Getting So Much Better All The Time

For a songwriter as wordy and confident as Courtney Barnett, she's something of a reserved character offstage. The friendly, quietly spoken 25-year-old chats without pretence, but that shouldn't be any surprise after hearing her instantly relatable songs. “I've hired out a room at my friend's house and I've locked myself in it for a week,” she says down the line from Melbourne. “It's kind of the first time I've sat down to properly try and write songs.”

The past few months have seen this young songwriter catapulted into the spotlight. She was on just about every end-of-year list from every music publication around the world and most of them have picked her as an “artist to watch” in 2014. “It's a bit weird that all of a sudden people show interest in me, but that's nice if people connect with the songwriting,” she says. “It is a bit weird though, all of a sudden to be selling out shows and having photos everywhere and stuff like that.”

It might be weird, but not much has changed for Barnett. “Nah, I'm still writing the same stupid songs. I just find myself a lot busier, which isn't completely a bad thing, but for someone like me, I stress out when I have more than one thing to do per day, so I've found I've really gotta focus my energy on how to do things.”

It's not just writing and performing that Barnett has on her plate; she's put out all her releases independently through her own label Milk! Records (also home to the likes of Jen Cloher, Fraser A Gorman and Royston Vasie). “I like doing things myself, I think mostly because I'm a bit of a control freak, but we're trying to make some changes this year to try and make it make more sense. I find myself not writing and not playing music – all I'm doing is trying to do the bloody HTML on a website or spending my whole day writing emails. I'm trying to find a healthy balance so I can continue doing what I like doing, which is mostly writing. Now stuff's picking up a bit it's obviously getting busier and busier… I want to keep doing it, but find a better way to do it.”

It's two of Barnett's songs that have made people pay attention to the artist in recent months: 2012's History Eraser and last year's Avant Gardener, both tracks getting enormous amounts of blog and radio love the world over. Barnett admits she knew the songs were good when they were complete, but she wasn't expecting others to agree. “I thought they were great songs, I didn't know if anyone else would think that,” she laughs. “I especially thought with Avant Gardner because it's so weird – a weird, stupid long song with long verses and no chorus – I really liked it and I was really proud of it when I finally finished it, but I thought it would be a bit of a dud to everyone else.”

This just about sums up Barnett's approach to writing; she wants to like what she's written more than she's liked anything she's done before.“I guess you just wanna improve on yourself every notch of the way, that's kind of my goal, to try and improve my own songwriting and try and make another record that I like or a song that I like better than the last one,” she says. “To be honest it's kind of a selfish little journey of myself; I wanna keep improving and challenging myself every time I do something new, so I guess that's kind of an ambition.”

As for 2014, a few shows in Australia, a trip to the US and the UK for a run of mostly sold out dates and then a return home to play with the legendary Billy Bragg are on Barnett's immediate dancecard. “And then we're making our album in April,” Barnett reveals. “That's what I like doing the most – I love playing and touring, but I like making new stuff, it kinda keeps you on your toes.”

While she admits she hasn't written the whole record yet, she's excited at the prospect of creating. “It's good to keep busy and not know what you're doing. All the other songs I just made up as they went – that's the way that I like to look at it. Even though I freak out about everything, everything's just one experiment after another. If the album is full of shit songs then I'll just do another one and do another one after that.

“I've got a handful of new songs I really like; they're a lot heavier, which is fun. Louder and a bit grungy.”

Courtney Barnett will be playing as part of PBS Drive Live on Tuesday 4 February.