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Maybe this is true of every country, but New Zealand loves to lay claim to expats who’ve gone on to do well. Musician Jess Cornelius is based in LA, and spent her formative years in Australia, but as soon as I saw she was born and raised here, my interest went up a notch.
And judging by her new album Care/Taking, Cornelius has been thinking about us, too. She’s had plenty more on her mind besides, like raising a daughter, and the dissolution of a relationship. So maybe it’s wishful thinking, but amongst the superb songcraft that defines this collection, I kept hearing hints at her birthplace.
‘Cloud Postcard’ disguises its serious sentiment inside some amiable arrangements. The lyrics go “All my life, I've been moving away/ Australia, America/ Every decade, I keep getting further”. It seems directed to a friend in NZ, and Cornelius follows up with reassurance that her moving away had nothing to do with them. The instrumentation falls apart around her, before the song reforms in a more serious way and she sings, “there's nothing you could've done that would've made me stay”.
There’s another nod to Aotearoa in the first song, called ‘Tui is a Bird’. It’s also the name of Cornelius’ daughter, born just prior to the release of her solo debut.
The line “Tui is a baby” is an unsubtle clue, followed by one of several very vulnerable lyrics on this album, when she says “some days, all I think of is the size of my love/ and what that means I could lose”.
Another line, in the song ‘Desire’, goes “I never thought I'd be here/ pregnant and scared that I can't turn you on”.
This bracingly honest approach was present in Cornelius’ former band, the Australian synth-pop outfit Teeth and Tongue. Her command of chord changes was too, and while the songs here started as demos on her Yamaha Portasound keyboard, they’ve been fleshed out to varying degrees with live instrumentation.
Care/Taking was produced by Mikal Cronin, who makes his own scrappy rock records, and here provided extra instrumentation, including a crucial saxophone part on the album’s centrepiece, ‘The Surgeon’.
Having read interviews with Jess Cornelius, I think when she says “pray you never have to learn/ just how much someone can hurt”, she’s speaking literally, about childbirth.
The song is a great example of how a pre-chorus like that - defiant and slightly unsettling - can make a great chorus even better, as the music resolves under the line “have to believe the surgeon found a way to sleep at night”.
The song is followed with ‘Dying’, another masterfully composed song, this time anchored by piano and synth. The way she periodically speeds up her cadence, and adds a very high octave to the chorus vocal, are masterful musical decisions.
In the liner notes to Care/Taking, perhaps anticipating interview questions, Cornelius says “the biggest shift for me that has happened over the last few years is that I had a kid. What that did was make me think about death more than I have in my entire life.”
Those twin impulses, the joy of new life and the fear it can provoke, propel their way through this album. It’s compelling stuff, but even more impressive is the composition: bold choices confidently made.
She moved from Wellington to Australia in 2000, aged 20, and fronted a series of groups prior to Teeth and Tongue’s debut in 2007. It’s a journey wending through several countries, genres and bands, that with this album may have reached its peak.