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CORNELIA MURR | Run to the Center

A Conversation with Musician Cornelia Murr

Interview by Tommy Moore

Photos by Rett Rogers, Emma Pillsbury, Melanie Drew Chambers


Cornelia Murr Photographed by Rett Rogers


Cornelia Murr’s newest album began with a question: What do I want? The answer is everything, and it’s never felt more urgent.


On her first LP in six years, Run To The Center, the London-born singer-songwriter delivers her most confident, expansive album yet. Across 10 hypnotic pop songs is a fully realized portrait of a woman and an artist in her thirties, standing triumphantly in uncertainties, asking the crucial questions one needs to sustain a life: How can you fit everything you want into a life? How can you do this if you want so much? 


Run To The Center, is produced by Jim James of My Morning Jacket. In addition to James, in the spring of 2023, Murr started working with prolific producer Luke Temple (Adrienne Lenker, Hand Habits). Temple was an old friend whom she had met in New York more than a decade prior. Finally, forces coalesced for them to work together. The result is a sweeping album of Murr’s most spectral and tender pop yet, born of a need to excavate her desires and experience of time, both in new songs born spontaneously out of an easy collaboration with Temple, as well as older songs that, for years, had been knocking around in her brain. 



Cornelia Murr


Cornelia Murr: I'm pretty sure I'm in North Carolina. I was in Virginia all day. I'm driving to Nashville now, and then ultimately across the rest of the country, but Nashville is where I'm gonna be tonight.


Tommy Moore: Ah, I know that drive very well.


Cornelia Murr: I am not at all a Midwesterner, but I'm driving to Nashville on my way to Nebraska, actually,


Tommy Moore: What was the Nebraska connection? Because you moved out there kind of just right before this record, right?


Cornelia Murr 'Run To The Center' Cover Art


Cornelia Murr: I actually started making the record in LA, and then I moved and finished it out there in Nebraska. So vice versa, but it's complicated. I was sort of bouncing back and forth for a little while, but the Nebraska connection is through my mom, who's also not from there at all. She's from New York, but she's a wanderer, a nomadic lady, and she is always keeping me on my toes. And this was the latest surprise, like, “Guess what? I’m moving to Red Cloud, Nebraska, which is a town of 900 or so people that is 20 minutes north of what is somehow deemed the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states.” So she moved there out of the blue, and I started visiting her to help her get settled, and trying to help her find a place, and all that. Then she found a rental, and around the corner was this house that always caught my eye that was totally abandoned and clearly not lived in, but had this pull. It was a house that felt like it has a soul. Then one thing led to another, and coincidentally I ended up meeting the owner of the house at the time, this older woman who took a shine to me, and she really wanted a woman to buy it, and it was incredibly affordable. 


It was a huge, huge commitment. I've never taken on anything like this to fix up a house by myself in a town where I don't want to live. It didn't make complete sense, but there was this momentum, and it felt like some sort of force that was pushing me to do it. Partly, my mom lives there and it just felt like a great opportunity. So I did move out there for about a year, solidly, to fix up the place alone in what was some very cold, wintery, and lonely times. But I finished the record with the producer, Luke Temple, who's an old friend who came out the summer that I moved to Nebraska. The house was barely livable when he came. Now, it's really sweet, but we were semi camping and recording in the house.


"It was a house that felt like it has a soul."


Cornelia Murr


Tommy Moore: It’s tough, too, because you're in the heart of the barren, lonely Midwest there.


Cornelia Murr: Truly. It's pretty hard to get more rural than that anywhere in the country. I've certainly spent time in small towns in upstate New York, but this is the most rural I've ever been.


Tommy Moore: I feel like there, or in the Dakotas, are the only places left that reach that level of untouched land.


Cornelia Murr: There's a lot of Nebraska that's Big Ag. I’d driven through the state and it's really flat with this commercial feeling, but most people just don't stray from I80. And in this area, it's actually quite rugged and feels really ancient. It's just rare in this day and age to see land that's not cut into everywhere. It's really beautiful, actually. And speaking of the Dakotas, I've still never been to North Dakota, but I did do a solo camping trip in the Black Hills of South Dakota in the spring. Have you ever been there? 


"It didn't make complete sense, but there was this momentum, and it felt like some sort of force that was pushing me to do it."


Cornelia Murr


Tommy Moore: The Badlands were always my middle ground, because I lived between Michigan and Wisconsin for most of my life, and that was always my stepping stone to get West.


It's all beautiful. I think, too, whether it's Nebraska the Dakotas, my favorite thing in the world is once you're 10 hours in on one of those drives and sun's finally setting.  You peel off of I80 or I90 and driving 20 minutes into nowhere, and watching the sunset over untouched lands and very small towns. It’s so quaint and beautiful.


Cornelia Murr: And it doesn't take much, you just have to leave the freeway to see where you are. I think that's actually how my mom ended up in this town called Red Cloud, because she was driving across country to New Mexico from Wisconsin, where she lived briefly in Eau Claire. She was stuck on I80 and having sort of a tough time, and I was on the phone with her from LA, helping her plot her journey a little bit. I think she knew of this town Red Cloud, because there's a famous author that's from there called Willa Cather. She's a very famous American author, and my mom's into her writing, so I think my mom had heard of it, but it's an hour off the freeway.


Tommy Moore: Tying that to your record a little bit, it feels like you're reaching for something. The whole record feels like it’s asking a question and looking for answers, reaching out into nothingness to try and find something.


"...it's like, 'Wait, pick a life now. Figure it out. Commit to something,' and what life is asking me to commit to in this moment feels contradictory."


Cornelia Murr


Cornelia Murr: I feel like at this point in my life, I've always been somebody who wanted a lot of things and I've lived in a lot of places, and I almost feel like it's only increased my appetite for more experience and curiosity about the world. But then you get to this point, for me and for some of my friends, like women in their 30s, where it's like, “Wait, pick a life now. Figure it out. Commit to something,” and what life is asking me to commit to in this moment feels contradictory. For instance, I feel this pressure and this real need to make a home somewhere for real, and Nebraska was almost a little preview of that, but it wasn't the real thing. But I have this urge to settle down and maybe have a family and all those things, but at the same time I feel like my career is also demanding just as much, and I just as strongly have the urge to dive all in into touring and living in a completely opposite way. I still sometimes feel just as strongly as ever the desire to live in other countries, or wander down these different paths. 


Mortality is definitely real around this age and the age of my parents. You can't do it all, but I still want it all. The last line of the last song, sort of by accident, in a way sums up a lot of what the record is about, which is, “How am I ever going to make a real life wanting everything at the same time?” That's been on my mind in the last couple years. Going to this place, I didn't intend to make a record about Red Cloud, Nebraska, and I didn't really. It's not really about that place exactly, although it's in there, but it felt like this strange, unexpected answer, in a way, to all of these opposing desires and ideas, pulling me to the last place I ever thought that's right smack dab in the middle of the country. Almost a peaceful point, like the eye of the storm. Just neutrality to survey everything else from a neutral place, which felt like something I really needed. I didn't know it was going to manifest that way.



Cornelia Murr


Tommy Moore: I think that that's a beauty of finding that space to exist in. Whether it's the middle of nowhere in the Midwest where it's complete silence and all the distractions are pulled away, or it's the opposite where it's the middle of downtown Manhattan where it's just nothing but noise.


Cornelia Murr: And I need both of those extremes. Even though I spent a year in Nebraska, I was also visiting New York City a lot where I used to live. I was going between those complete extremes, which was also kind of making me crazy, but enlivening to me. I really do get off on contrast, for better or worse.


Tommy Moore: Hitting on that urgency you're feeling to define your life, did you find a real answer? Or has it become a little bit more clear what the handful of things are you want to put your energy towards?


"How am I ever going to make a real life wanting everything at the same time?"


Cornelia Murr


Cornelia Murr: That's a really good question that I haven't really considered yet. No, I haven't found the answer yet. I think I'm a little bit more at peace with not having it for the time being. But that's also not entirely true. I still have a lot of the same questions. I think the short answer is that I'm more at peace with the life that I've made for myself. Which it's a very unconventional life, and it's one that, for better or worse, allows for a lot of freedom to ask these questions continually, and to allow for things to change. I'm learning to accept and and recognize that.


Tommy Moore: There was one line that said the beauty is being able to ask, and I think that's such an interesting take and a beautiful line in general. The idea of not having the answers, but feeling comfortable in asking the questions, which it seems where you've gotten.


Cornelia Murr: That's really on the nose. I do feel more comfortable asking, and it's not a sign of being a mess or being irresponsible with your life or something, but it's really honest, I think, to allow yourself to question everything.


"You can't do it all, but I still want it all."


Cornelia Murr


Tommy Moore: I think my life very much shifted, too, and I feel like I'm in a very similar-ish state of flux at all times now. It was hard for me to, at first, grasp that, and I think there's a guilt attached to that, too. I wasn't stationary or tied down to all of my family and friends in terms of the what was normal. Is that something that you ever dealt with getting to this point?


Cornelia Murr: I had a conversation with one of my best friends last night while we were both on long solo drives. And though she has much more of a stable home in upstate New York, she travels a lot, and I was kind of realizing that, for one thing, a lot of my closest friends have this in common, this curiosity about things.


Tommy Moore: I think too, there's the opposite side of that, where it is so nice when you are on the road to be able to pop in to see somebody twice a year. It’s so comforting in its own way, to stay connected to those little crews all around, even though you might not be as fully ingrained in that community as as they are. But it's always nice. In my eyes, it feels very comforting to go to any town in the states and be like, “Okay, who's around?” There's like some little feeling that I can make this town feel small if I wanted to.


Cornelia Murr: It reminds me of when you're on tour and someone comes out from somewhere nearby where they live. It's so special to see a familiar face and realize that you know people all over.


Tommy Moore: Every few shows you get a little warm hug that feels nice.


Cornelia Murr: If you're lucky, and it means so much more when you haven't seen a familiar face in a minute.


"...the short answer is that I'm more at peace with the life that I've made for myself."


Cornelia Murr


Cornelia Murr

Interview by Tommy Moore

Photos by Rett Rogers, Emma Pillsbury, Melanie Drew Chambers


 
 
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