She also indulged a love of movies, particularly older European arthouse pictures by Agnès Varda and Andrei Tarkovsky. Barnett whiled away stay-at-home orders writing songs by a windowsill – quieter material, in part to avoid riling the neighbours. The pandemic forced Barnett to come back to Melbourne, where she had no permanent address due to years of wall-to-wall touring, and so she moved into an expat friend’s empty North Fitzroy apartment to ride out lockdown. It’s really weird and hard for me to watch”
“ Anonymous Club is the film that Danny Cohen made. Stella was back in Australia for the first time in ages, and it became the perfect moment to work together,” she says. “When everything shut down, the options weren’t as open. Their renewed chemistry on stage for that show led Barnett to approach Mozgawa with demos of new songs, while pondering where she’d record her third album. The pair met again in Warpaint’s home base of Los Angeles three years later on Valentine’s Day 2020, when Barnett organised a fundraiser show with local musicians to benefit music education in local underserved communities. I don’t know when or where, but I need to,” Barnett recalls. I was like, I want to work with her again one day on something. A new collaborator was the first catalyst for this creative change: Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa, whom Barnett met while working on the 2017 collaborative album ‘Lotta Sea Lice’ with Kurt Vile. There is far less distorted guitar, let alone any sequels to ‘I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch’, while analogue drum machines displace the traditional rock toms that have driven Barnett’s music to date. The pair across the street one’s up the ladder and one’s on their knees, painting the faded brick,” Barnett observes on its first single ‘Rae Street’.Īnd the same can be said of the sonics of ‘Things Take Time…’, which is a folk record.
The parent teaches the child how to ride. The quippy wordplay of her past has evolved into a minimalist, less-is-more approach: “ The day begins to shine. It is gentler and less verbose than its two predecessors, chewing through a thousand words less than her 2015 debut ‘Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit’. Her new album, ‘Things Take Time, Take Time’, is her latest paean to humdrum beauty. The mundane is thrust with meaning in her world. Peaceful is a nice way to put it,” Barnett says.įor Barnett, epiphanies come about in moments of stillness – life-altering realisations snap into focus as she stirs instant coffee into a cup (as depicted in Anonymous Club) or stares at a swimmer in a nearby lane (2015 song ‘Aqua Profunda’). “It’s quite a different mindset from last time.
Something snapped to get her back stateside and sanguine about another endless tour – and it wasn’t just the post-pandemic joy of returning to the stage. I would get frustrated, angry at myself, because I would see it as a failure.”
“I think that then I was tougher on myself. “I just struggled to fully verbalise what I’m thinking,” she laments. Barnett tells NME how she once read a YouTube comment that asked her to stop doing interviews. Shots of Barnett struggling while speaking to foreign press underscore feelings of alienation. In the film, which will hit theatres nationwide next March, Barnett looks at her schedule, booked to bursting for the next 18 months, and sighs: “I don’t get what the point is.” Its deserts became an oasis for Barnett at the end of the 2019 tour for her second album ‘Tell Me How You Really Feel’, a run marred by ennui and captured in the documentary Anonymous Club.
“Oh, uh, what were we talking about? The pointlessness?” When Courtney Barnett takes NME’s Zoom call, she’s sitting in a dusty yard in Joshua Tree, California, cacti on the horizon beyond an uneven wooden fence.