You could see Courtney Barnett dressing up as Cousin Itt for Halloween. On a Tuesday night in L.A.'s Echo Park, she’s onstage, but she’s not billed. She’s part of someone else’s band. Her hair engulfs her face while she thrashes her own neck around the neck of her guitar, flicking her fingers across the fretboard in the style only she does, coming up for air every once in a while. Her leader for the evening is Australian singer-songwriter Jen Cloher, who is speak-singing a stinging number that's a cross between Patti Smith and Nirvana. It's called “Great Australian Bite.” “We’re all from Down Under, where no-one hears our thunder / Signing shitty deals just to make it work,” go the lyrics. A satisfied smile appears over Cloher's face. This is her first American gig, despite a decade of independently releasing records, and it's sold out.
On Cloher's right stands Barnett, her guitarist, undeniably the biggest breakout singer-songwriter of an Aussie generation. It's certainly not Barnett's first American gig. In fact, last time Barnett played in America, it was Philadelphia rocker Kurt Vile to her left. The pair released an acclaimed joint album—Lotta Sea Lice—last year, and on it Barnett covered Cloher's torch song “Fear Is Like a Forest.” Prior to that, Barnett ended her final shows touring for her charmed, grunge-y 2015 debut album Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit with a performance on SNL. Or, rather, two performances on the season finale of SNL, which—if you tuned in—felt like something out of MTV Unplugged's golden era. Never was that level of commercial crossover the plan. Struggling artists from Melbourne's DIY scene don't count on that.
Barnett, 14 years Cloher's junior, is also her “wife” (they've yet to have a wedding under Australia's new legislation, but Barnett reckons they will “as a token of our love”). They're also business partners running a label—Milk!—together in Melbourne. They co-parent Bubbles the cat, who decorates the home screen on Barnett's iPhone and appears in sticker form on the inside of her Fender Telecaster. Tonight, Barnett jams next to Cloher as she rips into the songs. This is Barnett in purest form. No spotlight, no pressure, just music. “I always feel on the edge of falling apart on Jen's stage,” she says earlier, substantiating that with: “Which is a great feeling.” Barnett, 30, leaves sentences half finished, like her thoughts. She comes back to them later if they're worth figuring out.
You wouldn't recognize Barnett tonight unless you already knew she'd be on stage. She likes it that way. The night she was nominated for a Grammy (2016's Best New Artist; she lost to Meghan Trainor), I stumbled upon her in a bowling alley. Granted, it was a bowling alley inside the Roosevelt, but it still struck me as the only after-party during the music industry's so-called biggest night of the year that Barnett could possibly wind up at. Those whirlwind breakout years never changed her. The adulation, acceptance, recognition, and tedious labeling of her as an era's “female Bob Dylan” took her by shock. The ensuing imposter syndrome made her feel inadequate and distrusting. Her friends were surprised to see it deplete her confidence.
That's just one reason why her second album title is loaded with forthright spunk. Tell Me How You Really Feel is her most direct statement yet. But in many ways, it's a statement she's angling back at herself, looking in the mirror, psyching herself up for another trip around the sun.
“What were you, uhm, expecting?” asks Barnett, sitting on a park bench on a rainy L.A. afternoon four days earlier. “It's hard to know what people think…”
Bubbles' startled face disappears from her iPhone's screen, and she hands over the artwork for Tell Me How You Really Feel. It's a close-up of her own startled face. Usually, her releases are accompanied by illustrations she's drawn—the cartoons she's sketched and then built her songs' narratives from outwardly. Past crowd-pleasers have included “Elevator Operator,” about a suicidal bellboy; “Depreston,” about creeping gentrification; and “Avant Gardener,” possibly the greatest song ever to document a panic attack. This, however, is new. There's no beginning, middle, or end. There's just Courtney.
“Yeah,” she smiles. “It's this Polaroid I took of myself. While I was writing [the album], I was procrastinating by taking photos. That one jumped out at me. It's weird when you look at it long enough. You can't tell what I'm thinking. I remember I was really emotional, but there's this look behind the eyes. I dunno.” She takes one of her long pauses. Like the Mona Lisa, I say, trying to help. “Ha! Exactly. I just…liked it.”
Many journalists tried to solve Barnett's mind during Sometimes I Just Sit… but most failed, probably because Barnett was failing, too. Today she's halfway through Elliott Smith's biography and she's thumbing a Joni Mitchell one. She likes to work out other people's minds, searching for the key to her own. Open about her struggles with anxiety, she constantly contends with bad days, forever trying to unpick a success story that she never set out for. Often, she doesn't have the vocabulary. It would be easy for that to be this album's story. Barnett doesn't want that, but it's what's arrived: the inward-looking follow-up LP. The idea of the difficult second album haunts her, because this is the difficult second album.
Again, she pauses.
“Yeah, it definitely is,” she says. “Any time a question like that comes up, I feel affected by it, so I'll say, 'It doesn't make any difference.' But of course it does.” She looks at the beauty of the surrounding orange trees, still amazed that music is her passport to far-flung places. “It was hard. I ticked the boxes of the cliché. It was really emotionally challenging. I was face to face with all these things I didn't wanna deal with.”
The hurdles were twofold. Number one: As a Dylan-compared, Cobain-worshipping, lesbian-identifying songwriter living among societal unrest, she felt she lacked purpose. “I reached this point of, Ugh, what am I saying? There's so many people saying powerful, inspiring things! I don't feel like I'm saying anything important! I beat myself up about that, tried to write these impassioned songs, and they felt preachy and full of ego. I hated them.”
Number two: Her songwriting process didn't get any easier by virtue of newfound popularity. “It's a shambles,” she says. “It always is.” She describes piecing ideas together from as far as 15 years ago up to the present day. There's a '90s dream-pop song called “Sunday Roast,” which Barnett began in high school. The melody boomeranged back to her. “I've never found words for it. I was mucking about with it, and it's my favorite song now. I love it.” It is beautiful. She smirks. “Sometimes it just takes a really long time to…write a song.” Half a lifetime? “Yup.”
The answer to Barnett's problems lay in wielding her overactive mind as a tool for her own smarts, and not self-damnation. Easier said than done. “Crippling Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence” is one song title that describes the struggle. She took the anger behind trying to go “political” and poured those feelings into tunes dedicated to friends' woes. “Then I realized that I was writing those to myself,” she says. She contended with her thoughts more—“instead of letting them linger up in the air.” And as much as it makes her wince to admit it, traveling the world made her face her demons in new ways. She found her head wasn't quite as scary as she'd feared it was.
She laughs again. “It's so cheesy but so true. Tour was fun, but being face to face with yourself during six-hour car rides is an interesting psychological study. [Before] I didn't believe that I had any importance as a human, not just as a songwriter. Now I feel like I'm allowed to say what I want.”
Kicking off with “Hopefulessness” and the sound of a winding guitar note that brings Barnett back into focus, the album makes her purpose-led manifesto immediately clear: “You know what they say / No one's born to hate… Take your broken heart, turn it into art.” That latter line is a quote from Carrie Fisher, the one Meryl Streep referenced at 2017's Golden Globes when she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award.
“I was sad when Carrie Fisher died,” says Barnett, uncomfortable mourning someone she never knew. “I feel so sad about the world being so fucked. How do you make something positive out of that, something useful, hopeful, not just wallowing.” She thinks. “You know how everyone has an inner story you always refer back to—that neural thing that you do?" She's referring to the voices in your head that tell you you're a loser, that nobody will care if you get eaten by a crocodile. "Mine is: 'No one likes me, no one listens to me.' Well, what good does that do me or anyone? It's stupid and selfish. Every time you feel that [way], just say no.”
On “Hopefulessness” she sings, “Your vulnerability is stronger than it seems,” setting up a coming-of-age record that relies less on sarcastic tropes and more on emotional truisms. “It's a growing-up thing,” she says, nodding. “Ages 27 to 30 were intense. I went to some really bad places. I feel like I've made a semi-decision to get over myself—to realize there's something bigger going on.”
“Charity” is the clearest example of that. It reads like a conversation to herself. “You must be having so much fun / Everything’s amazing…” It's like she's self-chastising for not riding high in a blaze of rock-'n'-roll glory. “That's a good way to put it,” she says. It reminds me of Barnett at Glastonbury 2015—objectively a huge career day. She opened the main stage, then performed again later in a packed tent. The prediction was that Glastonbury would be hers to conquer, but she unraveled. It was a deeply uncomfortable experience shadowing her there—like forcing a sick puppy to go for a walk.
“Yeah, that was a terrible day,” she says without hesitation. “Even knowing that you have people that love you…I have trouble talking to Jen about how I feel [on those days].” She uses the song “City Looks Pretty” to explain. It seems to document her return home (“Friends treat you like a stranger and strangers treat you like their best friend”). It's not. It was written in her early twenties. “I was on anti-depressants and wouldn't leave my room. Then I'd go for long walks. My housemates would worry when I'd come home. It's not about coming home from tour, but when I revisited it, it made sense from both angles, which blows my mind.”
Barnett saw patterns in her behavior, attempting to write herself out of them. She got out of her own way enough to complete songs like “I'm Not Your Mother, I'm Not Your Bitch” (“that's angry”) and “Nameless Faceless.” The latter is the lead single, a documentation of sexual assault. “Women are scared that men will kill them, I hold my keys between my fingers,” she sings. It's the type of observation that all females relate to, but it will be revelatory to men. Inspired by the women's movement, she felt galvanized to pen it.
“Me and my mom talk all the time, and she'll always say, ‘You're so brave.’ What the fuck does that mean?” she ponders, trying to find her place in it all. “I read this Margaret Atwood quote: 'Men are scared that women will laugh at them, women are scared that men will kill them.' Wow. I've spent so much time thinking about [sexism], where that hatred comes from. You can't figure that out. You can't put yourself in the mind of bad people. Social media makes men more aware by listening to how people feel, to empathize, not just be told that it's bad to sexually assault someone.”
The next day, I'm at the shoot for the “Nameless Faceless” video*. Directed by a woman, with an all-female cast, it features two girl wrestlers in a ring and a cavalcade of women surrounding Barnett and staring down the lens. They're told to channel every bit of rage they've ever harnessed toward men. It's a far cry from Barnett's previous visuals: no gimmicks, no punch lines, and nowhere to hide.
Hiding could have been an option for a post-Sometimes I Sit… Barnett. She could have made its follow-up in any fancy studio, working behind any big-name producer, disappearing further into the circus. Instead, she returned home in July 2017: to Melbourne, to Bubbles (“my little savior”), to Jen, to the studio down the street where she'd spend hours with fellow workaholic producer/engineer friends Burke Reid and Dan Luscombe, same as last time. She cleansed the palette, making that Kurt Vile LP (“a good side-step”) and recording Cloher's self-titled release. Beyond her usual lineup, the big surprise additions to Tell Me How You Really Feel are Kim and Kelly Deal (The Breeders), who sing on "Nameless Faceless" and "Crippling Self-Doubt and a General Lack of Confidence." That happened in Ohio. Barnett saw an opportunity to capture them, and her tour manager drove three hours to get there. “I have a WAV file of Kim Deal singing,” she says, still marveling at turning teen fandom into collaboration.
Yet it's her own voice that's matured. On “Need a Little Time,” there's a high-pitched, soft delicateness to her tone. Barnett insists that she didn't even notice it until her manager said: “I've never heard you sing like that.” She puts it down to Cloher's parents' piano, which they inherited and which she's slowly tried to teach herself on in true DIY style, writing many of these songs on it, discovering a whole new world of melody. “I'm not good at piano,” she says. That’s hard to believe.
The rain is starting to beat down harder. She looks up at the sky. Before we make a run for it, I remind her that at Glastonbury 2015 the only decent part of our exchange was when she said: “I don't wanna be a rock star, I just wanna write better songs.” She seems happy even now with that one sensible statement.
Are you writing better songs? “Yup. Definitely,” she says. “100 percent.” In that case, you wonder whether it even matters how anyone else really feels.
*The video for "Nameless Faceless" would not be released.
