[8] She has named David Bowie, Karen Dalton, Stephin Merritt, Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed, Arthur Russell, Elliott Smith, Van Etten, Elyse Weinberg, Gillian Welch, Yo La Tengo and Young as influences.
[20] The critic Bob Mersereau of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation praised the album as "a strong collection of songwriter tunes backing by a solid rock groove", and wrote "there's a definite spark about" Cornfield.
[22] The album was recorded live at Rooster Studios in Toronto, Ontario, was produced by Don Kerr and features appearances from Tim Darcy of Ought and Johnny Spence of Tegan and Sara.
[27] Sarah Greene, reviewing Future Snowbird for Exclaim!, wrote that Cornfield "usually opts for unlikely, slightly awkward rhymes and metaphors, her oddball lyrical choices walking the line between heartfelt and goofy but always quotable, with songs often landing in delightfully unexpected places" and concluded that "Kerr got some lovely organic performances out of Cornfield and the band, who sound like they lived in the songs a while before they recorded.
"[8] Liam Prost of BeatRoute Magazine wrote that Future Snowbird was "substantially more listener friendly" than Two Horses, but argued that "her narratives just don't land nearly as hard as she proves herself capable of on her older cuts".
The album features collaborations with Kevin Drew, Brendan Canning and Charles Spearin of Broken Social Scene, Shawn Everett and Leif Vollebekk.
Ruether praised "Storm Clouds", "Andrew" and "Up the Hill" for their "electricity and emotion", and concluded "The Shape of Your Name has an elegiac quality to it: there is plenty of mourning within these songs, but there are also rays of a bright future.
[32] In My Corner, a four-track EP featuring two original songs alongside covers of Lucinda Williams and Yo La Tengo, was released in March 2020.
[3] Cornfield began work on the album during a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, which ended early due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and completed it after returning home to Montreal.
[15] Reviewing the album in Exclaim!, Laura Stanley described it as an examination of "the dizzyingly sweet moments that happen even when things feel unbearably bad" and as musically "both playful and raw-sounding.
argued the album "weaves a rich tapestry of quotidian moments" and proposed that Cornfield could be a successor to Gordon Lightfoot's "mantle of quiet profundity".
[37] The Toronto Star's Richie Assaly described Could Have Done Anything as an expression of Cornfield's "gift for penning simple but evocative lyrics that carry listeners to a specific time or place".