“‘Kitchen Floor’ is an excellent showcase and calling card for Cornelius. As it becomes immediately clear on ‘Kitchen Floor’ she’s got an impassioned, soulful, and demanding voice. The song unfolds in a kind of mid-tempo brilliance that more than captures your attention with an anthemic chorus and Cornelius’s inviting vocals.” - WXPN, Song of the Week

A lot has changed since Jess Cornelius began writing the songs that would comprise Distance. 

For starters, she moved halfway around the world from Melbourne, Australia to Los Angeles. At the time, Cornelius — who was born and raised in New Zealand — had a few new songs and the idea of finally making a record of her own, excited to start fresh after several years as the primary songwriter in the Melbourne-based outfit Teeth and Tongue. 

But the distance that Cornelius addresses over the course of these 10 songs is hardly a geographical one. Instead, the album — her solo debut on Loantaka Records—finds a deft songwriter analyzing the space between society’s expectations for her and her own dreams; between the illusion of love and the reality of disappointment; between a past she is ready to let go of and a future she could have hardly imagined. 

As Cornelius puts it, “A lot of the record was about me deciding to continue this nomadic lifestyle of being a musician. I wrote about coming to terms with that reality. People would ask me if I was going to have a family and a lot of the songs are about me being ok with not pursuing that path. It was about coming to terms with the choices I had made.” 

She adds with a laugh, “And then two years later, I’m knocked up and married. I couldn’t have imagined that.”

Distance is a living, breathing document of a songwriter in the pursuit of living life on her own terms. Given the chain of events that occurred since beginning the record, it feels like an album Cornelius had to make, in order to begin the next chapter of her life. 

While the sonic tones and textures on the album evoke certain classic staples of Americana, soul and rock and roll, Cornelius’ lyrics anchor the songs to a deeply personal place. As she says, “I am a fan of classic songwriting but I would hope that the lyrics are not of any time historically but rather this time of my life as a woman.”

As a result, the songs showcase her gift for delivering a devastating line over the most soothing of sounds. On “Body Memory”, the last song she wrote for the record, Cornelius intones over a calming electro-rhythm “When we met I used to make you laugh/then we lost the baby and it broke my heart,” adding later: “My body has a memory and it won’t forget.” Similarly, on “Here Goes Nothing,” Cornelius parries with a messy affair, noting “Nothing kills lust like real life,” with a hint of a sneer, reveling in the kind of adroit summation that would take a lesser writer an entire album to try to attain. 

  “Jess Cornelius shares her beautiful and emotional new single "No Difference", an empowering jam that is accurately described in the press release as ‘part self-help mantra, part blind fatalism.’” – Gorilla Vs Bear

Despite this command and perspective over situations, Cornelius is not afraid to be messy. To let her uncool side hang out, with unabashed honesty. On “Banging My Head,” she wonders if she’s “a fucking idiot” or “a fool”, blasting through a straight ahead rock and roll number, at turns evincing shades of Edie Brickell and eighties Iggy Pop. On “Kitchen Floor,” she’s mapping the space between the bedroom and the front door over a Roy Orbison tinged rave-up, lamenting the coming pain: “This is gonna be a hard one.” 

But Cornelius is not only concerned with the distances between herself and others. “Born Again” is a stirring meditation on aging where she plots the distance of her whole life over the course of four minutes, while “No Difference” — which NPR described as set in a location perfect for “the questions of womanhood, aging and vanity that Cornelius seeks to answer,” when it was released as a single last year — examines the distance between our own personal heaven and hell. And our ability to navigate that space. 

And on album closer, “Love and Self Esteem”, Cornelius once again lets loose with an economical bit of soul searching: “sometimes I don’t know the difference between love and low self-esteem.” 

“The soul-baring tune is a vast departure from the fast-paced tracks previously heard on Teeth & Tongue records. Cornelius steps into her own and makes her powerful voice the focal point of the raw earworm.” – Nylon Magazine

Similarly, the album’s sounds and tones were also selected with great care. Cornelius says it was important for the album to reflect the local music scene of her new home. With the help of producer Tony Buchen — another Australian transplant who approached Cornelius after a show at Los Angeles’ Bootleg Theater — Distance became a roving affair, recorded in a string of Los Angeles studios with a changing cast of friends and local musicians. 

The album features contributions by Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint), harpist Mary Lattimore, Emily Elhaj (Angel Olsen), Stephanie Drootin (Bright Eyes), Jesse Quebbeman-Turley (Hand Habits), whistler Molly Lewis and special appearances by Justin Sullivan (Night Shop, Kevin Morby) and Laura Jean Anderson.

The playing on Distance is delicate and emphatic, but hardly the bloodless precision of a collection of hired guns. It sounds like people in a room playing together, which Cornelius says was the intention. “I wanted a break from [my] past ways of recording. With this album it was important to just go into a room with people and get a sound. It’s something I hadn’t done before personally, so for me it was new.”

The journey over Distance is a celebration of this newness. New beginnings and new perspectives on endings. 

From the chaos of a vagabond lifestyle to expecting a child just weeks before the albums’ release and researching the most sustainable ways to tour in the coming years. This is the distance Cornelius covers over the course of the albums’ ten songs. 

The result is an album where listeners get to hear a songwriter in the midst of a transformation. Giving weight to her prophecy: “One of these days I’m gonna be born again.”

Now based in LA, New Zealand-born and raised Jess Cornelius grew up musically in Australia, where she released three critically acclaimed albums with her Melbourne-based project Teeth & Tongue, receiving nominations for the Australian Music Prize and a J-Award in 2016.

Renowned for the seductive state of ease and intensity she occupies in live performance, Cornelius won crowds the world over playing alongside Courtney Barnett, J. Mascis, Vance Joy and Laura Marling, and was as well as at Meredith Music Festival, Laneway Festival, Falls Festival and SXSW. Shape-shifting through a variety of roles, Cornelius displays an intimidating command of her own songs, delivering powerful performances of brutal simplicity and rawness of feeling.

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Distance will be released on July 24th on Loantaka Records. 

Cornelius plans to tour whenever people are able to tour again.

 All songs recorded by Tony Buchen at West Avenue 34, 64 Sound and Stella Sound, Los Angeles except:

Palm Trees + Easy For No One recorded by Jarvis Traveniere at Comp-ny LA, additional recording by Tony Buchen at West Avenue 34.

Body Memory recorded by Daniel McNeil at Balboa, LA, additional recording by Tony Buchen at West Avenue 34.

Produced and mixed by Tony Buchen, written by Jess Cornelius.