STACK NZ Mar #60

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PEDESTRIAN
Hardly
FEATURE
she’d already graced the stage at Glastonbury
in the UK, and had her new single named
‘hottest record in the world’ by highly
influential BBC announcer Zane Lowe.
The song, Pedestrian at Best, is a charged,
sustained rant at relationship expectations and
tribulations, and is a typically vivid example of
Barnett’s semi-spoken, tumble-rollercoaster
style of delivery.
“It’s an older song. I’d been trying to write
it for a couple of years; I could never finish
it. We’d already recorded the music and I
mumbled some stuff over the top of it. Then
the words just came at the eleventh hour! It
was a stream-of-consciousness typ
thing; the words spewed onto the
page. But the writing process is
always different.”
Another song that showcases
Barnett’s ability to relate a
remarkable tale – in the vein of the
aforementioned Avant Gardener – is the
album opener Elevator Operator. It begins on
a Melbourne tram, and via a work day that
goes off the rails and some unpleasant social
interaction, finds its way to a building rooftop
where the protagonist “isn’t suicidal, just
insignificant.”
Barnett says it has a basis in fact.
“That song was the most I got to flex my
imagination. That’s the only song about
someone else. He told me the basics of the
story. The lady in the song is that typical
‘middle-aged, looks down her nose at younger
people’ figure. I get that a lot.”
nett was one of the standout
rformers at this year’s Laneways, but
tes a duet with The Lemonheads’
van Dando at the Meredith Music
estival in Australia as a recent
hlight. “He was lovely: you never
think things like that will ever happen.”
MUSIC
Rising Australian star Courtney Barnett talks about her writing process and
why her quirky observational narratives seem to have struck a chord with
international audiences.
A lthough she’s not one to dwell on it, it
seems Courtney Barnett’s vaguely
off-the-wall snapshots of everyday life
and stream-of-consciousness lyrics are the
things elevating the Melbourne singer’s profile
from local to global.
“It’s hard to look at it and make sense of
it,” she told STACK prior to the release of her
anticipated debut album Sometimes I Just
Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. “If I
thought about it too much it would be weird.
People connect with things I’m talking about:
growing up, working, decisions, relationships,
friendships.”
After her dual EP (A Sea of Split Peas) and
the buzz around a narrative song about her
suffering a serious asthma attack that required
an ambulance ( Avant Gardener), Barnett’s
blackly funny observational narratives have
struck a chord with international audiences.
Before her debut album was even released,
MARCH 2015 JB Hi-Fi