Charlotte Cornfield - Hurts Like Hell - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Hurts Like Hell is Charlotte Cornfield's sixth album, the first she's recorded since the birth of her daughter, an inflection point for her as a person and an artist. The album's recurrent themes of personal growth and renewal, of love's perseverance through difficulty and shame and awkwardness, are rooted there. InchThat experience has pulled me out of myself and given me a different outlook on things,Inch she says. InchThe vulnerability and fragility and wildness of it all has made me less focused on self, more zoomed out.Inch Hurts Like Hell is the most open-hearted, full-voiced album of her career, and also her most collaborative. Decamping to Philip Weinrobe's Sugar Mountain studio in Brooklyn, Cornfield was joined by a full backing band, including Palehound's El Kempner, Lake Street Dive's Bridget Kearney, Adam Brisbin, and Sean Mullins, with key contributions by Núria Graham, and Daniel Pencer. Cornfield then recruited Feist, Buck Meek, Christian Lee Hutson and Maia Friedman to sing on the album. The fruits of this process are immediately apparent on lead single InchHurts Like Hell,Inch a country-saturated yearner Cornfield calls Incha shy people love story,Inch the band swelling to embrace Cornfield's idiosyncratic flow as if to cradle her protagonist's heart. That the song is so vulnerable, so lived-in, is a matter of trust between Cornfield and her bandmates, in each other and of their gut. Their sound lands somewhere between Nashville Skyline and Harvest; a warm, richly-textured response to her bruised-but-seeking call. Much of Hurts Like Hell's magic happens in the space Cornfield makes for harmony. Taken up by Meek or Hutson, characters are sung into life as if with a brushstroke. When joined by Kempner or Kearney, it's a dazzling facet of the natural, lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry of her band. On InchKitchen,Inch Friedman mirrors Cornfield's sense of a