The Australian music scene had always undoubtedly been one of our most favorite trends. One's own musical taste education would have never been what it is if we did not know about The Birthday Party, The Triffids, SPK, The Go-Betweens, The Divinyls, The Church and many of the musicians involved in these bands whom have often pursued parallel solo projects. This made us have a genuine interest in all the indie/alternative music hailing from this ever fascinating country. There's something special about Aussie bands that make their vibrant sound get inside your head in a clearly different manner than the British, American or Canadian bands. So it is only natural that all along the years we stood attentive to all the exciting sounds coming from Melbourne, Sidney, Brisbane, Perth.
There are a lot of gorgeous bands and musicians around the Aussie block for the moment such as Rainbow Chan, Go Violets, The Native Cats, Screaming Match, Blank Realm, Animal Hands, British India, Alpine, The Jezebels, Bloods, Jagwar Ma and so many others that we could go on and on with a list of names but that is not our purpose here though one can be assured that Australian offers an amazing aural experience. This article focuses on someone that whether you like her or not revamped much of the actual Australian scene and made the indie world know about it in complete gaze. I tend to believe that she is doing a lot more in Australia than Mr. Tony Abbot government. Her music is generating a consensus of both admiration, praise and acclaim as well as reaching a multitude of people that Mr. Abbot never will.
Let's put politics aside and call in the magic of Courtney Barnett. She was born in Pittwater and grew up in Sydney's seaside area where the best beaches are located just before moving to Hobart, Tasmania, with her parents. Barnett’s mother being a former Australian Ballet dancer while her father worked as a graphic designer. After finishing high school, she attended University of Tasmania’s art school though hesitating between fine-art photography and music. Music won and Courtney Barnett dropped out University, moved to Melbourne where in between working in a bar and a tennis shoe store she began writing her music and became assiduous in the Melbourne music scene which would be of decisive importance to Courtney’s music career.
She played guitar in several small bands mostly garage outfits before joining psych band Immigrant Union and feature in the song Numbers on Baby We Were Born to Die EP (2012) by Jen Cloher and also playing on (2013) Cloher’s third album as full time band member. When Courtney went solo she launched her own label: Milk! Records to release her own music, but the label has grown and includes some of her favorite musicians in Melbourne and collaborative projects with her and friends. You definitely have to be bold enough to found your own record label with first headquarters in your own bedroom! Courtney Barnett did it and released the first self-produced EP I've Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris in 2012 while the following one, How To Carve a Carrot into a Rose, would be released in the early cries of 2013.
Pretty convinced that listeners were somehow lost in translation between both EPs and missing much of the issues and subjects. So she decided to combine them both in a double EP format and released them by the end of 2013 under the title of The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas. Later that year, Courtney Barnett and the band embarked on an almost sold out non-stop tour that took them to North America, Europe and back again to Australia with little available time to start recording what would properly be her debut album. The unanimously acclaimed A Sea of Split Peas, allowed Courtney Barnett to internationally make room for herself during 2013, in such a way that her recognition hugely went way beyond the Australian borders and got her booked on the widely known and influential Jimmy Fallon, Coachella, Glastonbury, and received appraisal from influential press such as The Guardian, NME, Rolling Stone and Pitchfork to mention but a few.
Courtney Barnett started writing songs by the time she started learning guitar, though she only began performing them in public when she was around 18. Her first accomplished song was Canned Tomatoes and like every other it was written from a regular human being perspective dealing with common emotions, roller coaster kind of ups and downs, good and bad experiences spanning everything going on in her life. The lyrics are ideas and feelings set to some background and it is no surprise that they show the gathering of loads of finely observed details excised from mundane existential routine. All of this goes into Courtney Barnett songs since she kind of compulsively observes what’s directly in front of her and normally the writing momentum happens on the spur of some inspirational circumstance which fill her journals with endless inner monologues before the words are set to the guitar.
She crafts her lyrics with great care, so it seems and then delivers them as if she’s improvising. One may say that it is purely logic and analytical procedure. In some sharp sense one could say that Courtney Barnett is a true master of an observational universe blurred between profundity and banality since the song themes can be triggered just because of drinking wine with friends in a living room or looking at cracks in a plaster wall or driving in the suburbs of Melbourne, or the personal objects of a deceased old lady. Courtney Barnett writes about many of the issues affecting the contemporary capitalist alienation and the lyrics perfectly achieve that equilibrium between personal, everyday moments and all the cargo of emotionally that often rides through one’s mind. Observation requires emotion in order to give personality and meaningfulness to the songs.
If one was considering literary styles one would feel tempted to say that though technically Courtney Barnett writes about her own life, she is far from being a traditional confessional diarist in singer-songwriter mode. On the contrary, she manages to be hyper-specific avoiding short-sighted outlooks on the issues she writes about. This is probably one of the most visible explanations that helps to understand the reason why one can easily connect to her lyrics. Her songs really tell a story and build upon a world of experiences that one maybe naturally acquainted to in spite of the fact that the nature of Courtney Barnett's songs derive from the uniqueness of her life experience, but there is also a lot in them coming from the alien experience of other people’s lives. Due to this evidence one can say that she writes from a perspective definitely shared not only by Australians or New Zealanders, but by a worldwide legion of young and not so young educated urban individuals above the average cultural enlightenment though almost broke if not poor in some cases.
To Be Continued On Next Post…