At 12am the night before releasing her new single, Los Angeles-based New Zealand musician Jess Cornelius felt her water break.
The baby was coming two weeks earlier than expected. With amniotic fluid on her floor, she sat down at her computer to tie up loose ends.
“I was writing emails to the US label, answering things about the record artwork and layouts,” Cornelius tells the Guardian. “I had to make the video [and song] public on YouTube and Bandcamp; I had to do all these things, because the press release was going out and I wasn’t going to be there.”
In what might seem an absurd last-minute flurry, she even made a final Instagram post from the hospital about the new song, Body Memory: “I was gonna write a whole thing about what the song is about,” she wrote, “but apparently I’m in labor or something”.
It seems ironic, then, that much of Cornelius’s forthcoming album, Distance, is about her coming to terms with the idea that life as a touring musician had made motherhood unlikely.
“I’d had opportunities in relationships where I potentially could have stayed in them and had children, and I didn’t,” she says. “I just thought ‘Well, I’m moving to the US to have this nomadic lifestyle, I’m not gonna have a baby anytime soon, the clock is ticking etc’ … I’d really come to terms with that idea of not having kids.”
Cornelius moved to Melbourne from Wellington in 2000, eventually forming the synth pop group Teeth & Tongue around 2008. After that band ended, she released her first solo EP Nothing Is Lost in 2017, a collection of simple guitar-backed songs that represented a stark departure.
Distance, out this week, is a kind of 21st century amalgam of Karen Dalton’s delicate folk and 70s jam band Americana; there are flashes of 80s pop-blues, and the woozy-yet-righteous Californian grunge of Hole’s Malibu.
Cornelius recorded its songs after moving to LA in early 2018, in full-band arrangements that could be stripped back for easier solo touring. Peel away the synthesised strings, bass and drums on Palm Trees – a song about beginning her new life in LA – and you can hear how the power and conviction of her voice would be enough to carry the song.
But Cornelius was forced to reassess her American touring plans when only three months after meeting her partner she fell pregnant, in a city she was still learning to call home.
Ten weeks later the pregnancy ended in miscarriage, an experience she channelled into Body Memory – the single which came out the day that she gave birth.
On Body Memory, Cornelius sings over a tinny pre-set beat and synthesised woodblocks from a budget Portasound keyboard. The dinky electronics lure you into a sneakily devastating song, which details the vast gulf of experience between parents after a miscarriage.
“When we met I used to make you laugh / then we lost a baby and it broke my heart / now I find it hard, to be that funny now / I tried to tell you that I can’t rewind / I can’t walk backwards in my mind / ‘cause my body has a memory and it won’t forget.”
Losing a baby solidified her resolve to become a mother, and Tui Pepper Cornelius-Hale was born in June. The birth had frightening moments, heightened by the face masks the couple, midwife and nurses were forced to wear amid a global pandemic – which Cornelius repeatedly tore off as her contractions came on strong.
“It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. I just thought to myself, ‘This is ridiculous; this is insane that this is part of life. What kind of sadistic design is this?’” says Cornelius. “She came out … like a little wrinkly grey old man. I put her on my chest and just descended to tears and it was completely surreal.”
Tui is named after a native New Zealand bird whose white throat tufts and garbled but crystalline song are national motifs. Cornelius’s mum Raewyn Atkinson is a native bird lover and an accomplished ceramicist; she’d nurture her kids during the day and her kiln, pots and glazes at night.
“I didn’t get the sense from her that [motherhood] was a big burden, but I did sense and hear a frustration sometimes with the kind of assumption that she [should] prioritise things to do with parenting over her work,” says Cornelius. “I think men just don’t feel that same obligation.”
Covid-19 forced Cornelius to record her own videos for the first time. The process helped her reconnect to an album largely written about the unlikelihood of her current situation.
The video for Kitchen Floor, for instance, begins with a pregnant Cornelius anxiously staring into her bathroom mirror, picking up confidence as she walks the suburbs of LA, before dancing down a pandemic-deserted Hollywood Walk of Fame in a figure-hugging leopard print dress. It feels like a refusal to let motherhood dominate her life – and a commitment to bring Tui along for the ride.
Since her daughter’s arrival, Cornelius has stopped worrying about counting Spotify streams and scanning reviews. Instead, the timing reaffirmed the importance of her work to her sense of self.
“I feel really grateful that I’m putting out a record at this time, because it does give me this other aspect of my identity that I think so many people struggle with. I can feel it, your whole identity gets lost in being a mother, being a parent,” she says. “It’s so consuming that I can very easily understand feeling a real loss of self, a real loss of identity … we’re obviously all more than one thing and definitely more than just parents.”
Distance is out 24 July on Part Time Records
