Brett Callwood
London-born, NY-based singer-songwriter Cornelia Murr told us about her love for a classic from the aughts.
Cornelia Murr: The 2005 Broadcast album Tender Buttons changed how I thought about music in a way that I’m forever grateful for. It’s brave and deliberate, filled with strange poetry and angular melodies that enter your mind like invocations or spells you’ve always known. “Constellation of Orion / A picture with a past, a future so vast / A mnemonic game on the arc of a journey.” At times it’s stark and severe; at times it makes you want to dance. Every sound you hear is so carefully chosen and tweaked to be exactly what it is. There is never too much of anything, never a half-baked intention. The music of Broadcast was like nothing I had heard before and this album was my introduction to them. Sometimes I think I might not make music myself had I not found it when I did.
I heard it first in high school. At the time the lead singer Trish Keenan was alive and the band fully active (she tragically died a few years later after contracting swine flu on tour at the age of 42). Up until that point, I had a pretty stubborn, ill-informed disdain for contemporary music. I lost myself in music of the past and in turn believed in some wordless place that nothing of real quality could be made anymore — a depressing thought, a teenage thought. But Broadcast blew that little lamentation to bits. Their sound is in itself hard to place in time. There’s a bit of ’60s Joe Meek-esque sonic experimentation, some of that retro space-age thing, but there is this fresh wind blowing through these songs that puts them somewhere else — maybe the future, or dislodged from time completely (is that what presence is?). Their music made me feel alive and curious. “The black cat, the black cat, curiouser, curiouser…” I’m hearing Trish sing now. I’ll never tire of her voice — somehow both girlish and stoic, earnest and playful, present but somewhere else too … haunting to be sure and all the more so after her untimely death. Her melodies find ways to weave through the music, not usually following or resting in it, but holding it in counterbalance as much as it holds her. She is calculated but unafraid of beauty and emotion. This album is home to many of my most beloved songs of theirs — “Corporeal,” “Subject to the Ladder”… but a particular jewel in the often harsh mix of sounds is a simple folk song called “Tears in the Typing Pool.” This outlier is just a nylon string guitar, some flute-like synths, and lyrics that will forever keep growing to me, like watercolors spreading on wet paper: “Interpret the rooms / my tears in the typing pool / the letters are sighing / the ink is still drying / I told you the truth and now I sigh too.”
Much of their remarkable specificity has to do with the way they recorded. A band from Birmingham, England, I gather they were invited to record in big studios more than once but always ended up retreating back to their method of home recording: off the clock, tinkering til the sounds were just right. Trish sometimes sang into a small cardboard box because she liked how it made the vocals sit flatter in the mix. It seems like their objective wasn’t to become “big” or anything other than they were, it was simply to continue their own strange path, which is how true art is made I think. Recently, the band released what they announced would be their final collection of music: Distant Call: Collected Demos 2000-’06. When I heard them first they were current. Now they too are of the past. But thanks to hearing them when I did, I was brought into better relationship with my time on earth. It felt special too if people like them were making music, my own musical tendencies and idiosyncrasies somehow encouraged by theirs. This album always brings me back to that gift and keeps giving.
Cornelia Murr’s album Run to the Center is out now.