Interviews (242)

• September 26, 2025
• Colleen Johnson
• 246
• 0

(photo credit: Laura-Lynn Petrick)

Want a dreamy way to cap off your weekend? Sunday night, Cornelia Murr will be coming to the House of Blues in Boston while opening for Matt Maltese, and it’s a no-miss. The dreamy as heck tunes are sure to be a pretty spell-bounding performance, and if my chat with Cornelia earlier this month is any indication of how she is in a live performance, it’s surely going to be a treat.

Cornelia chatted with me about everything from her tour essentials to the preparations for the current tour as she walked the streets of Brooklyn, and her wit and love for making music shone through. Our chat can be found below, and limited tickets can still be scooped here! Don’t miss out on this one. In the world of incredible female artists taking over the charts and this city’s stages, it’s sure to be one for the books! Cornelia will be opening the show around 8 pm so make sure to get there early!

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New England Sounds: You start your tour on Tuesday in Nashville, supporting Matt Maltese. How are the final preparations going for that run? 

Cornelia Murr: They’re going fine. You know, there’s always a million things.  But it always comes together just in the nick of time. So, I’m not quite ready yet, but the next couple of days are crucial, and I will be ready.  It’s a long tour, so in some ways there’s a little bit extra to think about. And then also, in other ways, there’s not. Because we’re just doing the same thing, just longer, and now I’ve realized that I’m going to be able to come back, I’m in Brooklyn right now staying with some friends, who I very often stay with, so I kind of live half here. But, I’m realizing I’ll be able to come back at least once to do a re-pack if I need; just logistics things. It always works out! Tour, I’m learning is like constant problem-solving. Like, things do go wrong; they will go wrong. But you can’t even plan for it; you just have to thicken your skin to be able to adjust on the fly.  I’m feeling better than I used to about tour, because I think I’ve strengthened that muscle or something in the last year or so. Anyway, long answer. 

NES: I like it! When was the last time you did a tour this long, or a tour in general? 

Cornelia: Oh, this long a tour? I actually haven’t done this long a tour, ever. Well, it’s thirty-one shows, and there are also a number of off days, so we’re starting on September 16th and ending on November 5th. So, it’s…unusually long. I mean, I don’t know, by my standards anyway, but I’m excited. I think the upside is, well, there are many upsides and positive things. You get exposed to that many more people. I play cities that I never have. And like I rehearsed with my band yesterday, and we get to change it up many times. We may change the set-list over many times. Just getting the chance to do that because there are so many different shows. So we can really sit into it, and I think you find things out about songs. We might play some new songs, eventually. So you find things out about songs when you play them, to anyone, let alone a whole bunch of people. 

NES: Then, in terms of newer songs, is that like songs after the last album you put out? 

Cornelia: Yeah, I’ve got some like very fresh stuff that I just recorded that still is sort of new to my brain. I just recorded a few new songs in Paris, with this guy Frank Maston, who’s pretty cool out there, in the very beginning of August, so very recently. But yeah, I sort of went out there. It’s still unclear what it will become, maybe an album. This new stuff, I’ll do more stuff, make it an LP or singles. Some of it I wrote on the spot, which I don’t normally do. Maybe not at the beginning of the tour, but once I’ve really settled in, see how some of these new ones feel, and they might inform me a bit about what they are meant to be. 

I’m also putting out some B-sides, well, I’m calling them B-sides. Two songs that are not new to me, but they’ll be new to the world, we’ll probably play those. The thing is, it’s a short set opening. So, we can’t do it all (laughs).  It’s about thirty minutes, so, yeah, it will probably change quite a bit from night to night in terms of what we do. 

NES: That’s quite the range. Making the album in Nebraska, and then doing the new songs in Paris, you’re really jumping all around—a lot of cultures. 

Cornelia: There’s a theme of that in my life. 

NES: Then I know for you, your debut album was in 2019. You released the EP in 2022, but your most recent album was released a few months ago. When did you start making music again? Was it always something where you were making music behind the scenes, or is it something where you jumped back in? 

Cornelia: I was making music. I put an EP out in between that time, in 2022. And I put a single out in 2021. I had a string of really tough business things. I was making music throughout those years, and had some very depressing business things go down. My former label went under, took me quite a minute to get the funding together, it took me a long time to make that record indeed. 

NES: When did you really start putting together this album? 

Cornelia: I feel like I was trying to make a second record for all those years. And there were spurts, like  I made a song with a producer named Ben Babbit that we put at the beginning of the second record. Started that at the very beginning of 2020, and so (laughs), yeah we made that.  So that’s why I started recording my EP.

And then when I started recording that EP, I was learning how to record things at home, like with Pro Tools, and that EP was a very DIY effort. An at-home experiment because of what was going on in the world. And there were moments it was like is this  what I’m supposed to be doing? Like, why are there so many roadblocks? And the personal stuff, too, I got out of a relationship at that time. I was doing my own thing, collaborating with musicians in a relationship can be intense. But also, that’s why it took such a long time. It quite honestly was money. It’s really expensive to make a record, even in a cheap way. It took a long time for me to figure it out. I sold like vinyl on Bandcamp, stuff over time that allowed me to finally do it. Yeah, it’s often money that holds you back and it’s also you make a record and it doesn’t come out right away. It gets held up, and that was the case with this one; it was out of my hands forever, and I really had to fight barriers to get it out, because it’s a long haul. I also dabbled in real estate, not that I wasn’t making music then. I’m not doing that anymore, but in 2020, 2021, things got so weird in a lot of people’s lives, took some wild curveballs, and mine certainly did change. 

NES: It was definitely a time, for sure. 

Cornelia: To answer the question, I was making music also, but a lot of that stuff just didn’t come out. 

NES: And will this tour be the first time that you are playing a lot of these songs live? 

Cornelia: No, thankfully, in the past year thus far, I’ve been on the road a lot. So I’ve gotten very lucky there; I’ve been playing with my bandmates. This formation is new, well, there are three players that I’ve been playing with a lot. And the guitarist is joining, but I’ve also played with him separately, so we’re all coming together, and it’s going to be cool.  But yeah, we’ve been playing a ton. 

NES: Then maybe a soft one, just a goofy one, we’re not in our twenties anymore. What are the three things that you think are necessary to bring with you on tour? 

Cornelia: Bring with me, like on tour?  Okay, for me, I need rose-water glycerin spray in the van for a refresh when you’re feeling very down in the van, I need that. I need a clothing steamer, which I just bought a compact one instead of a bulky one that was a pain, so I need that. And I need instant coffee. Because usually there’s a way to heat water, like we usually stay at Airbnb’s, but I’ve actually grown to like instant coffee. There’s something about the texture.  I need to know that I have it with me and that  I won’t be in a desert somewhere where there’s no coffee. I like having coffee before I leave the house in the morning. I don’t like being in a town where you don’t know where you are, being like, “Where’s the coffee shop?!” It’s too annoying, so coffee, rose-water glycerin, and a steamer. Yeah!