Courtney Barnett talks about her new album.
Courtney Barnett’s songs remind me of magic shows. She’s a deft lyricist and distinctively expressive, both as a singer and a guitarist. But there’s also some sleight of hand and misdirection. Her songs move with a brisk natural pace, a rush of wind in the face that belies the labor that went into them. They’re capable of being felt as well as contemplated, seemingly conversational when they’re actually philosophical.
Often, lines will jump out of the song only after multiple plays, with a curious resonance. On the new “Need a Little Time” she sings, “Shave your head to see how it feels/Emotionally it’s not that different/but to the hand it’s beautiful.”
That song appears on “Tell Me How You Really Feel,” Barnett’s follow-up to her 2016 breakout “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.” Her lyrical style has shifted slightly from the more matter-of-fact descriptions on her first record toward more internalized thoughts about anxieties and interactions with people. But the rudiments that made Barnett’s music such a bracing new sound a few years ago remain well applied.
She plays White Oak Music Hall on Monday and fielded a few questions from her home in Melbourne, Australia, on the other wide of the world.
Q: I was intrigued by the narrative point of view on the record. There are a lot of “you and I” type songs on there. But even on those, sometimes it felt like you were writing and singing to yourself.
A: Yes, I love that. And I totally get it. It’s something I started thinking about the first time on this album. And I noticed it confused some people. Not all people. But some listeners need you to define which is which, who you’re talking to. And I’m more like, “Well sometimes it’s one, and sometimes it’s the other, and sometimes it can be both.” It was really the first time I’d thought about it properly. There’s a book of essays by Zadie Smith on that topic. But when I was writing, so much of it was journal-style entry. And some was more like letter-type writing. I would write to people without sending it. But telling them want I wanted to say in a personal way. But other times it felt like talking to myself, like you would looking in a mirror in a movie. So yeah, I don’t know if I gave you an answer. There’s no definite answer. But there’s an empathy when you listen closely. Like saying what you’re saying to someone else, but it’s really something you need to hear with your own ears, too.
Q: There’s a line in “Sunday Roast” — “It’s all the same to me.” It’s an intriguing comment, one of those lines I think we use often but don’t really mean.
A: Yeah, right. I think language is so important, and we can take it for granted. And the ways we use it. There are lots of little kinds of common everyday phrases scattered throughout the album. They’re almost sarcastic in the way that we just say things without recognizing the intent behind the actual words.
Q: I admired the spacesuit in the “Need a Little Time” video. It looked comfortable.
A: (Laughs.) It’s actually super comfortable. I still have it. Two of them. And yeah, there’s something extremely liberating … I don’t know, you just feel free walking around in them.
Q: But balancing on the planet looked to be decidedly less pleasant.
A: Oh that was hard. I was in this harness, like a circus harness. I nearly passed out by the end of the day. I had to lie down because I overexerted myself. But I hung there in the harness long enough to where I had bruises all over my body. That’s what happens when you hang in the air all day. But it was fun to do. A lot of hard work. But fun.
Q: Moving back an album, “City Looks Pretty” has that line, “The city looks pretty when you’ve been indoors.” I guess that resonated to this particular indoorsy person.
A: Yeah, yeah, I guess I understand more about the essence of that song now that I can stand back. Originally, it was about depression and not leaving a room. But now that I can stand back from it, I think it’s more about seeing the beauty in the small and sometimes insignificant things. The less-than-beautiful things. So it may be a big, ugly, dirty city. But you can see some beauty in that, and it’s about feeling grateful for that. I guess it was a hidden message, even to me, and it took me some time to figure it out.