Photo: Mia Mala McDonald

One of our (other) Best New Artists of 2014 was Melbourne, Australia’s Courtney Barnett.  Barnett is a singer-songwriter, guitar virtuoso, visual artist and label owner whose prior release The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas was a joy on many levels.  Now comes the news that the gifted Barnett is releasing her debut album Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit on March 24th, 2015 via Mom + Pop Music. According to the label’s press release:  “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit chronicles several years in the life of Courtney Barnett, mixing witty, often hilarious, occasionally heartbreaking observations with devastating self-assessment.”

The first single from the new album, Pedestrian at Best,  was released today with the accompanying video which you can check out below.  The song and video feature Barnett’s self-deprecating style with “incisively indecisive lyrics, crammed with internal rhymes, and inside jokes.”  While not as immediately catchy as her prior Avant Gardener (one of our Best Songs of 2014), Pedestrian at Best is growing on us and bodes well for the new album for this likable Aussie.  You can pre-order it, amongst other places, HERE.

Fueled by the crunch of guitars and the loose groove of the rhythm section, Barnett’s songs are wild and wooly and wordy, her lyrics plainspoken and delivered like she’s making them up on the spot.  Barnett and her band – which includes Dan Luscombe on guitar and the surprisingly nimble rhythm section of Bones Sloane on bass and Dave Mudie on drums – recorded the album at Head Gap Studio in Melbourne during the fall of 2014.  “We’d start midday and work until quite early in the morning,” she says.  “Of course, half the time is sitting around waiting for the engineer to get a mic into place or something like that.”  The band used the downtime to take these songs apart and put them back together again. Nothing was taken on faith; every note and every word was parsed.  The songs may not sound tightly coiled, but they are carefully and exactingly structured.  Her lyrics may ramble, but each word is carefully chosen. “My songs follow me as a normal human with normal emotions,” she explains, “so there are great highs and great lows. They span everything in my life.”

Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit

01. Elevator Operator
02. Pedestrian at Best
03. An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in NYC)
04. Small Poppies
05. Depreston
06. Aqua Profunda!
07. Dead Fox
08. Nobody Really Cares if You Don’t Go to the Party
09. Debbie Downer
10. Kim’s Caravan
11. Boxing Day Blues