Courtney Barnett: Australian music’s unlikely international success story

Her songs about Australian life are quirky, original and addictive. Now the world can’t get Courtney Barnett out of its head.

TWAM 31 Oct 2015

It’s difficult to work out from the photo exactly what Courtney Barnett is thinking.

It’s February 19, 2011. She’s lying on the grass in a backyard in the Melbourne suburb of Thornbury, head propped on a backpack. She stares past the band playing on the outdoor stage in front of her, and up towards the wide open sky. From her posture she looks comfortable, but her face says otherwise. She’s just finished her set at a small festival called Applecore. Later in the day 400 people will cram into the backyard, but only a dozen or so early arrivals are there to see Barnett’s band, The Olivettes, open the show.

They play seven songs. Barnett introduces a song called Crates by asking, “Do you know it?” But she’s not talking to the audience, she’s talking to her band. After playing solo for six years it’s her first attempt at putting together a band to play her songs. Songs she’s been crafting since her father taught her to play Smoke on the Water at age 10, songs that fell flat at Sydney open-mike nights when she was 18, songs her friends have heard a million times, songs that will go on to form one of the most remarkable and unlikely rises to international success in Australian music history.

She could be thinking about how she’s going to pay her rent (the booker was late paying her $40 fee last time she played, and she sent a polite reminder: “I’m skint-as this week”). She could be wondering how long she would go on doing part-time jobs she hated, waiting for something to happen. This gig isn’t going to be life-changing, though. That gig has already happened, five months earlier. She just doesn’t know it yet.

Witty, erudite rants, stream of consciousness, rambling, sly garage-pop, colloquial, one of rock’s most beguiling young stars … for the past two years the world’s music press has rushed to compile adjectives to describe the 27-year-old’s songwriting, singing style and subject matter, ­possibly because it’s easier than accounting for Barnett’s meteoric rise, or working out her ­formula for churning out strange pop songs that won’t get out of your head.

Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go To The Party is the latest single from the singer who in a couple of short years has became one of the ­hottest names overseas, but who still lurks in the shadows of the mainstream in her home country. Now, with eight ARIA nominations in the wake of her debut studio album — including Album of the Year, Best Female Artist and Best Independent Release — Australia may have finally come, albeit unfashionably late, to the party.

The album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, released in March this year, was greeted with critical acclaim in the US and the UK. Her foreign fans were ready for the album; she had already played the biggest festivals in the world — Glastonbury and Coachella — on the strength of two EPs recorded for ­peanuts in Melbourne. Her first American tour in early 2014 was a sellout and America’s biggest talk show hosts lined up to have her on. She played to an estimated four million people on Ellen (the host saying Barnett was one of her favourite new artists — “I love her so much”). Jimmy Fallon and Conan O’Brien had their turn. Rolling Stone magazine named the album’s first single, Pedestrian at Best, its best song of the year. When the influential American news website Salon described Barnett as the new Bob Dylan, no one ridiculed its evaluation. Record sales alone are approaching $2 million. Last week she cleaned up at Australia’s Independent Music Awards. Not bad for a shy singer who releases her music on her own label, operating out of the front room of her small house, and who writes songs about mundane life in the inner-northern suburbs of Melbourne.

Barnett refuses interviews at home so we meet at the next best thing, Melbourne’s ­Northcote Social Club, her local pub where not long ago she poured drinks, in one of the ­suburbs so finely detailed in her songs. The yard is full of hard rubbish, it’s a mess, and I guess the neighbours must think we run a meth lab, she sings in the song Avant Gardener. Australia’s number one independent artist arrives chaperoned by two reps from the record company Remote Control, which distributes the hot property of her debut album. The bar staff recognise royalty when it appears and present a round of drinks on the house. Barnett cradles a soda water and a sauvignon blanc while her minders retire to another table and open laptops.

Her round face darts around the room, but she seems happy with her window seat, periodically scrutinising the street life. Does she like interviews? “I don’t mind them. Yeah, I like them. I don’t dislike them. I just think they’re OK. I think it’s funny because you’ve already got an idea of who I am and what I am.”

But who is she? American journalist Steven Hyden might have come closest when he observed that after talking to Barnett he felt like he hadn’t talked to her at all. He spoke to her on the phone. In person she gives the impression you’ve got the wrong person. If it’s hard to work out what she’s thinking from a photograph, it’s even harder to work out by asking her directly.

Deadpan, spoken-sung, wildly unpredictable, wry, rapid-fire cynicism, finding the poetry in everyday life … She interviews herself in her songs. The job of working out what Courtney Barnett is thinking has already been done by Courtney Barnett, and the findings have gone gold. “One of the sharpest, most original songwriters around — at any level in any genre,” according to Rolling Stone magazine. “She’s like a journalist embedded in her own life,” concludes Hyden.

Barnett has the folk singer’s knack of making the trivial big. She walks you through life and points out stuff you’ve been too busy to notice: the joy of an evening at home, the sadness of cleaning out a deceased estate, routine distractions along the freeway, and a million absurd ­little vanities that afflict our strange little lives. I ask her about Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, which she names as a favourite book, and in particular a line where Smith remarks that to be an artist is to see what others cannot. Does Barnett think she possesses this gift?

“Um … I don’t know. You never really know what people think or what they see. I can’t speak for others, but I feel like I zoom in on little things, and different kind of … sort of like, a big overview. I don’t see stuff no one else sees, I just do my own little thing.” Her answer is typical of the way she talks. She doesn’t use sound-bites. Doesn’t big-note. Doesn’t take a topic and run with it. She makes no effort to sound smarter than she is and doesn’t care how she comes across. There’s no hubris but no false modesty either. Just a constant, uncomfortable flailing for the accurate, truthful answer, then silence. Next question.

Her “own little thing” includes keeping ­constant note of anything crossing her path that might make good fodder for a song. She’s doing it as she talks to me, looking out the window. But she says the majority of it is just fodder. “I write so much shit. I don’t throw it away, I keep it in a box with loose bits of paper. I spend plenty of time agonising over everything.”

Barnett grew up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Her mother, Cheryl, was a ballet dancer, her father, Ross, a graphic designer. The family — minus older brother, Blake, who stayed in ­Sydney — moved to Hobart when Barnett was 16. It was a bad age to move. “I was a mega teenage brat. Yelling at my parents, fighting. But they were probably like that too at my age. It’s good to realise you were a brat and learn from your … not mistakes … but what you did.”

Barnett spent her teenage years listening to ’90s grunge and alternative music; Nirvana in particular. It shows. Her stage antics are Kurt Cobain to a tee, down to how she slings her guitar (she’s a lefty, like Cobain) to the mumbled drone of her live delivery, to the punk nihilism of diving into the drum kit, to the clothes, to the refusal to conform to the mainstream.

After two years at the University of Tasmania, majoring in photography, Barnett tried her luck back in Sydney at open-mike nights. “I tried to organise gigs but I couldn’t get any, because no one knew or cared who I was. And I was, like, a kid. I didn’t know what I was doing.” She moved to Melbourne just before her 21st birthday, crashing on a friend’s couch in Richmond. “It was a pretty dark and depressing time. I couldn’t get a job. It was kind of like, ‘What am I doing? I’ve made a huge mistake.’ I had no money, no friends really. But that was kind of what I wanted.”

Part-time jobs paid her rent while she played any gig she could get. “I just needed the money. I didn’t feel like I was bettering society by selling shoes. I wanted to do something, to try to create a space where I could make money out of what I wanted to do, which I guess is what a lot of people want to do. But I tried really hard to make it happen. I mean, why would I spend every day working a shit job, just so I could keep on living, you know? I just don’t understand that cycle.”

The only problem was that her personality lacked the qualities needed to turn songs into anything resembling a career. “I was doing heaps of gigs but I didn’t know the first thing about how to release anything, or where to record, or how much it would cost. I didn’t have any money anyway. And I didn’t have the confidence to say to myself, ‘Yeah, just go for it’, or to ask anyone for help.” The conditions were right for Barnett to ­continue as a talented but struggling singer-­songwriter. In September 2012 she promoted a gig at a small venue in Fitzroy called the Old Bar on her Facebook page. The post said, “Me. Old Bar. 8:30 tonight.” 14 people “liked” it. Eighteen months later, she would be playing the world’s biggest music festivals.

You never know who’s in the crowd. Barnett played the East Brunswick Club on September 1, 2010, along with five other acts. Nick O’Byrne was already well-­respected in the music industry, mostly through his role as general manager of the Australian Independent Record Labels Association. Clever and disciplined, he had knowledge and contacts. O’Byrne was in the audience that night and was taken by Barnett’s “hilarious lyrics and unique stage presence”, but by the next morning he’d forgotten her name. It would be more than six months before he cast his mind back to the night and went searching for his ­mystery singer. Barnett reluctantly agreed to a six-month trial with O’Byrne as her manager.

“She had a healthy suspicion of the music industry,” he says. But he immediately saw her real problem: she was a procrastinator. The songs were there, but she hadn’t released any music and couldn’t make decisions. Encouraged by O’Byrne, Barnett recorded and released her first EP, I’ve Got a Friend called Emily Ferris, in April 2012. Her ear for a catchy hook, humour, originality and honesty were immediately apparent. Barnett and O’Byrne decided not to seek distribution for the EP and sold it direct from Barnett’s online Bandcamp site and through her local record store, Thornbury Records. Barnett doodled a bottle of spilt milk on the back of the cover, and with it her own record label, Milk! Records, was born. She says the name was a joke about record labels milking you for all you were worth. The EP outdid all expectations and they went back to the pressing plant for multiple runs, eventually selling 1500 copies; not bad for a first EP by an unknown singer.

The second EP, How to Carve a Carrot into a Rose, and its single, Avant Gardener, dug the path to overseas growth. The strange song about an asthma attack brought on by weeding captured the attention of the right ears overseas and led O’Byrne to book Barnett for New York’s annual industry showcase, CMJ Music Marathon, in October 2013. Influential US online music ­magazine Pitchfork named Avant Gardener its best new song. According to O’Byrne, “That’s when everything went bang.”

Barnett drains both her drinks and gets to work on the lime wedge, sucking every last drop of moisture between her teeth. Satisfied it’s dead, she places it neatly on the table and her hands search for something else to molest. Finding nothing she props up her cheek on one of them, then the other, and resumes scrutinising the passing foot traffic out the window. Does she worry about what people think?

“I worry about everything. I worry about what to order at a restaurant. And what drink to order, and everything. It’s part of my anxiety.” The anxieties of Gen Y. The pressure to get a job and do something with your life. The guilt of calling yourself an artist to delay the onset of adulthood. The rising panic that builds as you watch your 20s advance and you’re still selling shoes and pouring beers. Navigating a patronising world that doesn’t reward artists fairly, that places the burden on them to give something to society other than mere art. I don’t want no nine to five, telling me that I’m alive, and ‘Man, you’re doing well’, she sings on Are You Looking After Yourself, adding, My friends play in bands. They are better than everything on radio.

So how did she react when O’Byrne contacted her, asking to be her manager? “I was like, ‘No way!’ I was like, ‘Oh man … music manager, music industry … sucks … NO!’ I’d heard so many scary stories and stuff, all those clichéd ­ripping-off stories.”

If there’s an underlying reason for Barnett’s default setting of distrust, she’s not letting on. “I trust a couple of people,” she says. And the rest? “People … people are f. king wankers. It’s pretty hard to trust anyone.” Had anything happened in Barnett’s life to form this impression? “No. But it’s true,” she shrugs. “I read the paper.” Her own flippancy grates her. She doesn’t take her words seriously and corrects herself. “Look, I’m really open and trusting and welcoming. I try to see the best in people. So until people prove themselves otherwise then yeah, I’ll have an open, optimistic opinion of them.”

She wants her character CV laid on the table, alongside the shrivelled lime: over-analyser, procrastinator, perfectionist, contradictory, plagued by self-doubt. I change the topic. Is she in love?

“Yes.”

Her girlfriend Jen Cloher is a stalwart of the Melbourne music scene who released her debut album, Dead Wood Falls, in 2006. The two started dating four years ago. Their 11-year age difference was detailed in a song they released as a duo, Numbers. It is perhaps the most ­beautiful song in both singers’ catalogue. ­Cloher’s voice is soulful and classical; Barnett’s fragile and honest.

Apart from playing her own music, Cloher teaches music and runs workshops. She’s been Barnett’s canary in the coal mine, acquiring a healthy dose of cynicism for the music industry while fostering a prosperous relationship with the local music community. While Barnett is overseas touring, Cloher takes care of Milk! Records. She watched with interest from ­Melbourne as her younger partner set off for her first overseas shows. Shows that would set up everything that followed.

O’Byrne remembers fondly the assault on America; it’s the stuff of managerial legend. A rookie manager in Manhattan, running on adrenalin, trusting his wits. The hunt for record labels, the right people, people who understand Barnett’s need for independence.

He hand-picked his team: expat Australian Grace Jones for ­publicist, and a young American booking agent, Marshall Betts. From the showcases at CMJ a rollcall of scarcely believable gigs began: Jimmy Fallon, Ellen DeGeneres, Conan O’Brien, ­Glastonbury, Coachella, a sold-out tour of the US. News of her success at CMJ ­travelled to Melbourne, and she played her first sold-out hometown show after returning from the New York showcase. Early that year Triple J gave lukewarm feedback for Avant Gardener. Too long and slow. But the thunderous overseas accolades were too big to ignore; the Australian music industry was starting to take notice.

Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit was released the Monday after the most important gig in her career, the NPR (National Public Radio) Showcase at the South by ­Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas in March this year. The timing was no accident. Two singles, the Nirvana-infused grunge diatribe Pedestrian at Best, and Depreston, a slow two-chord jam about the seemingly unsexy topic of real estate, were already out. Pedestrian at Best was named best song of the year by ­Rolling Stone magazine, but it was Depreston that resonated with worldwide audiences. The song about househunting in Melbourne’s once daggy, now gentrified suburb of Preston and stumbling across the condemned memories of the previous owners was an unlikely hit. The lame pun title wasn’t original, the song wasn’t new, the actual house wasn’t in Preston, and the film clip was shot in Reservoir, the next suburb along. But the truth doesn’t matter; it was a good story. It could be anywhere.

Barnett played the new album from start to ­finish at the sold-out show. A tour of Europe ­followed. She’s just finished Japan; next is New Zealand, then back to Europe. December and January she’s touring Australia. A week ago it was America, where earlier this year she’d teamed up with Jack White of White Stripes fame to record Boxing Day Blues (Revisited). O’Byrne gives a brief rundown of her recent US shows: “Supporting Blur at the Hollywood Bowl, then the Fillmore in San Fran, two days later she plays Madison Square Garden …” He lists the gigs as though running through his shopping list, but for a manager those words are the stuff of dreams.

There’s an old saying: be nice to people on the way up, because you’ll meet them again on the way down. What’s often noted in the Courtney Barnett story is her ­ferocious commitment to supporting her peers in Melbourne and resisting the temptation to cash in on her success. She’s turned down big money for corporate gigs, and from major labels. For Barnett and O’Byrne it’s about being sustainable; about growing a career that will last a lifetime, not crash and burn at the whim of corporate string-pullers. Barnett has even refused to send her music directly to some commercial radio stations.

“For me it’s about doing what feels right and not what feels wrong. Sometimes you get offered shitloads of money and you think, ‘Man, I could really use that money.’ In simple terms, you could get a lot of money from a major label, and they tell you what to do, how to dress, how your album should sound, and basically rewrite your songs. Or you can have less money and make all your own decisions. That’s the way I look at it.” But with Barnett’s tours selling out, “less money” still means a short, three-show tour of New ­Zealand nets over $100,000 in ticket sales.

Barnett shops locally, wears local bands’ T-shirts, goes to their gigs and takes them on tour. Milk! Records releases the music of other local bands they like. The end result is an almost eerie degree of respect and protection from the Melbourne music community. There’s no jealousy, no tall poppy syndrome, no murmurings that her achievements are disproportionate to what she deserves. They’re hoping they’ll never meet her on the way down.

Barnett names musician Darren Hanlon as a big influence. Earlier in the year Barnett took Hanlon on tour in the US as her opening act. It was a role reversal from a couple of years earlier when Barnett opened for Hanlon, but he isn’t grumbling. He tells a story. “During one of the shows we were sitting together watching the other support act play. Courtney noticed that a microphone had come loose on its stand and wasn’t picking up one of the amps. She ran downstairs, waded through the crowd, got up on stage and tightened it up again. It was just a small gesture, but one that says a lot about her to me.”

I remark that the music industry is fickle, that at the moment things are pretty good. Barnett squares her jaw and steels herself for the question she knows is coming. “OK,” she says, daring me to continue. So I do. “Are you preparing yourself for the possibility that your star might fall?” To Barnett the question is ­tedious; we’re speaking a different language. “No. I’m just doing what I like to do. I don’t really think about it. I don’t really care. I’m not looking at that stuff. Everyone else is. But I don’t really care. I’m just going to keep doing what I do. And keep living how I live. I’ve always felt it’s an honour to play songs on a stage in front of people, wherever it is.”

Not many artists are given the opportunity to turn down crazy money to do crazy things. Things that don’t feel right. Things that feel wrong. ­Barnett’s favourite author as a kid was Paul ­Jennings. There was always a twist at the end.

Just up the road from the Northcote Social Club is the Applecore backyard. How things change in a few years. In 2011, Courtney Barnett was playing small backyard festivals; I was booking small backyard festivals, taking a punt on an unknown singer-songwriter called Courtney Barnett. I had seen her play a few months earlier at a gig I helped put together for a visiting festival promoter. Out of the nine bands who played, she was the only one I remembered. Songs with melodies, with ­honesty, with humour. Songs where you could actually hear the lyrics. I hope there are no hard feelings about the late $40.

But I can’t claim to have “discovered” her any more than O’Byrne, or the American music ­tastemakers, or anybody can. Because nobody discovered her, and yet everybody did. It’s natural to feel a connection to Barnett, because every person who hears her songs feels it. It’s personal.

Whether or not her career sustains its current stratospheric trajectory is the wrong question. Barnett says she’ll write songs for the rest of her life, no matter who’s listening.