No one writes lyrics like Courtney Barnett. She has the ability to make mundane everyday things seem interesting as she looks on them with a wry eye. The way she sings almost seems like a stream of consciousness which speaks to her songwriting style - she makes it look easy, and her music perfectly compliments that. In Depreston, Barnett talks about living on the outskirts of town trying to make ends meet, something relatable to most artists. The way the song unfolds you can envision her dancing around the kitchen to this song as she brews her own coffee.
This song is full of humorous lines like how she “saves 23 dollars a week” by making her own coffee; it really makes you rethink what a song can be about. You can tell Barnett sings exactly what is going through her mind at a specific point in time. Towards the end, she repeats, “if you got a spare half of a million, you could knock it down and start rebuilding.” The keyword is "start". It really takes that much money to make a perfect house. For a struggling artist, this is an impossible task. It’s fitting that after these words the song goes into a guitar solo for the remainder of the song. This change really makes you think about those words and for some reason, it takes that long for them to set in, it’s like we can’t begin to imagine that to be true, but when the vocal drops out the reality starts to set in. And just the like that the song ends.
You can learn more about Courtney Barnett here:
About the curator - Nick Malpezzi
Nick Malpezzi is a lover of nature, cats, beer, and music. When he’s not at his day job he is recording artists, working on films, writing music, taking pictures and enjoying life. He believes complexity is derived from simplicity, which is seen in his musical tastes and original productions.