Courtney Barnett on embracing discomfort and finding joy in uncertainty for new album 'Creature Of Habit' • Interview • DIY Magazine

As children, we’re conditioned to believe that self-development - and, in extension, success - is a quantifiable, linear process. We’re schooled to attain grades, pass tests, gain qualifications, each one a measure of progress made. Social milestones - promotion, homeowning, marriage - are worn like Scouts badges, pinned to the lapel of our Instagram grids. Every year is a stepping stone until, as adults, we stand complete. Finish line reached. Job done. Except that’s never quite how it works, is it?

“I started therapy and meditating a few years ago, and had the realisation that this is a constant [battle]. I think I was looking for THE answer: ‘when am I going to get fixed?’” chuckles Courtney Barnett. “Instead, you realise: ‘oh, we have to think about this and do this work forever’. It’s not like you put in the hours and then you figure it all out.” Life, as it turns out, is an eternal learning curve. “And I guess,” she nods, “I’m trying to embrace that now, instead of feeling overwhelmed or threatened by it. That’s just how it is.”

Returning this month with her fourth studio album - the follow up proper to 2021’s ruminative ‘Things Take Time, Take Time’ (since which she also released the instrumental record ‘End Of The Day’ in 2023) - Courtney is no stranger to overwhelm. Widely beloved for her wry, prosaic lyricism, she writes with the unpretentious, often anxious candour of one for whom things have always been slightly bewildering. “I saw something recently talking about directors essentially making the same film over and over again,” she muses, kicking herself for not remembering the specifics. “And I connected with it, because in some ways I feel like I’m making the same songs over and over again. At the crux of it, I’m essentially saying the same thing, but trying to find a different answer within it somewhere.”

“A few years ago, I think I was just feeling so lost and unsure of what I was doing.”

Having cycled through various guises with each LP, trying on different hats as she went - self-deprecating aphorist, sociopolitical critic, introspective philosopher - it seems that, with this latest outing, she’s dropped the act entirely, emerging from a decade-plus-long metamorphosis with a new ethos: acceptance.

‘Creature Of Habit’, Courtney tells us over Zoom, was born out of a prolonged period of doubt: globally, we were reckoning with a post-pandemic world, our rapid return to the pace and pressures of life before lockdown a jarring contrast to the enforced stillness of the early ‘20s. Personally, too, she was adrift, “at a point in [her] life where [she] didn’t know what [she] was doing, or what [she] wanted to do, or where [she] wanted to be.”

Abandoning her usual instinct to overthink for the pull of new horizons, the Aussie alt-rocker upped sticks from her native Melbourne to land in the US, an “adventure” she sorely hoped would jump-start her stalling creative engine. “A few years ago, when all of this happened, I think I was just feeling so lost and unsure of what I was doing,” she reflects today, speaking from the satisfying comfort of her LA pad, in the middle of a “really weird” rain storm. (Prior to our chat, she’d even nipped out briefly, à la Drew Barrymore, to enjoy the downpour). “There were some pretty dark times; it is a strange existence, I guess, to work and to live so entwined like that.”

Attempting to extricate her personal identity from her professional self, Courtney consciously put music on the back burner and leaned into more mindful pursuits, spending her days hiking in the beautiful, barren landscape around her then-rental in Joshua Tree. Away from the mire of ‘grind culture’ and social media’s self-improvement obsession, her eyes opened to the slow magic that already surrounds us.

“I had the idea for [album track] ‘Same’ after hiking in the national park, and being at the top of a mountain, and just having that feeling of being a tiny speck of dust amongst this huge world and universe,” she observes, summarising the sensation as “that humbling feeling of just existing.” Setting a peppy synth soundscape against lyrics which scan as both reassuring affirmation and uncomfortable epiphany (“I am a drop, I’m a drop in the ocean / […] / Floating around, and if I ever drown then / I’ll be the leaves in the bottom of your tea”), the song finds her reckoning with the inevitability of change, doing her best to welcome our worldly insignificance. While admittedly daunting, she also finds the perspective strangely grounding. “It can be overwhelming for sure, but in that moment you realise that some things we’re worried about really don’t matter.”

“[Early on], maybe I made jokes because I was actually being defensive. I probably thought I was tough; I didn’t realise that I was trying to hide something of myself.”

Despite her best intentions, then, Courtney found the studio calling once more - but this time, she returned determined to ease the pressure, having struck on inspiration precisely when she wasn’t seeking it out. “I think it’s interesting for me to observe that my response [to uncertainty] was to figure it out through the act of writing or making music,” she acknowledges.

“That’s so funny to me. And it was nice because then I felt that I WANTED to do it, instead of feeling like it was a burden. It wasn’t [saying]: ‘I have to do this because it’s my job’, or ‘because people are expecting it’. In those moments, it feels really beautiful because it’s not about the outcome or the finished product or whatever it is; it’s just about the process. It felt like a big circle to go in, but maybe it was necessary.”

That’s not to say it was easy from there on out. For a self-confessed control freak, this new, looser framework lent itself not only to freedom, but also to intense vulnerability. Heading into Joshua Tree’s Rancho de la Luna armed only with unfinished lyrics and incomplete songs, she had no choice but to surrender herself to the process. “‘Maybe I don’t need to know exactly what’s going to happen. Maybe that’s okay’,” she suggests, recalling her forcefully hopeful attitude.

“But instead,” she continues, “[the fact that] I didn’t feel in control of myself or the work that I was presenting kicked in, and I kind of psyched myself out and went to these dark places in the studio. I thought: ‘I’m wasting everyone’s time. Nobody wants to be here. Why did I bring everyone here to make these songs that I haven’t even finished?’. I was being so negative and down on myself.”

Acknowledging that she was actually surrounded by “the most beautiful, generous musicians” in what was “this really safe environment”, Courtney notes that “we all have our weird little insecurities, and those things affect everyone so differently.” Did she expect to still feel so exposed, four albums and over ten years into the game? “I think about this a lot,” she nods. “Maybe the answer is that you have to be so confident and so egotistical that you don’t even care about those things… but then you lose this vulnerability or softness.”

“I do feel like it’s a really joyful album, even though a lot of it was hard to write and hard to finish.”

And those are two qualities that ‘Creature Of Habit’ possesses in spades. Anchored by buoyant, analogue warmth and shot through with natural imagery, it sees Courtney turn - at first desperately, then gratefully - to simplicity as a salve for her too-loud mind. “Rip this thing out of my head / Gotta get this off my chest,” she howls in urgent opener ‘Stay In Your Lane’; “Let’s figure out the rest another day,” she sighs later, on grace-giving Waxahatchee collab ‘Site Unseen’.

This is also Courtney at her most earnest - still whip smart and witty, sure, but no longer using clever quips to deflect away from her inherent uncertainty. They say hindsight is 20/20; now, when she looks back on her earlier work, she understands that “‘maybe I made jokes because I was actually being defensive, or maybe I was being sarcastic because I was scared.” Back then, she reflects, “I probably thought I was tough; I didn’t realise that I was trying to hide something of myself. I thought I was doing [one thing], but now with some distance and time, I kind of see it from a different angle.”

In many ways the antithesis of her 2015 debut and its acutely specific observations, here, album centrepieces ‘Mantis’ and ‘Sugar Plum’ indulge in inarticulation, finding a real sense of elation in not having all the answers. “Yeah y’know those words don’t come easy to me / So I’m looking for a little leniency,” she shrugs in the latter’s jangle-pop outro. We quote these lyrics, and Courtney chuckles. “That makes me so happy to hear, because I do feel like it’s a really joyful album, even though a lot of it was hard to write and hard to finish. There’s pain and all that stuff in there, but that’s just life.

“This record took so long for me to finish; I really struggled with it. It’s almost like I was holding myself to these incredibly high standards, and then was upset that I wasn’t churning through things.” In an age of instant gratification and perpetual overstimulation, it’s disconcerting, we offer, to step off the hamster wheel. She nods: “I think a lot of it was reminding myself to slow down and enjoy life, but also take the time to get it right. A few people close to me jokingly referenced my last album title, saying ‘well, things take time, don’t they?’ I just thought: ‘shut up!’” she laughs.

‘Creature Of Habit’ saw Courtney Barnett do battle with herself; but as a result, it’s utterly armourless. Beauty, it suggests, can be found simply by shifting the emphasis - here, she’s looking not down at the ground, but up at the sky. “Part of it, for me, was changing these habits in my life, changing these patterns,” she shares. “It was leaning into this darkness or confusion or doubt, feeling it, but then choosing joy instead. And I hear it in the final product.”

So do we: it’s in the quiet resolve and country-tinged chorus of understated banger ‘One Thing At A Time’; it’s in the bird song of sun-streaked closer ‘Another Beautiful Day’; it’s in the artwork’s praying mantis, a symbol of stillness and patience. “It’s not about finding the answer or figuring it out,” Courtney says simply, “it’s just about the steps that you take to get there.”

‘Creature Of Habit’ is out on 27th March via Fiction.

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