If you’ve ever watched a romantic comedy, or listened to a pop song, or been alive for over, like, 15 years, you probably know by now that love—or a thing that you call “love” in order to make it seem more important than it probably is—will tend to make you do some pretty dumb things. Even if it isn’t as extreme as straddling your roommate on a minibike on a cross-country voyage to mistakenly return a briefcase you thought this subject of affection left at the airport, it’s easy to feel disconnected from yourself in the aftermath of doing the exact thing you told yourself you wouldn’t for a person who doesn’t seem worth it. “Sometimes desire betrays logic, and you end up at somebody’s door even after you’ve talked yourself out of it, in all of the ways,” as Canadian songwriter Charlotte Cornfield puts it. “And that feeling can be intoxicating. And it can be painful.”
This is the subject of Cornfield’s latest single from her forthcoming album Highs in the Minuses, which aims to strip the baggage attached to this rom-com cliché by literally stripping the instrumentals on the track down to somber piano and her own voice, waiting to record the track once her band (on these sessions consisting of an all-star lineup including Ada Lea on bass and Suuns’ Liam O’Neill on drums) had left the studio. “I remember I felt truly alone, in a way that I needed to be to sing it properly,” she continues. “We did two takes and kept the first one, and if you listen closely you can hear the piano bench squeaking a little bit in the background, which makes it feel close and immediate.”
The video for the track succeeds in capturing this moment of solitariness in the midst of uncontrollable surroundings, as we see Cornfield singing the track alone, waist-deep in a body of water as the tide rises. “We shot this video in Lake Ontario, my brother behind the camera and my mom on the beach holding a reflector and cuing the song,” she notes of the video set up, which mirrors the minimalism of the track’s recording. “There was something really special about it just being the three of us out there, in that magic blue hour light. We kept getting deeper and deeper in the water, and I didn’t even notice the rolling wave that came and swept me away at the end.”
Watch it below.
