Cornelia Murr Shares New Luke Temple-Produced Track 'Pushing East'

On February 28 the London-born, NY-based singer-songwriter Cornelia Murr will release her new album, Run To The Center via 22TWENTY. The album was produced by Luke Temple (Adrienne Lenker, Hand Habits) and finds Murr delivering her most confident, expansive album yet. Now, she teases the LP with a new single, the kaleidoscopic “Pushing East,” which is about leaving life as you know it and forging ahead because you must. The track features Murr’s mother, Pamela Livingston, on flute (she also designed the cover art for the single).

She shares “Pushing East is a breakup song, to be played ideally loud in the car in the fresh moment of irrevocable change. It speaks to aspects of relationship between musicians, when collaboration often takes place and leaves a creative product, and how an experience of one’s music differs completely from experiencing a relationship with that person. It’s a wish for future peace and liberation, too.”

Murr previously shared “How Do You Get By” and “Meantime.” She will play those songs and other tracks off the album at her record release celebrations in New York on February 27th and 28th at Brooklyn’s Union Pool and in Los Angeles at Gold Diggers on March 8th and 9th. Tickets are available HERE and list of tour dates below. 

Cornelia Murr tour dates

2/27 - Brooklyn, NY - Union Pool (with Anna Fox)

2/28 - Brooklyn, NY - Union Pool (with Hnry Flwr)

3/8 - Los Angeles, CA - Gold Diggers (with Luke Temple) 

3/9 - Los Angeles, CA - Gold Diggers (with Lightman & Lightman)

In naming the album, Run To The Center, Murr mirrored where she found herself during its creation—at the geographic heart of the 48 contiguous United States, the small town of Red Cloud, Nebraska (population: 948). There she hunkered down to restore an abandoned house, immersing herself in solitude and reflection. Music flowed out of her during this monastic period of stripping wallpaper in a derelict construction zone in the middle of nowhere. In the last place she expected, she was able to gain a vantage point of her own life and ultimately locate her own center, a grounding force that was inside of her the whole time.

Adding to her impressive list of collaborators (which over time have included Jim James, Rodrigo Amarante, Alice Boman, Reverend Baron) Murr worked with Temple on the album in Red Cloud. She says, “we finished the arrangements and vocals in my then barely livable house with a makeshift recording rig I had set up.” And while Murr’s past albums, with her signature soft voice and celestial production, have been described as “dreamy,” the multilayered, revved up production of Run To The Center sounds more like waking up. 

The album - the follow-up to 2022’s EP Corridor and her 2018 debut Lake Tear of the Clouds (produced by James) -  is the most updated expression of who Murr is now, both socially and emotionally, particularly as questions around artmaking have become more urgent for her over the better part of the last decade. Run To The Center is a fully realized portrait of a woman and an artist in her thirties, standing triumphantly in uncertainties, asking the crucial questions one needs to sustain a life: How can you fit everything you want into a life? How can you do this if you want so much? The LP was born of a need to excavate Murr’s desires and experience of time, both in new songs born spontaneously out of an easy collaboration with Temple, as well as older songs that, for years, had been knocking around in her brain.

When Murr recorded Lake Tear of the Clouds, she had barely performed as a solo artist but rather had backed up other artists for years. That album marked a pivotal change in her life: the shift where she decided to focus on her own music, a shift of intention and identity. If Murr’s first album was about unveiling her own voice in music, her latest record is about exploring that commitment. 

Photo Credit: Rett Rogers

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