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Courtney Barnett interview: third album and inspiring young guitarists

Wielding a left-handed electric guitar, Courtney Barnett is a force of rock to be reckoned with – and to inspire the next generation.

Australian singer, songwriter and guitarist Courtney Barnett in Melbourne, May 2021. Picture: Ian Laidlaw
Australian singer, songwriter and guitarist Courtney Barnett in Melbourne, May 2021. Picture: Ian Laidlaw

On a summer evening in Launceston, a woman wearing black jeans, black boots and a white T-shirt strides out on to a big stage before several hundred people. An electric guitar is slung across her shoulder and, backed by a powerhouse band, she proceeds to run through an hour-long set of idiosyncratic songs that could only have been written by her.

At the foot of the stage are a couple of dozen small children, some of them barely tall enough to see over the steel barrier. Accompanied by their parents, some of the front-row teenagers are mimicking the frontwoman by headbanging to the pulse of the band’s upbeat indie rock.

A few of the younger children, though, are so immersed in the sight and sound of one of Australia’s greatest rock‘n’roll artists performing in full flight that the youngsters stand rooted to the spot, transfixed.

Courtney Barnett is the woman with the left-handed guitar standing centre stage, singing into the microphone with her distinct and unapologetically Australian drawl.

It’s mid-January 2019, and the four-piece band is among the final acts to perform at the first iteration of Mona Foma to be held in Launceston, as the annual summer event begins a northern shift from its former home in Hobart.

Although it arrives at the beginning of what will be a bulging 2019 schedule comprising about 80 concerts around the world, this isn’t just another prime-time festival slot for the singer and her band, which was then composed of drummer Dave Mudie, bassist Bones Sloane and keyboardist Katie Harkin.

This concert is a rare chance for Barnett to show some of her overseas-born road crew around the island where she spent some of her formative years, having moved to Tasmania at age 16 after being raised on the northern beaches of Sydney.

As well, there’s another aspect to the Mona Foma gig that makes it especially memorable for Barnett, and it’s something she shares with those watchful young music fans pressed up near the front barrier.

“My folks were there,” she recalls to Review on a phone call from Joshua Tree, California, smiling at the memory. “My parents haven’t really been to too many of my shows in my life, so it’s always really special having them there. I’m so lucky to have incredible parents. That’s a really beautiful thing, I think, to feel like somebody’s proud of you.“

Review stood side of stage at that show, beside Barnett’s mum, Cheryl, a former performer with the Australian Ballet who proudly danced, sang and took photos as those children in the front row watched her rock star daughter with a mix of amazement, adoration and creative inspiration.

Some of them might well have been thinking: When I grow up, I want to be like Courtney. The next day, Launceston’s music stores may have seen a spike in sales of practice amplifiers and left-handed electric guitars.

Courtney Barnett performing at Mona Foma in Launceston, January 2019.
Courtney Barnett performing at Mona Foma in Launceston, January 2019.

“That was a beautiful festival: I remember there was a kid, maybe 10 or so, on her parent’s shoulders,” Barnett recalls. “She was so totally into the music and so present in the moment. I could see that look in her face, and that made me really happy.”

It sent her back to her own childhood, when she began learning guitar at the age of 10 thanks to her older brother and some of his friends in the neighbourhood where they grew up on Sydney’s northern beaches.

Early on, her chief influences were the likes of Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix and Green Day, a trio of acts whose six-string innovations have fascinated several generations of listeners.

But as she’s grown from a little-known artist into a major draw at festivals and headline shows here and abroad, Barnett has become more comfortable with the notion of inspiring those younger than her, too.

“I’ve been accepting that that’s the circle of musical life, and that’s a really nice thing to be a part of,” she says.

“There probably used to be a part of me that was a bit closed off, shy or ashamed, or some weird kind of reaction to that. But I think that’s a really wonderful thing: we all inspire each other and take inspiration from other people, so it’s a nice way of sharing knowledge and inspirations around.”

Barnett in Melbourne, May 2021. Picture: Ian Laidlaw
Barnett in Melbourne, May 2021. Picture: Ian Laidlaw

Mona Foma 2019 was the site of another memorable event for Barnett, as she also performed a secret solo show at a small indoor theatre on the sprawling festival grounds at the University of Tasmania’s Inveresk Precinct. Advertised only on social media, it saw hundreds of people queuing for a glimpse of the singer-songwriter sans band.

“There’s something so intimate about solo shows; I really have to rejig my brain when I do them, because I feel so naked,” she says. “You just feel so alone. Everyone’s looking at you, there’s nowhere to hide; it’s just you and the guitar and your voice. I love it. There’s something really special about that closeness to the audience, and the really magnified sound.”

That’s how she began performing in her late teens and early 20s, of course, before anyone knew her name. But what inspired this return to standing and delivering on her own?

“It’s just that idea of balance, and of constantly trying different things,” she replies.

“Even that idea of pushing outside of your comfort zone: I can find it so nerve-racking to play solo like that, and I think that that’s a good thing to be confronted with sometimes. If you get too used to something, you get comfortable; you get lazy. It’s good for me to challenge myself.”

That Launceston solo show eventually led to a proper solo tour of the United States in early 2020. Her instinct to push herself to play alone became pretty handy during the long periods in isolation that followed at home in Melbourne, too.

Her solo US tour just before the world was changed by the pandemic “inspired something in me that probably added towards these new songs, and this new album,” says the 34 year old. “Space and quietness; I think I was looking at melody and lyrics differently, and trying to say more with less words.”

Written entirely on her trusty Maton acoustic guitar and a Roland CR-8000 drum machine, Barnett’s third album – titled Things Take Time, Take Time – sees her taking a subtler and gentler approach than the full-tilt rock‘n’roll that largely characterised her first two albums, which were released in 2015 and 2018.

Lockdowns meant her usual bandmates were temporarily sidelined out of necessity. Instead, Barnett reconnected with Sydney-born drummer Stella Mozgawa, with whom she played on a charming 2017 collaborative album named Lotta Sea Lice, which she co-wrote with American singer-songwriter Kurt Vile.

Mozgawa is a hard-hitting player best known for sitting behind the kit with Los Angeles indie rock band Warpaint.

Barnett in Melbourne, March 2018. Picture: Aaron Francis
Barnett in Melbourne, March 2018. Picture: Aaron Francis

Asked about Barnett in a June 2019 interview for this newspaper, Mozgawa was full of praise. “Even just from afar, looking at her career, it was always really heartwarming to know that someone from Australia was getting so much recognition overseas,” she told Review at the time. “And then meeting her, working with her and becoming her friend, it just made me feel very lucky; lucky to know that she has a really good heart, and she does it for the right reasons. That’s the most important thing: when you get that kind of insight, you’re just rooting for someone ’til the end of time.”

When these kind words are shared with her, Barnett is flattered. “Aww, that’s bloody nice, isn’t it?” she says with a laugh, before responding in turn.

“There’s a very optimistic kind of energy to Stella in the studio, and a very supportive mind as well,” she says.

“Sometimes if I hit a wall, or hit a problem, I can tunnel myself in a bit. I noticed from working with her that, instead of going down some rabbit hole, she would try to experiment and find another path; another answer.

“There’s so many different possibilities in music and in songwriting. Just taking the time to try different things, even if they don’t work, at least you know that you’ve made the effort, and you’ve done the work to see where it could lead you.”

During the album recording sessions in Sydney late last year, Mozgawa played drums, keys and bass, and helped with programming the Roland; Barnett says she’ll join the band for the upcoming American tour, too.

As well, Mozgawa had a hand in another collaboration recorded for an entirely different project.

Barnett was commissioned to write the theme song for an upcoming animated adaptation of the 1964 children’s novel Harriet the Spy, which debuts on Apple TV+ on November 19.

“I had never done something like that,” she says of writing to a brief. “It was a really good challenge for me, and a different skill set. The messaging of the show is great, and it’s got such a cool history to it. It was just fun to write something that was directed at kids.”

Titled Smile Real Nice, the two-minute theme song – on which Mozgawa played drums and bass – is a hook-filled earworm of a track that features several tasty lead breaks. As it happens, Barnett had someone in mind when writing this song: her younger self.

“It was just fun to think of me as a 10-year-old kid,” she says. “I was learning guitar then, so I wrote this song with an upbeat, ‘television-sounding’ energy – but also the energy of [the character] Harriet the Spy, who bounces around.

“I tried to write a song that I would have wanted to learn as a 10-year-old kid.”

There’s a neat connection there between the wide-eyed live music fans who were trained on her every move from the front row of the Launceston show of early 2019, and the upcoming animated show, which will be seen – and heard – by many impressionable children around the world.

Perhaps a few of those viewers will be inspired to pick up a guitar and learn the spidery lead riff that drives Smile Real Nice.

At this suggestion, Barnett gives a laugh of affirmation. “Shit yeah! It’s very fun to play. I highly recommend it,” she says.

Things Take Time, Take Time is released on Friday, November 12 via Milk! Records.

Andrew McMillen
Andrew McMillenMusic Writer

Andrew McMillen is an award-winning journalist and author based in Brisbane. Since January 2018, he has worked as national music writer at The Australian. Previously, his feature writing has been published in The New York Times, Rolling Stone and GQ. He won the feature writing category at the Queensland Clarion Awards in 2017 for a story published in The Weekend Australian Magazine, and won the freelance journalism category at the Queensland Clarion Awards from 2015–2017. In 2014, UQP published his book Talking Smack: Honest Conversations About Drugs, a collection of stories that featured 14 prominent Australian musicians.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/courtney-barnett-interview-third-album-and-inspiring-young-guitarists/news-story/28e35d6ae9dfb2982b85b1c5d63e2cde