Courtney Barnett has been having a mid-thirties crisis. She might not say it (she keeps her cards close to her chest, speaking broadly about “life” and “things”; as she once confessed to the Guardian, “I don’t really like talking about myself”) but the symptoms are all there. A general sense of feeling “lost”; the relocation from Melbourne to LA “on a whim” after the closure of her self-started record label, Milk!; and, most damningly, the adoption of a muppet-y poodle mix named Larry. “I never used to understand why dog people are so happy. But he’s been a ray of light.”
Courtney is calling from LA, where it has been rainy as of late. Paradoxically, she moved to the city – the same city Jack Kerouac famously called “the loneliest and most brutal of American cities” – to be closer to nature. There are a lot of pleasant walks, she tells me, especially in the mountains or in the desert resort Joshua Tree, which is a two-hour drive away. “When it rains in LA, it’s like nobody knows what to do.” For a second, I imagine Courtney hovelled inside at her writing desk, Larry sat beside her, as the rain patters down, and countless desultory influencers zoo-ed in their Caligulan mansions.
Maybe there’s an element of pathetic fallacy to the downpour, or maybe the weather’s weighing things down. Either way, a lot of the conversation is spent talking about the sadness of the long interregnum between her last album, 2021’s lockdown low-down Things Take Time, Take Time, and her upcoming release Creature of Habit, dropping on March 27th. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep making music [after Things Take Time],” she says, “I felt like I’d forgotten how to write a song.”
Coming from an artist who once managed to effortlessly lace the word “pseudoephedrine” into a song (it’s a type of nasal decongestant), the notion seems absurd. But Courtney insists she felt “disconnected from songwriting, from writing as a whole” after her last release. She wasn’t even keeping her journals, so the new album was her way of trying to break out from the fug.
The return to writing took a bit of regimentation, she admits, which seems misaligned with the laidback languor she exudes. “I had to challenge myself to sit at my kitchen table and write a song. I wasn’t really finishing songs but I was starting them, and that felt like progress.”
The results have been lyrical maturation. In the 2010s, a young Courtney Barnett made herself the stuff of millennial legend with her canny ability to turn the minutiae of life into moments of great profundity, perspicacious poems on suburban discontent and early-20s growing pains. ‘Avant Gardener’ was a track about an anxiety attack she had while attending a backyard radish patch; ‘Kim’s Caravan’ turned a chance encounter with a seal carcass into a meditation on the “rape” of the barrier reefs.
Such skill earned her hackneyed comparisons to Bob Dylan or Stephen Malkmus in her early days (both of these she rejects) and a best new artist nomination at the 2015 Grammy’s, which she somehow lost out on to Meghan Trainor (“COURTNEY ROBBED”, roared r/popheads). Even today, her tracks rack tens of millions of streams on Spotify and her vinyls plump the shelves of any self-respecting vinyl store or high-street HMV.
But her recent work has been skipping the minutiae to get straight into great profundity. The observational bent and off-the-verandah approach of her younger work has calcified into life-drunk and lived-in meditations (“you know those words don’t come easy to me,” she chirps on ‘Sugar Plum’, “so I’m looking for a little leniency”; a very Courtney Barnett rhyming couplet). Her linguistic experimentation and fragmentation, once so pronounced, have been softened into straightforward prose (“I’m picking up the prettiest pieces,” she croons in ‘Wonder’).
Little things, though, still form the backbone of her approach. She cites the birds flying past her kitchen window and, of course, that praying mantis who appeared on her doorframe as big influences. “I saw it [the mantis] one day on my own in Joshua Tree, when I was feeling depressed and lonely and pretty low.” She admits, half-embarrassed, speaking to the mantis and thanking it for being there, telling it that it was safe with her. To Courtney, the awry arthropod was a message from the universe. “My friend told me to google it: praying mantises are signs of good luck.”
This encounter helped to break down the writer’s block she had been suffering, which eventually “just went away”. Following this little visitation, Courtney was able to pen her woozy single ‘Mantis’, one of the album’s most pivotal. The influential insect also appears on the album cover.
Creature of Habit, she jokes, is therefore an album about creatures, one of a handful of jokes she permits during our conversation.
Naturally, I ask what other creatures it’s about. I receive a long pause, brace for a backpeddle, feeling like I’ve touched on something off-the-cards. But then she breaks into a charming giggle and replies with disarming earnestness.
“Well,” she says, “I guess it’s also about Larry.” A creature of comfort, if you will.