Courtney Barnett: ‘I think an album is a document of time’

Courtney Barnett lives in a city that spent longer under lockdown than anywhere else in the world, and which also claims to have the most live music venues per person. But the Australian singer-songwriter is not in Melbourne when we speak. She is in Joshua Tree, California, preparing for a US tour that begins later this month in support of her new album, Things Take Time, Take Time.

It is her third solo LP, following 2015’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit and 2018’s Tell Me How You Really Feel. Having come up through Melbourne’s prolific indie scene playing in bands, her own work has brought her international attention, including nominations for Grammy and Brit awards. Her fellow nominees for best international female solo artist at the Brits in 2016 included Ariana Grande, Björk and Lana Del Rey — unusual company for a DIY musician who set up her own label, Milk! Records, in order to release her music.

Things Take Time, Take Time opens with a portrait of her home city during one of its 262 days of lockdowns since March 2020. “Rae Street” is named after a Melbourne address where Barnett, 34, spent some of last year living in a friend’s empty apartment. The song finds her pulling a chair to the window to observe minutiae outside, like a suburban update of a Dutch village painting. A garbage truck inches down the road, dogs on leads get entangled, a mother screams at children making a racket, day turns into night. Vaulting thoughts about making changes to life are undercut by mundane ones about changing her bedsheets.

“As much as I did not want to be writing those songs, they were what was happening,” she says of the song and the record’s other lockdown chronicles, such as a track inspired by regular Zoom conversations with a group of friends. “I think an album is a document of time.”

A 2018 study found that in Melbourne there was one music venue for every 9,503 residents, the highest proportion of venues per head in the world. There has been anger at the slow lifting of Covid restrictions for the sector following the end of the city’s lockdown last month.

“I understand the anger and upset of people being left out, it’s a whole industry of people being kind of ignored,” Barnett says. “It’s frustrating when they bring back things like big horseracing events or football games and leave music out of it.”

We talk by video call. Barnett sits in a room with light spilling through a roof window in the sloping ceiling behind her. Rooms often feature in her songs, such as a 2015 track called “An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in New York)” in which she lies awake at 4am counting the cracks in an unfamiliar wall while trying to take her mind off a person she is missing back home.

In her new songs, the perspective shifts. Their protagonists, all voiced in the first person by Barnett, tend to be looking out of rooms; no less trapped, perhaps, but with a prospect of release at least. “Yes, the album seems to be doing that, I think. Maybe more so than before,” she says.

It could be a friend or a lover or someone I saw on the street. The ‘you’ is interchangeable

Her songs have a vintage alt-rock feel: Nirvana and PJ Harvey were among the acts she grew up listening to. They have a deceptively low-key bearing. Barnett plays guitar — thick, fuzzy guitar riffs, lazy-sounding until being skewered by off-beam solos — and drawls her vocals in a slow sing-speak, a drowsy form of phrasing that belies the sharpness of her lyrics. Earlier songs especially had a witty, self-deprecating sensibility, such as the vignette of a hapless swimmer trying to impress the attractive occupant of a neighbouring lane with a disastrous tumble turn in “Aqua Profunda!”. 

The songs are often addressed to a “you”. “Normally the ‘I’ is me but I would say the ‘you’ is always changing. I’ll just write the song to that person. It could be a friend or a lover or someone I saw on the street. The ‘you’ is interchangeable.”

For much of the last decade Barnett was in a relationship with another Melbourne singer-songwriter, Jen Cloher, with whom she co-founded Milk! Records in 2012. “You’re riding round the world/You’re doing this and signing that,” Cloher sang in her 2017 song “Forgot Myself”, in reference to Barnett’s absence while she toured the world. As though foreshadowed publicly, they split the following year. Such painful airings of private woes are an occupational hazard for observational singer-songwriters who fall in and out of love with each other.

“It was a learning process,” Barnett says of her transformation into the “you” of another person’s song. “I probably didn’t overthink it at the time. It was just part of what was happening. Now I’m more like: ‘Oh, I don’t want to talk about that.’ I feel like I share a lot of stuff in my music or in the lyrics or the artwork.”

Her musical life began when she started playing guitar aged nine or 10, a left-hander strumming away at right-handed models, like a junior Hendrix (one of her first musical heroes). She grew up in Sydney before her family moved to Hobart, Tasmania, when she was a teenager. The home was filled with the sounds of classical music; her mother was a dancer with the Australian Ballet. Her father, a screenprinter, favoured jazz. “Not really any rock or pop. Just a lot of Miles Davis.”

She remembers dissecting “To Her Door”, a song by the Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, in an English class. “That was a real moment when I could see how a song is put together. Up until then we’d done poetry at school and we’d dissected certain books, sometimes it felt just out of reach. There was something about that song especially that was more relatable and accessible. He was painting a picture with words which was different from Shakespeare or The Crucible. He was singing about taxis — I could see the world in front of me.” 

It’s about trusting that things happen in the right time and the right place. Instead of worrying about it, just keep on working, keep on moving forward

Barnett has been tagged as a modern version of the slacker, that determinedly work-shy, reflexively ironic archetype of US alternative culture from the late 1980s and early 1990s. An Australian sub-genre semi-mockingly known as “dolewave” emerged in the 2010s, to which she was linked, a humorously humdrum style of indie songcraft named after being on the dole, ie claiming unemployment benefit.

But Things Take Time, Take Time dials down the comic aspects of her older work. Made with Stella Mozgawa, the Australian drummer with US band Warpaint, who plays on the album and co-produced it with Barnett, it has a sense of plugging away patiently through life’s trials. “Take It Day by Day”, as the title of a song puts it.

“I have definitely learnt a lot more about patience,” she says. “I think in a musical sense, I used to be scared that when I finished a song I wouldn’t be able to write another one, or when I finished an album another one wouldn’t come. It’s about trusting that things happen in the right time and the right place. Instead of worrying about it, just keep on working, keep on moving forward. Eventually things work out how they’re supposed to.”

‘Things Take Time, Take Time’ is available from November 12

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the FT’s pop critic

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