Q&A: Singer-songwriter Cornelia Murr ready for 1st Pittsburgh show

Although singer-songwriter Cornelia Murr has been to Pittsburgh before, she’ll play her first show here later this month.

On one of her last tours, Murr and her band drove through town and had a memorable meal.

“I had the best pho of my life in Pittsburgh,” she said in a recent Zoom call. “So that’s what I think of now when I think of Pittsburgh. It was so delicious.”

After the February release of “Run to the Center,” her first album in seven years, Murr is now opening on Matt Maltese’s tour, which hits the Roxian Theatre in McKees Rocks on Sept. 23. Murr sang harmony on some songs on Maltese’s album, and she’ll join him for a few songs on their tour.

“As an opener, you just hope that you make some new fans and reach some people that maybe you wouldn’t have otherwise, and that people aren’t just waiting for your set to be over,” she said with a laugh. “At the very least, that’s what I hope. I’m really grateful to be a part of it. We’re gonna play some really beautiful rooms, and I’m getting to play Pittsburgh and a bunch of cities that I haven’t played before. So I’m personally going to get something out of that.”

Murr, who was born in England before moving to the U.S. as a child, also released a pair of B-sides — “Treaty” and “Gotta Give” — on Wednesday to coincide with the tour launch.

“They’re songs that I recorded around the same time as the last record, but I didn’t want to include them for whatever reason,” she said. “They felt like they existed somewhere else, and ‘Treaty’ is an old song, very old. It’s satisfying in a particular way to put out a very old song that you’ve been carrying around for a while.”

The release could be described as a “decluttering” of sorts.

“To be honest, I don’t feel like I ever truly loved any of my songs. None of them are masterpieces to me or anything, but the only way that I can finish a song or if you think about it over the years, it has something that you care about and there’s something going on,” she said. “There’s some reason why it exists. And so ‘Treaty,’ that’s the case with that one. It means something to me. There’s something satisfying about it at times to me. So it just feels good to share it. As opposed to, it doesn’t do anyone any good when it’s just sitting in your voice memos.”

In a Zoom call last week from Brooklyn, Murr spoke with TribLive about her new album, renovating a house in Nebraska, whistle solos and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.

Your newest album, “Run to the Center,” came out almost seven years after your debut. Does this feel like a new beginning for you?

Yeah, it does. It’s a more active phase than some of the years in between. There were a whole lot of really boring business hang-ups that I won’t get into. It wasn’t all just by choice that it took me a while. But I’ve got a good team at the moment, and things are moving in a way that I’m really, really grateful for. It feels really good. There’s a lot of moving parts, and if things get snagged by any part of what you’re doing, it’s a big mountain to climb or a big rock to push up a mountain.

You also spent some time fixing up a house in Nebraska. Had you ever done anything like that before?

No, I really hadn’t. I had dipped my toe a little bit into design stuff, like making aesthetic choices in the home environment. But no, this was full-on drywall and very much a solo experience.

Did that sort of seep into the album at all, those experiences?

It did a bit, yeah. Some of the songs were written before I started that process, but then a few of them that ended up on that record kind of popped out while doing some of the work, which was cool to me. For instance, there were many layers of really, really, really old wallpaper that were — I don’t know if you know about old wallpaper, the adhesive they used to use is crazy — and it was a real job just getting it off. I spent a lot of time stripping wallpaper, and it was a very meditative thing and frustrating at times, but I just found that sometimes when I was really just focusing on something like that, a very simple, repetitive task, some songs would come easily, without effort. I even mention wallpaper in one of them. (laughs) So yeah, it was directly related at times, too.

With “place,” has that ever affected your previous works more than, say, this one?

Yeah, totally, it has. I’ve written about places directly, even like the song “Tokyo Kyoto,” for instance. I don’t know if I directly cited New York City, but I have talked about cities. The answer is yes. In all different ways, I think it comes into play either directly or not so much. But I think we’re all products of our environment. And mine has changed many times, so it does affect the work.

I’ve seen that you bounced around from England to California to New York. Have you thought about a forever home? Is that even something that pops into your mind at all?

It definitely does. I think I sort of obsess over the concept because it feels like a challenge for me to decide on one and to just commit to one. But I’m at an age where — I mean, it’s not about age — I do feel ready to have a real spot. And just to simplify life, it’s just on a very logistic basis, like having an address where I am actually there often to receive mail. My address is currently in Nebraska, which is so funny and bizarre, but I have to go and ask them to hold my mail for months at a time.

They laugh when I come into the post office, because that’s always what I’m going to do, and then come back and it’s a mountain of mail. I want to be more — I don’t know what the word is — I don’t like the word settled, but yeah, I’m looking for a home. But I’m also someone who honestly, I’d love to be able to spend half the year somewhere else. (laughs) When I think about it, like, oh, that would be perfect if there were two (homes). But I have to make it complicated, it seems. It’s a habit.

There’s lots of people around Pittsburgh who are here for the spring and summer and then they go to Florida for the winter.

Maybe that’s what I should do: Pittsburgh and Florida. It doesn’t sound bad. If I had it my way, I’d spend half the year in the UK and the rest maybe in somewhere near New York, but we’ll see.

With the song “How Do You Get By,” I think you described it as a meditation on how people make their lives work and what sustains us. What have you discovered about that for yourself? What helps you get by?

That’s a good question. (laughs) The song is referring to both money and also perhaps spirituality of some kind. I think I need both of those things. How do I answer that question? I don’t know if I’m even getting by. I need more sleep. I could use a home. No, I’m getting by. I’m doing fine. I guess how I would answer that question is, the way that I feel the most fulfilled is sharing my music. So when people are receiving it warmly and telling me, that fills me up more than probably anything else. But then again, nothing like a good night’s sleep, which is so rare, you know? That really helps.

Now that you’re in your mid-thirties, do you feel yourself being pulled in different directions? Is it like, I have to focus on my career, I have to focus on relationships? Is that something that’s on your mind at all?

Yes, it is. I think I’m starting to embrace the kind of extreme collision of what it feels like, multiple huge aspects of life, crying out at the same time and feeling really crucial at the same time. That’s what this general age does feel like to me, and maybe in part, especially as a woman, because of ‘the clock’ or whatever. I was thinking a lot about that around the time of making the last record, but I think I’m hopefully starting to just accept life.

Life is always filled with something. There’s always a lot going on, and it changes. It just feels like an important time in my life, and I’m starting to see it that way. This is just a time to deal with a lot and hopefully achieve some things that I want so I can maybe more easily put them down, move on. Trying to just embrace it for what it is and not be stressed out, which is how it did feel for some time.

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In “Meantime,” there’s a whistling solo. Do you have any other favorite songs that feature whistling? Do you feel like that’s an underused musical tool in songs?

Who doesn’t love a whistle solo? (laughs) The first song that just came to mind is “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” which is a hilariously common example. I don’t know why I do it actually. I’m not an extremely good whistler. I just enjoy it, and I think it’s just a way when you’re singing, it’s almost like taking a guitar solo as a singer. It’s a shift. It’s not your voice. It’s a different mechanism, but I think probably because I don’t do guitar solos. I do whistle solos instead, and it’s very fun. You may think, I don’t know if you whistle, do you whistle?

I can whistle.

Well, you ought to try whistling in a microphone with reverb because then it’s something else. (laughs) It’s very satisfying, and you’ll feel like a better whistler than you are.

It gives it a little bit added heft?

It really carries. It’s also challenging because you can’t really whistle directly into the mic because it’ll sound like air. But, yeah, it really carries. I mean, it’s a whistle. With a little reverb on it, it’s fun.