THE MIGRATION

CHARLOTTE CORNFIELD

Future Snowbird Toronto native Charlotte Cornfield felt the pull of New York and lived there for just shy of two years, long enough to have formative experiences to spill into some of the songs that would become Future Snowbird, her sophomore album. Though she recorded once she got back with a band made up of old friends (some of whom she’d played with in Montreal), there’s a stylistic kinship with New York’s anti-folk scene in Cornfield’s approach to lyrics that has perhaps always been there. She usually opts for unlikely, slightly awkward rhymes and metaphors, her oddball lyrical choices walking the line between heartfelt and goofy, but always quotable, with songs often landing in delightfully unexpected places. It’s good that Cornfield does this, because on a record that wears its influences so comfortably on its sleeve (early Bob Dylan, Neil Young and, on songs like “Scots Line,” some soulful moments of the Band), a little irreverence in the writing keeps things unique and idiosyncratic. There’s a nice logic to the track listing, too, moving from the folk rock of “Aslan” to the rockier “Mercury” (a duet with Ought’s Tim Darcy) to the strummy sing-along “Big Volcano, Small Town” and beyond, venturing into toe-tapping twitchy soulpop interspersed with campfire-friendly solo acoustic turns. And producer Don Kerr got some lovely organic performances out of Cornfield and the band, who sound like they lived in the songs a while before they recorded. (Consonant, consonantrecords.com)

WHAT WAS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF YOUR TIME IN NEW YORK?

Within four days of getting to New York, I met the guy who was to become my long-term boyfriend [but] my experience there went beyond that: the people who I connected with, the songwriting that I did and the challenges that I faced, which I had never quite had in Canada, because there’s an element of basic quality of life that I always had when I was here. I felt there was more stress, more urgency, in day-to-day life and that affected my anxiety level in a major way and tipped the scales for me. It was like the best and worst time of my life all smashed into a couple years.

WHERE DID YOU GET THE LINE “BIG VOLCANO, SMALL TOWN”?

I had a Greyhound Discovery Pass with my friend. One bus we took from Olympia to Portland and the bus was overloaded [and] we had to stand up in the aisles, which is so illegal and weird. There was this really large guy with a jean jacket vest and shaggy blonde hair standing in the aisle cracking jokes. Someone was like, “Where are you from?” and he said, “I’m from Tacoma: you know, big volcano, small town.” SARAH GREENE