury, part of the job is to nominate albums for consideration. So this weekend I wrote a post to the jury message board recommending Charlotte Cornfield’s Could Have Done Anything. While brief, it’s the most I’ve written about an album that was on my best-of list last year. So I thought I’d share it (lightly edited) with you all.

Charlotte Cornfield, photo via her Instagram.

Charlotte Cornfield’s The Shape of Your Name was long-listed for the Polaris in 2019, and her High in the Minuses got quite a bit of attention (but not from Polaris) in 2021. But this record came out May 12 last year, early enough in the eligibility period that perhaps it’s slipped folks’ minds. Which feels like a gift to me, to get to be the person recommending it.  Or recommending it again, rather, as it was the only Canadian album in my Slate best of 2023 list. 

Cornfield has been active as a singer-songwriter for a fair while, mostly between Montreal and Toronto. Her songs take characteristic dekes and tangents away from straightforward folkiness, with a gift for both individualism and intimacy. She’s in her mid-30s now, a mid-career point when artists are neither the shiny new thing nor treasured veterans, and easily get overlooked.

This is her first album made away from her local musical circles, in upstate NY with producer Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman). Almost all the music is played by just the two of them. It’s deceptively slight looking, nine songs totaling just short of 30 minutes. But she makes each of those minutes count, which I appreciate in an era of albums that often feel padded for streaming and many songs that are like hooks with no real development.

You can hear that care right away in the first track, “Gentle Like the Drugs,” a travelogue over a mellow soul pulse, passing via landscape imagery into a highly particular emotional state, as is Cornfield’s specialty and this album’s singular purpose. 

“… when I get home,
For the first time I really don’t feel alone,
Or anything sad, or anything profound.
I just feel gentle like the drugs I do when you’re not around.”

That helps set up an album seemingly threaded through with a long-term romantic story line, one always fragile, spoken of with delicacy. From the isolated snapshots we get, it gradually adds up to a tale of heartbreak, despite some tender and near-ecstatic highs. If these are even parts of the same story. But that’s what makes it feel so real. These are songs about love by someone grown, someone who knows what they’re talking about, with no illusions, but also no cynicism. 

My music-nerd heart is inevitably won by “The Magnetic Fields,” depicting a date early in the relationship, to go see Stephin Merritt and band. (I wondered if it was the same, rescheduled post-covid tour I saw with an ex in Toronto. Maybe even the same show. That is, if the story happens to be true.) “Tickets were sold out, but I scored us two,/ Which won me points with you/ That I went on to use,” Cornfield winks. But then the song flashes forward to a later time, after the sweetness has gone sour: “I thought if I said you were evil/ I would get over it easier/ But I didn’t get over it at all … never got over anything.” 

The record is full of zoomed-in particulars, scenes in which, say, a shirt might be draped over a bedroom lamp for shade while two people lazily debate whether to listen to ESG or Big Star. But it's suffused with an overall wider perspective. It succeeds in that great trick of art, letting the listener feel like we can inhabit someone else, feel things the way the narrator feels them, no matter how different we may be. 

It’s plainspoken melodically, subtle musically. You have to get up close and sit with it. Or go for a walk with it down quiet streets, maybe talk it through with a friend, “conversations free-flowing,” till finally feeling some sort of tentative closure.