Courtney Barnett: “Time has changed the way I speak about myself a little”

Courtney Barnett has always been a keen personal archivist. Photographs, journals, mementos – the Sydney-born, Melbourne-shaped singer-songwriter collects them all, periodically piecing together the fragments to map out her journey. “There’s something I love about looking back and seeing yourself at a different age, or in a different headspace,” the 38-year-old explains, speaking from her adoptive home of L.A.. “Ego and emotional stuff aside, it’s fascinating.”

It was in this spirit that she allowed Melbourne filmmaker Danny Cohen to observe her process, back in 2018. Accompanying Barnett as she toured internationally and began sketches for her third solo album, ‘These Things Take Time, Take Time’, for three years he captured life inside the maelstrom, emerging with the acclaimed 2022 documentary Anonymous Club. It wasn’t quite the victory lap everyone anticipated, recounting instead the struggles of a shy artist all but overwhelmed by imposter syndrome and writer’s block. In one scene, Barnett confesses, “I just turned 30 and I feel like I stepped over some sort of line, but I’m still lost.” The Guardian described it as “a film so intensely personal it almost borders on claustrophobic.”

For the film’s subject, watching the period back proved surprisingly confronting. “I mean, I knew some of those things about myself, but I saw a different part of myself and I didn’t like it,” she recalls. “I was like, oh, I don’t want to be that person. But I tried to not like who I was in a kind way, if that makes sense? It became a catalyst for me wanting to change.”

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I saw a different part of myself and I didn’t like it. It became a catalyst for me wanting to change.

Courtney Barnett, on Anonymous Club: the documentary about her third album

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Certainly, the woman sat before me now – relaxing in the home she shares with her girlfriend and their poodle/Shih Tzu-cross, Larry – seems in a much calmer, more contented place. In the interim, she’s put in the hard yards: therapy, new hobbies, cutting back on drinking, regular exercise – the works. “All the things I was convinced wouldn’t make me feel better when I was in my 20s,” she chuckles. “It was like, oh wait, those things actually work…”

Another positive byproduct of prioritising her mental health has been a renewed sense of confidence creatively. You can hear it all over her fourth LP – out March 27 2026 – the wryly-titled ‘Creature of Habit’. Where ‘These Things Take Time…’ traded in easy-breezy acoustics with an almost demo-like looseness, ‘Creature of Habit’ is pitched somewhere between the more tightly-coiled grunge textures of 2018’s ‘Tell Me How You Really Feel’ and the 60s-garage-meets-slacker rock stylings of her 2015 debut ‘Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.’ 

Last October’s lead single ‘Stay In Your Lane’ made for a barnstorming comeback, powered by a squirming, buzzsaw bassline, choppy guitars and metronomic percussion courtesy of Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint. Suitably self-effacing, it found Barnett facing her demons and immediately regretting the decision, as referenced in the anguished refrain, “Rip this thing out of my head.” 

On ‘One Thing At A Time’ she doubles down on the theme, rueing over enjoyably noodly, Graham Coxon-esque guitar, “I don’t know where to start / When every thought at once / Comes flooding til I’m underwater,” before declaring, “Oh my god I’m ready for a change.” Meanwhile album centrepiece ‘Mantis’ is a driving, heartland rock anthem redolent of The War On Drugs, and concludes with the admission, “I got my head sorted – sort of / I keep going, just because.” 

Begun in earnest in 2024, while Barnett was based in a sublet in Joshua Tree, California, ‘Creature of Habit’ boasts all the boldness of an album conceived in relative isolation. “I had a lot of space to make a lot of noise, unlike with ‘These Things Take Time…’, which was written during COVID lockdown in Melbourne with me trying not to upset the neighbours. Where that album feels timid and quiet and reflective, [‘Creature of Habit’] feels like the total opposite.” She pauses and adds: “Also I had just moved to America, and was on this new adventure, doing all these new things and seeing all these new places. So I wanted this album to be really joyful and fun.”

Improvisation was key in achieving this – a method she first leaned into making her 2023 instrumental album ‘End of the Day’. Created with Mogzawa and derived from ambient material originally made to score Anonymous Club, Barnett describes that record as “a lesson in trusting myself in that moment, and letting go of the fear of being disorganised.” Where previously she would spend “months if not years” perfecting songs before bringing them to other people, she and Mogzawa would deliberately enter the studio “totally unprepared.” 

The creative process behind ‘Creature of Habit’ resided somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Barnett smiles: “Mostly it was about ignoring the little voice in the back of my head that tells me I’m wasting money and other people’s time, and leaving space for a little bit of magic to happen.” With the direction set, the album was finished in dribs and drabs over the next 10 months, overseen by producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Big Thief, Sharon Van Etten). 

After the relative melodic introspection of ‘These Things Take Time…’, it’s a delight to hear Barnett really leaning into big pop choruses again, be that on the punky ‘Stay In Your Lane’ or via ‘Great Advice’’s rebellious,“I like it this way” refrain. There’s a glorious widescreen quality to the record too. On ‘Site Unseen’ that manifests itself in undulating alt-country, featuring close vocal harmonies from Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee. On ‘Same’, it’s quirkier, offering up a playful combination of smudged synths and exploratory guitars that brings to mind ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’-era Blur. While Barnett struggles to name any specific reference points for the album today, she admits to playing ‘Nobody Loves You More’ by Kim Deal and Paul McCartney’s ‘McCartney II’ on repeat during that period.

As a lyricist, Barnett remains unmatched in her ability to temper heartfelt confessions with droll humour. “I know I got a sensitive heart, I’m always picking it apart,” she sings on ‘Sugar Plum’, before pulling the rug: “And when I throw it to the vultures, they don’t want it either / Probably too sincere.” But where once Barnett wore humour as a kind of armour, it’s now more often used as a device to unveil deeper emotional truths.

“Sometimes when I go back and look at old lyrics, or when I just perform old songs, I do recognise that some of that [humour] was a bit of a barrier or a way to deflect,” she admits. “Nowadays it doesn’t feel as natural to do that. I’m not as self-deprecating because I just see the world in a slightly different way – or I’m trying to see myself in a slightly different way. Time has changed the way that I speak about myself a little bit.”

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I’m not as self-deprecating because I see the world in a slightly different way – or I’m trying to see myself in a different way. Time has changed the way I speak about myself a little

Courtney Barnett

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She warms to the theme: “Ever since the documentary, I’ve been really interested in the idea of honesty or vulnerability. Because when we think we’re being really honest or vulnerable, we’re still filtering our message for someone else’s ears. For this album, I tried a lot to write from a subconscious place as much as possible, trying my best to bypass those filters and see what was the truest thought or idea.”

The truth is, large parts of ‘Creature of Habit’ come from a pretty raw place emotionally, with Barnett still processing the turbulent period documented in Anonymous Club, in which she had seriously considered quitting music altogether. Additionally, in 2022, she had dissolved Milk! Records, the independent record label she founded in 2012 with her ex-girlfriend Jen Cloher.

“It just felt like the right time to do it,” she says of the decision. “Situations had just changed, and I was in such a different place to where I was when I started it. Also, it was just hard to keep it going financially. And on some level, I wanted to just see what would happen if I put 100% of my effort into writing music instead of kind of trying to spin all these different plates.”

Naturally, as pragmatic as she tried to be about the situation, closing the imprint still unearthed a rich well of guilt. “I think for part of me, it really felt like a failure to let it close. And I took a lot of that really personally, like there was something that I had done wrong not to be able to make it work. But, at the same time I felt quite liberated because I suddenly had this time and space to focus on my music. “

The key to moving forward was to take things slowly. Barnett prioritised her mental and physical health above everything, allowing herself a full year to simply live, before heading back in the studio. Untended, her creativity bloomed, bringing with it a vital opportunity to heal. She explains, “Even if I’m not writing a song, I’m always in the process of writing something – anything. I write letters and journal-style things, and do freewriting, just to see what’s going on in my head. And I find it really helps me get my thoughts in order and understand myself better.”

Meanwhile, therapy offered some crucial perspective: “I think as soon as you say something out loud to another person, it changes it and makes it real. Whereas sometimes with writing, I can go around in circles in my own head, which sometimes doesn’t feel as productive.”

Another key takeaway from that period was a proclivity for routine that ultimately inspired the album’s title. The phrase appears in the song ‘Mantis’: “I’m floating aimless but got my feet concreted beneath this creature of habit / Teach me the magic of an extra ordinary day, anodyne the time away.” The verse concludes hopefully, “There’s no such thing as a perfect melody but I keep searching every morning in the trees.”

Barnett recalls, “It was a little throwaway comment in one of my journaling pages. I was in a routine where I would get up every morning, sit with the coffee and write in the desert. And I had observed that like I had much it threw me off when my routine changed or when someone kind of infiltrated my day, which is a really inefficient way to live. 

“Like, even with making this album, the idea of going to some amazing location to record sounded fun but I was like, I want to sleep in my bed and I want to have my perfect coffee in the morning. So I was kind of dealing with this duality of those two things: recognising the moments where I wanted to be safe and secure and be with the people I knew, but also the part of me that was craving new experiences and new challenges.” 

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The idea of going to some amazing location to record sounded fun – but I wanted to sleep in my bed and have my perfect coffee in the morning

Courtney Barnett, on making album four

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The album concludes with ‘Another Beautiful Day’, a rare moment of straight-faced sincerity, from an artist adored the world over for serving poignancy with a generous side order of self-deprecation. “Reborn every morning, still somehow getting older,” she marvels in her breezy drawl, concluding, “Wish we’d thought to bring something to bottle up this moment.” Her wonder is infectious, perhaps because the very fact it’s hard-won feels so palpable.

She smiles: “Part of why I love making music is the process, even though the process can be fucking so hard. For this album, I was really going through it, but I guess that’s a part of why I do it.” I wonder what growth we’d see as viewers, were she to allow the cameras back in for an Anonymous Club part two.

“It’s hard to tell,” she says, pausing to give the question some serious thought. “You know, that’s interesting because it goes back to our conversation before about filtering and honesty. Maybe now I would be a little bit more guarded or something. But I have to say, as much as I hated watching it, and kind-of wish it never happened, I’m grateful for it. Because if it didn’t exist, then maybe I’d still be the same person as I was before.”

‘Creature of Habit’ is out March 27.