Up from
downstairs

Folk-rocker Charlotte Cornfield
climbs to bigger things

COOL DISCOVERY: Cornfield

by DAVID LEVITZ

Before I knew that she was the next it-girl of folk-rock, Charlotte Cornfield was the tall, slightly dishevelled Concordia music student from downstairs whose drumming pissed off my roommates to no end. Then one day, a friend played me her album, and when I put two and two together, Charlotte from downstairs suddenly became Charlotte Cornfield, singer/songwriter extraordinaire.

Cornfield grew up in Toronto in a musical family, playing piano and French horn from a young age and taking up drums at 13. In the summer after Grade 11, Cornfield had her first songwriting breakthrough. “I remember going to a party and sitting on a trampoline and playing that song, and everybody was crying,” she says. “I realized then that I could be powerful using guitar and voice.”

Now 21 and with two impressive independent EPs under her belt, Cornfield plays a different gig nearly every day—solo, with the Charlotte Cornfield Band, on drums for Bent by Elephants or with any of several other projects and friends. Recently, she opened for Lake of Stew, and shared a stage with Amy Millan this past summer.

Of her second EP, Collage Light, Cornfield says, “I started listening to a lot of old Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley and Joni Mitchell, and so I was interested in more swooping melodies and bigger sounds. This EP comes from a more painful place. It’s more on the theme of people coming and going and drifting apart,” she says, adding “it also didn’t help that while we were recording the album, the bass player and I were breaking up.”

This past summer, after recordingx, Cornfield took her show on the road, Greyhounding across North America with friend Boris Paillard, who plays under the name the Keys. “Our coolest show was in this tiny town called Bruno, Saskatchewan,” Cornfield recalls. “It’s like 400 people, and the whole town came.”

Still unsigned, Cornfield is waiting until she graduates this year to think about label representation and the more commercial end of her music career. “Being on tour opened my mind up to the desire to explore different things musically,” she recounts. “When I got back here, I said, ‘Instead of booking 10 shows immediately, I’m going to put together a band that I really care about that’s doing something really unique and work with them, and we can discover things together.”

While she already plans to hit the road again soon, Cornfield doesn’t see herself leaving Montreal for good. “I’ve been able to find a really cool community here in fellow musicians,” she says. “I’m really excited about music that’s happening in Montreal right now, and I think we’re on the brink of some really cool discoveries.”

THE CHARLOTTE CORNFIELD BAND
AND BENT BY ELEPHANTS AT CASA
DEL POPOLO ON TUESDAY, JAN. 19,
9:30 P.M., $7