Courtney Barnett

ABOUT this week’s guest:

photo credit: Lindsey Byrnes

I'll never forget how immediately intrigued I was back in 2013 when a CD with hand-drawn black ink illustrations landed on my desk at my radio station. It was a newcomer from Australia named Courtney Barnett, and had a curious and clever title: The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas. The first single, “Avant Gardener”, was over 5 minutes long and had no apparent chorus, and breaking all old school rules about the 3.5 minute radio song, was an immediate favorite. The entire album was addictively good - chock full of what we now know is Courtney Barnett's signature wordplay, tender and honest everyday observations, the deadpan delivery often revealing deep emotions in a turn of phrase. And her live shows with her trio, shredding her left-handed guitar, made an instant and everlasting impression of awe. Unsurprisingly, by the time her full length debut arrived in 2015, called Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit, it wasn’t long before Courtney Barnett was a household name. That album won four out of the eight ARIA award nominations it received in 2015, and the following year, she was nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammy’s and Best International Female Solo Artist at the BRIT Awards. Tell Me How You Really Feel, her second full length arrived in 2018, winning Best Rock Album at the ARIA’s (one of four nominations) and in 2021 the three-time ARIA Award-nominated Things Take Time, Take Time. In between her own albums, she also released an acclaimed collaborative album with Kurt Vile in 2017 called Lotta Sea Lice. And since we last chatted with Courtney in 2021, a feature length documentary about Courtney Barnett was released called Anonymous Club, and in 2023 she put out an instrumental album titled End of the Day featuring music she had written to score the film. But it’s been several years since we’ve had new Courtney songs to sing, and now the wait is finally over. As we celebrate the arrival of her brand new album Creature of Habit, we welcome back Courtney Barnett as our SHERO in the Spotlight.