How does Courtney Barnett really feel?
There were occasions in the course of writing “Tell Me How You Really Feel” where Courtney Barnett says she found herself thinking about the expectations raised by her acclaimed debut, “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.”
That album had resulted in a Best New Artist Grammy nomination, after all, despitebeing released on the Australian’s own Milk! Records imprint.
“And then some days,” she says, “I would think there’s so many artists in the world. Who are to think that everyone is waiting on your next album?”
Barnett laughs then adds, “But mostly, I just tried to tell myself, ‘Don’t think about what anyone is thinking. Just write some songs that mean something.’”
The writing of songs that mean something has been the singer’s calling card from the time she emerged as a talent to watch in moments as evocative as “Avant Gardener,” a feedback-laden highlight of “The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas.”
In the course of an ambulance ride to the hospital after having an asthma attack while gardening, she sings, “The paramedic thinks I’m clever ‘cause I play guitar / I think she’s clever ‘cause she stops people dying.”
It’s the sort of casual observation that would go on to define her conversational approach to lyricism. And she more than lived up to the promise of those early songs on “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.”
Released in 2015, the album’s highlights ranged from the bittersweet folkpop of “Depreston,” a song about trading the carefree days of youth for a house in the suburbs, to the post-Nirvana
Courtney Barnett
8 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 2. The Van Buren, 401 W. Van Buren St., Phoenix.
$30. 866-468-3399, thevanburenphx.com.
splendor of “Pedestrian at Best.”
It proved a brilliant introduction to a singer-songwriter whose way with words would see her celebrated as Australia’s answer to Bob Dylan. In truth her style is closer to Ray Davies, distilling the bittersweet essence of life with a keen eye for detail.
Barnett says she wasn’t expecting the album to take off like it did in the States.
“I never thought it was a possibility,” she says. “So yeah, it was a really nice world that opened up.”
While fans were waiting on a proper followup to that one, Barnett teamed with kindred indie spirit Kurt Vile on a collaborative effort called “Lotta Sea Lice.”
“It was really great to work on that project because it was really carefree,” Barnett says.
“We didn’t have any plans, really. We just hung out and made these songs and it kind of snowballed into this full album. I think it’s really good to do different things and keep your mind working in different ways.”
The first words out of Barnett’s mouth on “Tell Me How You Really Feel” are “You know what they say / No one’s born to hate / We learn it somewhere along the way.”
It’s a bracing image, inspired, she says, by “just existing, I think, in the world, learning history and observing the current times, just trying to kind of understand where that energy comes from and that it is learned and it comes from fear.”
It’s one of several highlights on the new release that have clearly been shaped by the current political climate as filtered through Barnett’s distinct lyrical vision.
“I just wanted it to be honest, I think,” she says. “Vulnerable, not condescending or self-righteous.”
That vulnerability comes shining through on “Need a Little Time,” a bittersweet ballad that sets the scene with a wistful delivery of “I don’t know a lot about you but you seem to know a lot about me.”
On the opposite end of the see-saw of experiences, Barnett builds a chilling chorus on a quote by Margaret Atwood, who who wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale,” on “Nameless, Faceless,” a withering if somehow humanizing portrait of male rage and insecurity.
“I wanna walk through the park in the dark,” she sings as the chorus explodes, accompanied by Kim Deal of the Breeders and Pixies on backing vocals. “Men are scared that women will laugh at them / I wanna walk through the park in the dark / Women are scared that men will kill them.”
“It was actually a placeholder lyric,” she says. “I was kind of like ‘Oh I don’t know about this lyric. It’s a bit wordy and long and it’s a bit of a weird chorus.’ ... But then once I’d been singing it for months while I was writing it, it got stuck and I couldn’t get rid of it.”
She chose the title “Tell Me How You Really Feel,” she says, because “the meaning is quite ambiguous, the tone as well. Is it sarcastic or earnest? I like that flexibility of it, the way it leaves it open to interpretation.”