Courtney Barnett keeps on keepin' on

The Melbourne singer-songwriter now has the grand distinction of Grammy nomination, but remains a master of the minutiae

((Photo: Pooneh Ghana))

Courtney Barnett loses her train of thought and suddenly smiles bashfully, "Oh, this is my song." The novelty of her own music coming on in a pub hasn't worn off for the Australian, nor has seeing snow, which blankets the deserted streets on a chalky day in east London at the end of a lingering winter.

'The city looks pretty when you've been indoors,' she sings on her new album, and this feels particularly apt on a day when I've finally left bed and braved the elements to meet up with Courtney and discuss the record. Nursing a pint, she is a quiet, unassuming person, which comes as little surprise given the dazed, spectative nature of her music. Her breakthrough debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, was a breath of fresh air in 2015, rejecting the overwrought metaphors of modern indie for a simple, imagist approach. I could go on for hours about her ability to move the listener with blank, on-the-surface-of-it empty observations, but this is best exemplified on the first album's track 'Depreston', which imagines a bored couple viewing houses in a gentrified suburb.

A verse from it:

It's got a lovely garden, a garage for two cars to park in

Or a lot of room for storage if you've just got one

And it's going pretty cheap, you say, well it's a deceased estate

Aren't the pressed metal ceilings great

"Sometimes those smaller things are just more powerful," she says of her minutiae-orientated style, which is reminiscent of the poems of William Carlos Williams, "sometimes if it takes a minute to hit it hits you harder." I suggest that it takes a lot of confidence to hang a song around such simple lines, and she muses that a lot of art seems to be about confidence. As for her own confidence levels, "they vary", Courtney says, "I definitely was in a period recently where they were not high.

"It takes me so long to finish something, anything, and then to find the decisiveness to say it's 'done' and that it can't get any better. It's kinda scary."

Getting the new album as finished as a piece of work ever can be required Courtney to actually sit down and write more than she has before. Debut albums are often collections of scattered thoughts observed across every lived year leading up to that point, while notoriously 'difficult' second albums take a bit more discipline.

That said, some of the tracks on the new LP go back a long way, particularly new single 'Sunday Roast', the riff for which she wrote when she was 13. In spite of its juvenile origin, it happens to be the best song on the album, one of those floaty, detached melodies that evoke standing, spaced out from jetlag, on one of those horizontal escalators you get in airports. It's reappropriation of the weary "keep on keepin’ on" idiom that serves as its refrain is one of many ambiguous, open-ended and strangely hopeful sentences Courtney serves up on the album, along with another chorus' 'I don't know anything/I don't owe anything', the song 'Help your self' and the album title itself - Tell Me How You Really Feel - which could be a barked order or a gentle entreaty.

But, for the most part, her sophomore album shows a directness we haven't seen from Courtney before. Lovers/ex-lovers are confronted across the songs and there's even a little anger among the ennui, 'Nameless, Faceless' co-opting the Margaret Atwood quote "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them, women are afraid that men will kill them" in a tirade against basement-dwelling internet trolls.

"He said, 'I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup and spit out better words than you,'" Courtney sings, perhaps quoting back a YouTube comment on one of her songs, before sticking in the knife in: "But you didn't."

In addition to trying to explore lyrical topics "deeper than I have before", Courtney took a more holistic approach to songwriting for this album, teaching herself drums so that she had at least a basic understanding of every musical element in her work, meaning she could track guitar, bass, drums and vocals ("I love sitting around in my room with headphones on going da-dum da-dum - tracking everything separately") so she had rough demos ready for her band's input.

She also had a stab at piano as a melody-making technique. "I like the mistakes it lets you make. I was writing a lot of this album on piano and, being a very amateur piano player, I was just kind of figuring it out as I went along and that meant making these beautiful mistakes that turn into melodies that I never would have found on guitar."

Finishing our beers, we stamp through the snow to a cat cafe on the other side of the road. I'm really a dog person, but am happy to indulge Courtney who loves cats, her and her partner Jen Cloher owning one who is apparently "in charge" in their house.

'If they look nervous please give them some space,' a sign reads, which I suggest could be the title of Courtney's third album.

(Photo: Pooneh Ghana)

Myself sipping a chamomile and Courtney a mint tea ("I love having fresh mint in my garden, it grows like a weed"), we discuss antidepressants, which are mentioned in passing on the new album and which we both have been on at some point. "Just neutral," she says of her own experience with them, "which I guess is kind of what they do; plus a bit dramatic because of changing doses and stuff like that." I mention that I've been on them so long now I can't really remember what I feel like naturally. "I probably didn't have a great experience," she concludes, "I don't think they're negative or anything, but sometimes you know people who can fall into dangerous patterns with other kinds of prescribed medication."

When I turn the talk to movies, Courtney confesses that, like most millennials, she's more about TV at the moment, particularly detective shows. "I wouldn't have pegged you as a Nordic detective show person," I say, to which she enthuses "I love them. The Killing, The Bridge, Borgen..." Her predilection makes more sense when she points out that they feature protagonists who are "always slightly emotionally detached".

Treats dispensed, kitties stroked, we finish our tea and head our separate ways. Courtney may have a Grammy nomination behind her, but still takes her days as they come. As a character in one of her songs might. "Maybe I'll go see a musical," she considers for her last night in London before heading back to Melbourne. "Maybe The Lion King."

Tell Me How You Really Feel is available to buy and stream in all of the places now.