Courtney barnett and Kurt Vile on making music and making friends…
“We were on such a similar wavelength – we could trade lines and it still made sense” COURTNEY BARNETT
you two didn’t know each other well when you started making music together. How did you know this might work out?
Kurt: I was a fan of Courtney and we had mutual friends, so I knew we would get along. And we were definitely good acquaintances and knew it would be a good combination from being fans of each other’s music and being sort of similar people who played sort of similar music. What I didn’t know when we started was that we would have a full-length album. It was really cool to become good friends through music. There was a lot of growing in a relatively short time, and when you can create something like this it’s pretty heavy in a good way. And it’s not like we were looking over each other’s shoulders a lot – we both brought songs and it was all so complementary. There weren’t tons of disagreements or anything. Was it a relief not to feel the pressures that you might when working on your own albums?
Courtney: This was nice because it was made in our spare time and across a couple of years. And there are always these funny pressures that we place upon ourselves, and that’s so stupid. For this, we were just making it up as we went. So when I think about the kind of pressure that I put on myself making my album, it feels very unnecessary. It’d be so nice to ideally be able to push all those thoughts away and just get on with making things. They’d probably be 100 times better for it! you’re both used to writing for yourselves, so what was it like creating music that had room for each other, too?
Courtney: It was fun writing with another person in mind, to sing those parts on the songs that are more like duets. It was cool sonically, too, just to hear those differences in timbre. We’d chop up some of the songs to see who would sing which line. Sometimes, if they didn’t work musically or melodically, we had to change them, but it didn’t matter that much. It felt like we were on such a similar wavelength, it was all very adaptable. We could trade lines and it still made sense.
do you think it helped that you two had very compatible senses of humour? That quality is also very strong in your approaches to songwriting.
Kurt: Yeah, she’s got the deadpan Australian thing, which isn’t that much different than my Philadelphia style. And I think my music always has a sense of humour in it. It’s not that I wouldn’t ever have just a straight-up serious song, but I do think humour is really important as one of the many emotions. Some bands just have more drama than I do, but I believe you’ve got to combine all the emotions, you know.
it’s also interesting how songwriting itself comes up as a subject in many of the new songs, especially “Over Everything” and “let it go”.
Courtney: I feel like a lot of the lyrics were born out of the email conversations we were having. It’s weird, because it wasn’t intentional and we never really discussed it, but we were talking about writing songs so it kind of crept in in subtle ways. I’m reading a Leonard Cohen biography right now, so I was thinking about the line in “Hallelujah” when he sings, “The fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift.” It sounds so beautiful, but it’s a songwriting reference since he’s talking about a chord progression – that’s my interpretation! So we do reference those things, too. Sometimes I didn’t even know it was being said, so it’s nice to realise afterward that songs have all these hidden meanings.
Was it exciting to hear how the older songs you traded turned out, too?
Courtney: “Peeping Tomboy” was one that I did by myself when Kurt was back home or touring. I’d loved that song for a long time, but it was definitely different for me. I just felt vulnerable doing it – I found this weird crazy tuning and it’s really high, and I wanted to challenge myself and do something hard. Once I cracked it, it felt good. I spent longer than I normally do trying to get it right, and I ended up just doing it live with guitar and singing at the same time. I tried to separate the vocals and it kinda lost all of its soul. I always feel like live is better – to sacrifice a few notes for the soul of the song is always a better option.
Kurt: I loved what she did on “Peeping Tomboy”. She sings it real sweet and childlike but with a much better range than a child has. I wanted to do “Out Of The Woodwork”, and we first tried it backstage at a festival in Dublin. I wanted the vibe she had on her recording, with the backing vocals and how it all sort of floats over the piano. I finally accomplished that in the studio with Courtney. I needed her there as a muse, playing percussion, singing along while I was in the other room. I was playing lead guitar and feeling more like Alice Cooper, like I had to sing it in some sort of tough way. I didn’t know it was going to even reach that rock’n’roll point, but I’m glad it did – I just knew it had to go somewhere. Now that it’s out in the world, are you bracing yourself for all the inevitable “Kurt & Courtney” headlines? That combination of names inevitably has baggage.
Kurt: Yeah, we’re aware of it. I knew people would say that; and Courtney did, I’m sure. It’s just like a marketing thing so we don’t have to do that ourselves.