'I Don’t Garden Really Anymore Because It Freaks Me Out'

The pub in which we speak to Courtney Barnett is playing a weird folk-acoustic blend, with lashes of Lorde. Barnett orders a vodka neat, we order a cider. She’s just come across the road from FBi’s Sydney studio, where she’s just given the members of Dune Rats a haircut live on air. She’s wearing her signature band tee-and-jean combination, hair tousled, dirt beneath her fingernails. She’s got a rather nasty cold, maybe because it’s week two of their Laneway festival run and the weather has just taken a rainy turn. She mumbles, raking her fingers through her hair when she pauses before answering a question. Courtney Barnett is a fidgeter.

“Singapore was kinda nerve-wracking because it felt like the first time we’d played since December. I think we’d done other things but I can’t remember. It was - I don’t know, scary, to start off with, but once we were on stage it kind of came back to us which was good. The crowds have been really great and it’s been fun hanging out with all the other bands and stuff.

“We try not to overrehearse too much, just to keep ourselves guessing.”

The singer-songwriter with the laconic drawl almost speaks slower than she sings, peering down at her vodka glass. In stark opposition to her songs, she rarely rambles: she’s direct, shrugging off long-winded questions. At Laneway, Golden Plains and A Festival Called PANAMA, the setlist for Barnett and band covered off the singles from her first two EPs: Avant Gardener, History Eraser, Lance Jnr, but was packed with unreleased songs from her debut full-length record, Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit.

"I don’t garden really anymore because it freaks me out."

Is it daunting to play unreleased tunes to a festival audience? “I try not to read into it too much, because sometimes people can be standing still, and you think they’re hating it, but they’re really just standing still out of interest of hearing a new song, I don’t know. People seemed to like stuff, I think.”

It’s an album she spent a year writing, from the moment second EP How To Carve A Carrot Into A Rose came out in 2013. Our first tastes, Pedestrian At Best and Depreston, each show off different aspects of her songwriting: the former is almost garage, sharp cries and power chords; the latter a laidback jangly tune, its guitar work intricate, the vocals slowed down and affective. Each has its own vivid imagery, a partner crying at the kitchen table in Pedestrian At Best, or the photographs in the former Preston home of a Vietnam veteran in Depreston.

Barnett and band then worked on the songs, Dan Luscombe, Dave Mudie and Bones Sloane “adding their awesome parts”, and then went into the studio in April for ten days of recording. Continuing to write about her own experiences, from notes in her “lyrical diary” felt like “the most natural thing to do.

“Sometimes I force myself to write but it normally ends up being more like a ‘what I did today’ kind of story. It’s never really interesting, but sometimes it’s good as an exercise for me to kind of get that out of my brain so something else can happen.”

Only a few songs crossed over from her writing process for the EPs and her writing in 2013/14. “There were a couple songs that were a bit older that I’d never finished and I came back to them for this album.

“It was only like Elevator Operator and Aqua Profunda!, and Debbie Downer, that were slightly older, that I’d never finished, or never liked that much. I kind of changed lyrics and changed parts that I didn’t like and finally finished them.”

She admits it would’ve been easier potentially to write more songs from scratch: “they’d already proven to take five or six years… Elevator Operator I’ve had for ages, maybe four years, anyway, I can’t remember times. I don’t know. Depreston I wrote really quite quickly one afternoon, and some of those songs have kind of been in the back of my head for ages. Dead Fox, the main line from that, or the line I’d started writing it with, had been stuck in my head for two years. It took a further two years to turn it into lyrics”.

In the end Barnett didn’t cut any tracks, but was considering it. “I thought they all belonged there.”

We ask if she put particular care into the arrangement of album tracks: how does she decide what comes first, what comes last, and what goes in between? “Why do you think it’s being released a year after it’s been recorded? Because it takes me a long time to decide on things like that.
“There’s so many different things I had to [consider]. I wanted to try to not have two, obviously different feels, I didn’t want to have a group of the same feels of songs together, so like the same emotions. I didn’t want to have all of the wordy songs right next to each other, and then the more melodic songs separate, I wanted to make it so it flowed a little bit. It was actually really hard pressed. It’s something I really sweated over. It sounds like it doesn’t really, maybe no one else cares about it, I don’t know, it took ages.”

She doesn’t know how her songs will be interpreted. “People always talk to me about my songs and think that they’re about something completely different, or [there’s] something that they’ve got out of it which is kind of… not irrelevant, it doesn’t make it not right just because I didn’t intend it. You take what you need from a certain song or from a certain whatever, a person. You project what you want onto it and you get that back in some way, I reckon.”

She says she’s not conscious of the way a song will affect her audience; that it’s not about actively going out to touch someone. “It’s kind of hard to do that I think. I think that’s the kind of beauty of that is that it’s so accidental and you can’t craft a good song. Someone, like a record label, no matter how much money they put into someone, and how much advertising and whatever they put into them, still, no matter how many statistics and stuff there are, you can never know how it’s going to affect people. That’s the one thing that no one really knows how to predict, so I think that’s kind of cool. As a songwriter, you shouldn’t know how you’re going to make someone feel: you should just say whatever you want to say.”

"I asked people to help me. That’s how you get through life: asking for help."

For her debut, Barnett and her own label Milk! Records had the support of Remote Control Records. “It was kind of like a partnership for these releases. It was great. It meant that they could help us out with selling records, as opposed to me sitting in my room taping up CDs every day, and not writing any music. It was kind of good in that way.”

It helped to have that kind of backing, both when making the record, and when touring: in years gone by, Barnett handled the nitty gritty herself, playing shows then jumping off stage to sell her records and chat to fans. “It’s kind of hard to do that every show though. I kind of always go and, when we’re touring, I still go and, if people want stuff signed and stuff. It’s kind of hard, I kind of wasn’t coping with travelling. There was a point where I was tour managing, writing all the songs, kind of in charge of everything, and then like playing a show, and then going out the minute I finished playing, all sweaty and emotional, and being like, ‘Hey, buy my stuff!’ It’s pretty intense sometimes.”

How did she get through it? “I asked people to help me. That’s how you get through life: asking for help.”

Newfound fame hasn’t meant that Barnett has had to change the subject matter of her songs; they’re still suburban psalms, because in effect the realities of Barnett’s life haven’t really changed. She still does the same things she always does. She’s still, she chuckles, inspired by the same thing: “being depressed and sitting in my room”, except now, “I’ve got a bit more purpose, and I’ve got great friends.

“I feel like I was covering the same tracks for the EPs: just kind of internal stuff, and the stuff that was going on around me, and relationships, friendships, the world, and my brain.”

But the thing is: “I don’t garden really anymore because it freaks me out. I’ve just been doing that stuff like the last two months. Before this last album I was playing in other bands, touring around Australia, touring quite a lot, just not overseas, and kind of had a different band rehearsal nearly every night, and a different gig every night, and then was trying to work as well. I kind of feel like I’m doing the same thing just in a different place.”