Music Garden Concert: Charlotte Cornfield

Less than two years since Highs in the Minuses became Charlotte Cornfield’s break-out — a magnetic mission statement for the Toronto songwriter described by Rolling Stone as “Canada’s best-kept secret.”

Cornfield emerged from pandemic seclusion with new fans, raised expectations and her first major US tour. She could have kept touring forever and fled to the woods with a four-track. She could have done anything. She jumped into an old Subaru, and when she arrived in Hurley, NY, at the red-steepled church now Dreamland Recording Studios, she was ready for whatever came next.

Cornfield had come to Hurley to work with producer Josh Kaufman, thrilled by his sublime recordings with Cassandra Jenkins, Anais Mitchell and his own band, Bonny Light Horseman. The album they’d now make together, Could Have Done Anything, is a testament to Cornfield’s uncommon life and all its possibilities, an acknowledgment that the best musicians can turn fleeting moments into timeless songs.

Whereas Cornfield’s preceding albums were made in familiar settings, with troupes of friends, her latest long-player reaches into the unknown. Kaufman and Cornfield (who went to school for jazz drums) played every instrument, from ringing guitars to cozy piano, Hammond B3, pedal steel and synthesizers. Together with engineer D. James Goodwin (Kevin Morby, Whitney) and assistant engineer Gillian Pelkonen, the pair worked impulsively, trying to shrink the gap between having an idea and putting it on tape. The resulting sound is at once elaborate and unrehearsed; there’s a sense that it’s coming together, and coming alive, at the very moment it’s being made.

Intimacy and absence go hand-in-hand on Could Have Done Anything: the theme repeats on the unfussy love song “You and Me,” with its tale of tour and homecoming. Some love is as simple as this: liberating, easy, like piano and guitar in two-step. That was the spirit of this record: connection, possibility, acceptance. “Don’t be afraid to take a left,” Kaufman would say, encouraging Cornfield to drop preconceptions and invent new rules. Even with the small things, like wandering around the tracking room with a pair of claves in your hands, or adding random, surround-sound echoes to “The Magnetic Fields,” a song about a potent and formative live concert experience. Throughout,

Cornfield tried to channel the energy of her favourite classic records, from Tapestry to Blood On The Tracks to Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, albums where the songs and the playing carry the listener. After six days, Cornfield returned to Canada with a new album to mix and master. Another day-long drive; another homecoming; and one more thing that would arise a little over nine months later: the singer had her first baby in April 2023. Anything can happen.