Courtney Barnett's departure from doubt

She had just finished a summer of touring her second solo record Tell Me How You Really Feel which, in hindsight, she now refers to as her “falling apart album.” Before, filling notebooks with nonsensical musings and writing songs about the inner-workings of her brain was a therapeutic exercise but, all of a sudden, Barnett felt like she was swimming in glue.

There’s a moment buried in that record where Barnett spells it out. “Everybody wants to have their say / Forever waiting for some car crash / I need a little time out / I need a little time out / From me / And you” she sings in “Need A Little Time.” In the song’s accompanying music video, Barnett and her guitar float through space, the only place where they can be alone together. She needs a moment away from herself and everything else down on Earth – the responsibility to feel and to swiftly document it. For the Aussie singer-songwriter, who had been making music since she was a teenager, now seemed like the perfect time to pivot.

It wasn’t until the start of the pandemic in 2020 that Barnett discovered that songwriting doesn’t have to be a chore. Conversely, she found herself using it as an escape in a moment of loneliness, fear, and uncertainty. In 2021, she released Things Take Time, Take Time, the record that helped Barnett re-center herself in her craft. Moving forward, she would encourage herself to use music as a means of meditation and self care.

Six years later, Barnett is approaching the March 27 release of her fourth record. On Creature of Habit, Barnett is still a rambler, an anxious thinker, and an unapologetic oversharer, but she isn’t looking for explanations or answers. Instead, Barnett is leaning into the subconscious – the area of her brain over which she has less control.

Barnett joins our call from her makeshift home studio in Los Angeles, a modest attic covered in wooden paneling for acoustics. She doesn’t need much equipment to make demos, besides her drum machine, guitar amp, and a little TASCAM microphone to record vocals into. Barnett brings little company into her home studio, maintaining a mostly private production process. “I normally don’t like showing people things until they’re, like, pretty close to finished,” she says. “I just want them to sound good and sound right.”

Music has been a part of Barnett’s life for as long as she can remember. “I was just obsessed with music as a kid,” she recalls. “I started playing guitar when I was pretty young because my older brother did, and I wanted to copy him.” The two would borrow mixtapes from their neighbour, building a repertoire of rock-and-roll, from Jimi Hendrix to Rage Against The Machine.

Barnett remembers when she realised that she had the tools to create songs. It wasn’t as complicated as she thought. “My guitar teacher said, ‘These four chords I’m about to show you … You can write any song you want with them.’” And so, she did. Barnett performed at her first open mic night at 18-years-old and played with several bands in Melbourne.

All the while, the songwriter was fixated on her pursuits as a solo artist. Her grandmother gave her a loan to kickstart her music career, and Barnett self-released two EPs – How to Carve a Carrot into a Rose and I've Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris – under Milk! Records, a label she founded with musician Jen Cloher in 2012. In 2013, the EPs were combined and re-released by Marathon Artists’ House Anxiety Records as The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas.

The pièce de résistance of The Double EP is lead single “Avant Gardener,” a gripping introduction to Barnett as a storyteller and a musical force. The song chronicles a lazy Monday morning during a heatwave, wherein Barnett suffers from an asthma attack while gardening. While detailing this ill-fated experience, her anxiety-laden stream-of-consciousness catapulted Barnett into the spotlight.

Fast-forward through her coming-of-age records, The Double EP and first full-length 2015 release Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, she's working at a bar in Melbourne, consumed by the pressures of growing into herself and making big decisions.

Following the aforementioned Tell Me How You Really Feel tour, Barnett wrote Things Take Time, Take Time in lockdown. It was the first time she had lived alone and, like most of us, she found herself in an emotional rut. “After Tell Me How You Really Feel, part of me was just like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do this anymore.’ I was so fucking sad and depressed, so I wasn’t really planning on making more music,” she says.

It was at this moment that a switch flipped. Barnett says, “I was like, ‘Well, I might as well write a song because I don’t know what else to do.’” Eight years into a career of writing, recording, and releasing music, Barnett realised that she runs to music to get through the hard times. Songwriting has become a sixth sense – a practice she relies on.

Barnett approached the Things Take Time tour with a renewed sense of self-awareness as a musician. Though she’d never be completely rid of writer’s block and pesky self-doubt, Barnett knew that she chose the right path. 

“Then I, kind of, moved to America without really meaning to,” she says matter-of-factly, as if this is a regular course of action. Barnett had toyed with the idea of moving to Los Angeles before the pandemic, but her decision was delayed for three years. What followed the move was another bout of asking herself, “What comes next?” I find myself reassured by Barnett’s forthrightness about being confused and unsure often.

She started by composing End Of The Day, an instrumental soundtrack for Danny Cohen’s 2022 film Anonymous Club. The documentary follows Barnett over three years, including the Tell Me How You Really Feel tour in 2018. End Of The Day lifts a curtain on this complex year for Barnett, where she reached her most revered and her most emotionally detached at the same time.

At the start of 2023, she started writing Creature of Habit. “I hadn’t written a song in a while, so it took me a minute to get into the flow of it,” she says. “It felt like I’d forgotten how to do it.” Barnett gave herself a year to see what she could come up with, sticking to a disciplined routine of writing every day. She journaled her dreams in the mornings, studying her more subliminal patterns and fixations. “It’s this unfiltered part of your brain that plays with symbols and metaphors and dances around the edge of the thought, instead of just shooting down the middle,” she explains, noting their influence in the writing of her fourth record.

After her first recording session in Joshua Tree in 2024, the record felt far from finished: “I was like, ‘This album’s never gonna get finished. I’m a terrible songwriter. All this spiralling blah, blah, blah, bad stuff.’ And then, I was like, ‘Shut up. Just keep working on it.’” Sometimes, Barnett would procrastinate finishing a song by starting a new one. This untraditional songwriting strategy birthed “Stay In Your Lane,” the electrifying, punk rock opening track to the Creature of Habit era. In the chorus, Barnett proclaims, “Rip this thing out of my chest / Clip my wings, I’ll do my best,” over a gritty bassline and thrashing guitar riffs. The background vocals are the angels on Barnett’s shoulder, encouraging her to be patient – a sentiment the record goes on to amplify.

The “Stay In Your Lane” music video, directed by Alex Ross Perry, is inspired by Barnett’s first experience with sleep paralysis, she explains. In this particular dream, a rat crawled through her mouth and into her head. After recounting this disturbing story to Perry, along with her desire to make a Cronenberg-esque B-grade body horror film, the final product is a campy, 1980s sequence of an ear piercing gone wrong. Barnett sings and plays guitar, sporting a suede brown overcoat atop her hospital gown. Bloodied and lethargic from a traumatic surgery, she maintains that she has no choice but to compose herself and perform.

Second single “Site Unseen” takes an airer, less urgent approach to grappling with anxiety. Barnett admits she recorded the song three times before she invited Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield to sing the song as a duet. The first time she heard Crutchfield’s vocals mesh with hers in the fourth recording, Barnett cried with relief, having found the song’s missing piece in Crutchfield’s sweet Southern drawl. The duo takes turns promising each other that no decision is too permanent: “I know it seems like a lot / it’s only for a year.”

Several songs on Creature of Habit feel like direct addresses. When asked if she has specific people in mind when she’s writing, she struggles to find an answer, at first. “Sometimes it might change through the process of writing the song, which is really weird and confusing,” she says.

One such track that evolved from having “nobody in mind” initially, to focusing on an acquaintance, then a close friend, and finally Barnett herself, is “Mostly Patient." With its “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” quality, the track finds its footing as a stripped-down, gentle message of encouragement. “I feel like it’s not linear,” Barnett says of the song. “I never really start a song [knowing] what it’s gonna be about or who it’s for because it always shifts.” Barnett finds it more difficult to make music when she thinks too much.

As Courtney Barnett nears the release of Creature of Habit, she’s proud to have found joy in making music again. She doesn’t need a pandemic or a panic attack to make songs – just some empty pages, a wandering imagination, and a few stories to tell. “I think it took so much doubt to get it finished, and now I’m in this place where I did all of the hard work of doubting myself and fixing everything until I thought it was the way it was supposed to be,” she says. “Now I can confidently say, ‘Here are my songs. I hope you all find something that means something to you.’ That’s my only wish.”