In the small town of Red Cloud, Nebraska, Cornelia Murr stripped wallpaper from the walls of an old house and, layer by layer, stripped away something deeper. The London-born, New York-based artist spent months in near-total isolation there, renovating a century-old home while crafting her second album, Run to the Center. Released this past February, the record represents a stunning evolution for Murr, whose 2018 debut Lake Tear of the Clouds (produced by My Morning Jacket’s Jim James) established her as a purveyor of hazy folk and cosmic soul. This new work perfects her signature style by featuring songs with structures of unpredictable elegance that break conventional rules; it elevates listeners in a supreme moment, guides them into a sudden harbour where a fresh rhythmic change awaits, introduces bullfrog sounds, incorporates a touch of strings and horns, sustains arches of synth, and showcases playful keyboards moving like a caterpillar staircase.
The vision for Run to the Center crystallized for Murr when she recorded the title track. “That one was written towards the end of the process of making the album, just before Luke Temple came out to Nebraska to finish arrangements with me,” she recalls. “It came out all in one piece and felt like a final statement in a way on what that chapter had been about: allowing yourself the space to sit with big anxious questions, to lean into your purpose, to no longer let anything get in the way.”
The house itself became more than a workplace. It transformed into an extension of Murr’s own process of transformation, a physical manifestation of the internal work she was undertaking. The title track contains the lines “stripping leaves off the centuries/maps of other worlds/obscured destinies,” which Murr explains is “a reference to a few things, one being the stripping of wallpaper, which was a near-endless task in the renovation process. The house had many layers of old, heavily glued wallpaper over crumbling walls behind it that I then had to restore, so the wallpaper had to come off first, and sometimes it seemed it would never end.”
But within this tedious labour, Murr found unexpected poetry. “On good days, the act of stripping it revealed shapes that looked like maps and clouds to me, parallel universes and lives being led,” she says. The reference to “obscured destinies” also nods to Willa Cather, the author who hails from Red Cloud and wrote a book with that very title, which Murr was reading during her time there. “Sometimes it felt like I was stripping layers of the past off myself. The house often felt like an extension of my body during the process, which that song also mentions.”
The album is ripe with curiosity and dilemma, an open gate of philosophical ruminations exploring ideas of how life will thrive wherever it can, questions of how we all make it through amidst the unnatural systems we live inside of, and the complexities of shelf-life love. Murr’s lyrics range from cryptic to colloquial with splashes of proverb, turning her daily life into metaphors. Some elements feel city, some pastoral.

Family threads weave through the record in unexpected ways. Murr’s mother contributes flute to “Pushing East” and also created artwork for the album. For Murr, this collaboration represented a profound shift in their relationship. “Being able to collaborate with a parent artistically is a very special and unusual feeling to me. It’s so different from the parent/child dynamic,” she reflects. “It entails seeing them as a teammate and in this case, since it was my project, I got to sort of direct and guide as well, as opposed to the other way around. Mostly my mom is just a very talented person and it made perfect sense to ask her to contribute flutes and also artwork, because those are skills she really has, besides being my mum. But of course because she is my mum her mark on things is more meaningful to me.”
The choice to create this album in geographic isolation was deliberate. For an artist who has described feeling simultaneously drawn to run and torn by indecision, positioning herself in the literal middle of nowhere provided necessary perspective. “It felt a bit like sitting on a perch where I could survey the options and the questions from a distance. Or on the fulcrum between things, which felt stable in a way,” Murr explains. “It was extremely lonely at times but I think I needed to tune out everything else for a bit to hear myself in the noise.”
The album’s architecture reflects this journey from confusion to clarity, from anxiety to acceptance. It opens with “Skylight” and closes with “Bless Yr Lil Heart,” two tracks that function as emotional bookends. “Skylight is about the return of optimism and hope upon looking down a new path, remembering life can change suddenly and become just about anything,” Murr says. “Bless is a bit of a laugh at yourself on the carousel of that cycle: hope, doubt, confusion, repeat. Or something like that. It’s a broader look at how fickle it is to be guided in life by emotion and sort of forgiving myself for that.”
Reviewers have described the album as hypnotic, ethereal, and dense, a dream-pop-folk hybrid that showcases Murr’s artful weaving of the abstract and universal. When asked if she deliberately aimed for this atmospheric resonance, Murr’s answer is refreshingly simple: “I can’t say I ever envision what the atmosphere of a record will be. It just shapes itself.” From her poetic mountain, covered in delicacies of tone, she delivers an album of surprises, with a whistling solo and vocals of demi-god allure.
Since releasing Run to the Center, Murr has been navigating the challenge of translating these intricate studio creations to the stage. Live performance has historically been difficult for her, but something has shifted. “I’m having a lot more fun playing live these days on account of having a band, as opposed to playing solo as I often did in earlier years,” she shares. “It’s been fun, for one thing, to be freed up from playing instruments at times and experiment with moving around the stage. It requires you to be pretty free in your body to do that which is a good exercise for me.”

Murr has stated publicly that she wants her music to be a balm in turbulent times. When fans reach out to tell her that her songs bring them healing or solace, she experiences it as both an honour and a relief. “Like the circuit is complete,” she says. “The music is doing its job out there so I don’t have to think about it and can think about new songs and new things.”
Revisiting the album now, certain lyrics have taken on new resonance. “Perhaps I’d say the sentiment in ‘This Will All Change,'” Murr notes. “We don’t do that one live every show, just once in a blue moon, and when I come back to the song it’s just of course always true, that things have changed, that they will continue to. I sometimes can grasp that I’m in a new place from the last time I thought about the song.”
If she could invite listeners to physically inhabit one track from the album, to get lost in it and experience it as a tangible space, Murr would choose “Spiral of Beauty.” “I would hope they feel the pull of a spiral, a corkscrew, a slide not downwards but inside of a shell, only to be spat out into a garden where the naked lady lilies are blooming, time doesn’t exist, and all beings are growing older and younger at different intervals concurrently,” she envisions.
This year, Murr also released B-Sides, comprised of two new singles, “Treaty” and “Gotta Give,” that exemplify the intimate storytelling and lush, hypnotic soundscapes that have been steadily earning her a devoted following. Her trajectory from the fantasias of her debut (which brought to mind Broadcast, Stereolab’s most pastoral moments, and the spooky romance of Beach House) through the sparkling pop explorations of her 2022 EP Corridor (which No Depression described as “as much an exploration of sparkling pop as it is a deeply felt meditation on the ache of being alive”) to the philosophical depth of Run to the Center shows an artist unafraid to follow her curiosity wherever it leads.
Having toured and collaborated with contemporaries such as Rodrigo Amarante, Lucius, Michael Nau, and Alice Boman, Murr has found her voice in a musical landscape that increasingly values authenticity and emotional depth. Her wanting everything at the same time has formed a real-life masterpiece that will bless any little heart that listens. In that Nebraska house, amidst peeling wallpaper and existential questions, Cornelia Murr found her centre, and in doing so, created a work that helps others find theirs.
Photos – Rett Rogers & Andres Amaya
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