Video: Cornelia Murr, ‘Hang Yr Hat’

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Cornelia Murr (Photo by Julia Brokaw)

“Hang Yr Hat” is singer-songwriter Cornelia Murr’s first single since her 2018 Jim James-produced full-length “Lake Tear of the Clouds.”

It finds the London-born, L.A.-based dual citizen in typically graceful, captivating form, casting a spell with her sensual vocals, weaving intrigue with inner dialogue sung over a dreamy bed of Wurlitzer, synths and soft guitar.

The tune, she explains, was written right in early 2020 right before she went into the studio with producer Ben Babbit. “It has sat as a little pre-pandemic time capsule this past year, quarantining with me,” Murr says.

The video, directed by Audrey Turner, mixes footage shot by Jackie Bao with clips from French director Dominique Delouche’s 1960s film “Le Mime Marceau.”

“The night I wrote [the song], I had stumbled across a YouTube clip of the great mime, Marcel Marceau,” Murr says. “The pace of his movements seemed to draw out the song’s rhythm and melody, and it strangely almost felt like a collaboration.

“I was thinking about what it is to be someone who puts any creative work into the world, to be a performer especially —— the drama and sometimes the absurdity of that path. There’s a duality of being an autonomous artist on one hand, and a conduit for the audience’s projection/entertainment on the other. The mime is a good example of this, working in silence and space as a nobody, an anybody and an everybody at the same time. I was also thinking about the time in my life before I had put any music into the world, when I was in my early 20s in New York feeling pretty purposeless, untethered and lost. In a way I did a lot of performing then, too, but without much agency or awareness, a lot of unconscious shape-shifting to try to meet the expectations and fantasies of people around me.

“To hang one’s hat is to feel at home, so the song is about the process of finding that within yourself and coming from that place in whatever you do.”

||| Watch: The video for “Hang Yr Hat”

||| Previously: “Who Am I to Tell You,” “Tokyo Kyoto”