When Courtney Barnett appears on my screen from Los Angeles, she is caught in the soft inertia of the afternoon, possibly slightly over caffeinated and making time for our conversation between domestic admin and life’s endless need for organisation. For a writer that finds fertile territory in exploring the interest and intrigue of ‘the ordinary’, it seems like a perfect time to begin a conversation surrounding Barnett’s artistic practise, finding inspiration when the hands are distracted by chores allowing the mind to wander.
Barnett’s latest album, Creature of Habit, exists between the routines that hold a life together and those that restrict it. Across her catalogue, the mundane is where larger questions disguise themselves: in repeated gestures and objects encountered at precisely the moment we are ready to assign them meaning.
However, we start the conversation with a magic mantis, the symbol, cover star and even pseudo-spirit guide of the record. The insect has become the album’s talisman, appearing not as a grand religious revelation but as a small interruption whose significance Barnett chose to entertain. Even now, it continues to find her. “Just the other day, I went away to do Newport Folk Festival,” she tells me. “This is my fourth time going, I think, and it’s such a magical place. The day before I left, I was walking to get a coffee and there was this tiny, tiny mantis on the footpath.”
Whilst Barnett views herself as largely pragmatic, this mantis seemed to be louder than most, “I don’t know, it’s just one of those things. Sometimes it feels like this really nice little sign from the universe. It’s one of those things that has popped up a few times during this album process. It’s like a little good-luck charm or something that I don’t quite fully understand.”
The ambiguity is important as it leaves room for imagination, Barnett does not pretend to understand the mantis or insist that its appearance contains an objective message. Its power lies in the meeting point between chance and attention. While writing in the desert, struggling and feeling lost, she saw one appear and accepted it as a sign that she was moving in the right direction.
The mantis is an example of an image that embodies a central tension in Barnett’s artistic character as her songs move between meticulous observation and restless introspection, converting the concrete world into an arena for private uncertainty. Yet she is not naturally mystical. She is grounded by an industry that requires dreams to be converted into schedules, journeys and performances. “I would say I’m typically quite a practical realist,” she says. “I can be a bit of a dreamer, but things like this don’t often happen to me. When I do come across something that really feels like it’s trying to tell me something, it feels like the volume is really turned up. “If it’s coming through that powerfully, then I know I have to follow it or take notice, really listen. I guess that’s what I was doing.”
Perhaps this is the balance an artist must maintain: enough realism to complete the work, enough susceptibility to mystery to begin it. The dreamer and the administrator are not opposing figures but necessary collaborators. One notices the sign; the other builds an album around the impulse to follow it. Barnett speaks about each record as another education, through which knowledge creates new ways of inhabiting uncertainty. From her first album Sometimes I Just Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit, to her latest, Barnett’s expanded growth as an artist comes partially through her expanding collaborators such as producer John Congleton, drummer Stella Mozgawa and bassists Zach Dawes and Flea. Inviting them into the work meant tolerating the terror of not knowing what a session might produce.
“If it’s coming through that powerfully, then I know I have to follow it or take notice, really listen. I guess that’s what I was doing.”
“Every album, I feel like, thank God, I’m learning something and taking steps forward,” Barnett says. “It always feels like a giant learning curve. You get that even when you’re working with the same people, because we all change and grow in different ways. For this record, I worked with a couple of different people. That is so challenging but rewarding, because I was outside my comfort zone and pushing myself. It’s such a confusion of terror and delight. I definitely learned a lot and pushed through a lot of those fears, which felt good by the end.” The push and pull of terror and delight is not just a tension exclusive to artists, but a human experience we all feel when challenging ourselves beyond our comfort zone.
Barnett speaks openly about stress and overwhelm during recording as the process extended beyond her plans. But the disruption also revealed the community that a decade of music had created around her. “I guess I’m learning, as I get older, that it’s so beautiful that I’ve met these different people around the world,” she says. “I can say to someone like Zach, ‘Do you want to come in for a few hours and see what happens on this song?’ It’s a feeling of gratitude, but it also comes from taking risks and stepping outside my comfort zone, because that kind of thing can be terrifying to me.”
Her collaboration with Flea emerged from playing a Patti Smith tribute together. Flea and Mozgawa had their own shared history, allowing Barnett to enter a room with two musicians whose abilities she trusted without predetermining the result. The stature surrounding Flea could easily have made the experience intimidating, but she has always spoken of the love with which he approaches music. In practice, Barnett found his immersion in the act of playing made that mythology and household recognition recede.
“When I was thinking about Flea, I was thinking about what a beautiful musician he is,” she says. “He was so in the moment and so focused that all the other stuff drifted away, the fact of who he is and the history of what he’s done. There was something really soulful about the way he approached music.” That quality of presence offered its own instruction, as did Mozgawa’s way of absorbing and experimenting with music. Collaboration becomes contact with forms of attention Barnett could not access alone: less a matter of borrowing another musician’s sound than witnessing how another person enters the work.
Collaboration is key for so many artists, but equally crucial is finding, protecting and developing their own personal voice, their je nais se quois, their idiosyncratic perspective that colours the music uniquely their own. When I ask Barnett whether a single narrative thread belongs exclusively to her across her catalogue, she responds with the kind of self-awareness that is both funny and disarmingly candid. “When I finished the album and started performing it, I thought, ‘Oh my God, sometimes I feel like I’m saying the same thing over and over.’ That thing seems to be: I’m trying to get my shit together. I’m trying to get my head together. That seems to be what I’ve been trying to do for the last 12 years of releasing music. I’m just saying it in a slightly different way every day.”
“When I was thinking about Flea, I was thinking about what a beautiful musician he is. He was so in the moment and so focused that all the other stuff drifted away, the fact of who he is and the history of what he’s done. There was something really soulful about the way he approached music.”
A recurring question changes because the person asking it changes, so Barnett’s self discovery avoids all repetition due to her newest form questioning the newest person. The work becomes less a sequence of definitive answers than a consciousness revisiting its essential preoccupations and questions.
She is drawn to the word “questioning”, and to the curiosity that survives beneath those repeated attempts at self-organisation. When writing fails to arrive, she seeks companionship in other artists who have publicly grappled with doubt. Leonard Cohen is a recurring figure, inspiring not only through the songs themselves but through his struggles and inconsistencies. Barnett has increasingly found solace in hearing artists explain why they make things at all.
“I really fell in love with listening to artists talk about being artists: why they’re artists, what their motivation is,” she says. “I guess I’m always coming back to that. I’m like, ‘Why the hell am I doing this? What am I doing, and why the hell am I doing it?’ As time goes on, I find that more and more fascinating. For some reason, the only book I can think of is Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I read a lot of books like that: poets, authors or songwriters talking about why they do what they do and how they do it. I found a lot of solace in that.”
The ever persistent ‘why’ can follow Barnett onto the stage. Like all great artists, a certain nervousness remains, although age and experience have altered its intensity. She hesitates to call the change 'confidence', rather it is closer to a gradual reduction in self-doubt, an increased ability to recognise the fear without allowing it to occupy the entire frame. “The self-doubt is still there,” she says. “It creeps in, but it’s less than when I was in my twenties. I was more hard on myself. I struggled a lot more.”
Performing in the wake of COVID produced a more decisive shift, illuminating different parts of the ever elusive ‘why’. Touring while audiences still wore masks, amid the difficulty and uncertainty of that period, brought her closer to understanding what performance offered and why she continued to pursue it. “I remember feeling a different level of gratitude for it, and a different understanding of why I was doing it,” she says. “I felt a little closer to the answer to that question than I had before.” For Barnett the actuality of the experience made it feel a little less existential perhaps.
“The self-doubt is still there. It creeps in, but it’s less than when I was in my twenties. I was more hard on myself. I struggled a lot more.”
However, Barnett is not interested in doubt for its own sake. Questioning has an ethical and artistic function: it prevents the rituals of a career from emptying into habit. “I do think it’s good to constantly be questioning, to be curious, to check in and assess things,” she says. “Why do I actually do this? Why do we tour? Why do I want to perform in front of people? What’s the intention? What is the actual feeling behind it? If you don’t know that, then it’s another level of going through the motions, and it feels even more pointless.” There may be no stable equation for maintaining enough understanding to remain present and enough mystery to remain curious. Barnett leaves it deliberately unresolved, remaining in a liminal state, a state of tension means there is no conclusion or end to the curious creativity.
When Barnett thinks of returning home she is “lucky enough to consider Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart all hometowns, because I’ve lived in all of them and still have family there. They all feel like hometown shows in different ways. There’s something comforting but also terrifying about Australian shows.” Yet, the familiarity does not make performance easier. It makes comfort and fear arrive at once.“I’m almost more nervous, but I’m also more comfortable at the same time,” she says. “I find it really confusing.” It’s almost like the phenomena of where we would rather reveal our secrets and inner workings to strangers, rather than our close family and friends.
Returning home, then, does not resolve the contradictions that animate Barnett’s work: comfort exists alongside terror, discipline alongside dreaming, and experience alongside uncertainty. Like the mantis that continues to cross her path, the questions do not necessarily arrive with answers. Their value lies in making her pause, pay attention and choose her direction with intention.
The Melbourne singer-songwriter will play shows in Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney this November. Ticket information available on the Frontier Touring website.
Feature image by Pooneh Ghana
