After years of collaborating with people like Elvis Perkins and Lola Kirke, LA-based singer-songwriter Cornelia Murr is gearing up to release her debut album this summer. It’s called Lake Tear Of The Clouds, and it speaks from a particular place in Murr’s life. Though born in London and now residing in California, Murr lived in various locations around the States growing up, and with her first official collection of songs, she’s channeling the bucolic surroundings she experienced in Upstate New York.

Murr had always kept her songs close and personal, so when it came time to let them out into the world she teamed with a few friends, including some who knew a thing or two about drawing on the American landscape for inspiration: Lake Tear Of The Clouds was produced by My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James. “There is a place I go when I am ‘gone,'” James said about working with Murr. “It is my favorite place — what takes me there!? A touch, a laugh, but mostly sound … and this place is where I am sent whenever I hear her voice … I am lost to the world … I am sun on a leaf of grass I am water in the stream I am wind on the feather of a dove.” Alongside James, MMJ keyboardist Bo Koster and Murr’s old collaborator Kirke also contributed to the album.

Along with the announcement, Murr shared a lead single called “Man On My Mind.” Here’s what she had to say about the track:

This song was written the Summer of 2016, when a lot of hope and excitement was in the air, as well as impending doom as we now know, and this creepy rise of normalized madness: “a turbulent time.” In one sense, it is indeed about someone I had on my mind, a man I didn’t know very well and wanted to know who I was projecting a lot of fantasy onto, as we do in that deep-crush, quite creative state. In another sense, it is about the state of the earth in relation to humanity (no accident I refer to it here as “man”). To me, the voice in the song has come to belong to the earth, saying to humanity both seriously and not, it’s no big deal, you were just an experiment of mine, I’ll move on and be fine without you after you mess this whole thing up and perish, but also — I don’t want to lose you, it is a big deal, so please don’t mess it up. All in all, it’s about illusions and expectations vs. the truth.

“Man On My Mind” certainly exists in that place, the pocket of pressure in between two things, two competing urges or visions. A sense of hope vs. a sense of encroaching darkness, or infatuation vs. being over it — the “illusions and expectations vs. the truth,” as Murr put it. But while it might emerge from a particular tension, the song sounds more like a salve, like the meditation in the middle of the madness that, just maybe, will offer a sense of peace as the rest unfolds. It also comes with a video directed by Charlotte Hornsby and Jesse Ruuttila (with choreography by Juri Onuki). Check it out below.

TRACKLIST:

01 “Different This Time”
02 “Tokyo Kyoto”
03 “Man On My Mind”
04 “Cicada”
05 “Who Am I To Tell You”
06 “Billions”
07 “I Have A Woman Inside My Soul”
08 “You Got Me”

Lake Tear Of The Clouds is out 7/13 via Autumn Tone Records.

CREDIT: Rachael Pony Cassells