Australian rocker Courtney Barnett brought her particular brand of poetic grit to New York City this week, selling out the Bowery Ballroom three nights running as she promotes her newest album and the second of her career, "Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit," the follow-up to her uber-successful double EP, "A Sea Of Split Peas."
Barnett's humble outback beginnings belie a unique creativity and soulful perspective not often seen these days of cookie-cutter rock and bland electro-ambient-pop, all of which somehow falls under a category which no longer seems to hold any actual meaning - "indie."
While the rest of these acts do their best to look unique and spend oodles of dollars doing so, Barnett is hard at work actually sounding unique and with a perspicacity and uncomplicated straightforwardness which draws you in with the first shimmering chord and keeps you nodding right along as she and her band, the aptly named The Courtney Barnett's, wend their way through a sometimes edgy, sometimes achingly emotional, but always poignant, tapestry of power chords and spoken-word.
There's a simplicity to her work that breeds real beauty - a rawness to her sound that seems to speak to universal truths of the human experience while not deigning to act as if she's somehow better, beyond, above these dirty emotions and baleful, easily brushed-aside injuries we all know a bit too well.
If she's holding up a mirror, it's dirty and cracked and probably has a badly peeling Transformer sticker stuck to one corner.
Barnett, who kicked off her latest U.S. tour - along with Chastity Belt and Darren Hanlon in New York, Spoon and The Decemberists in Colorado, The Alabama Shakes in North Carolina and Belle & Sebastian in Kansas City and Wisconsin - with a few nights at The Forum in Melbourne, flitted through Boston for a night before setting up shop in NYC and the Bowery for three sold- out evenings.
Before taking the stage for the second night of her New York City go-round, Barnett stopped by the WNYC Greene Space for a rare daytime appearance, singing a few songs and - perhaps, reluctantly - answering a few questions.
Following a rousing rendition of "Dead Fox," a song off her new album - released with a wonderful animated music video - Barnett did her best to keep her restless and yet somehow composed energy in check.
"I'm a serious person," Barnett deadpanned to a smattering of laughter from the audience after being questioned by the host as to what influenced her songwriting - the trucking industry in Australia, animal welfare - on her latest album, which does seem to cover weightier ground than "Peas."
"This album, a little bit more of that came out. I think I was feeling a lot more frustrations about some of that stuff and reading a lot more of the news than I was in the years before because I just kind of shut myself away from it because it was so depressing."
Barnett, who tends to punctuate her more serious, emotionally driven songs with tongue-in-cheek pieces which denote a certain sarcastic self-awareness, said she doesn't approach her creative process in a structured enough manner to determine which style of song will emerge when.
"My songs are just kind of me working through ideas in my own thoughts. It doesn't really matter if it's serious or not serious. Some days you have more serious thoughts than others."
There didn't seem to be much in the way of seriousness for Barnett on this early Wednesday afternoon in the city.
"I think when I concentrate too much, nothing happens. So I'm going to pretend not to be interested in what I'm doing, that's when it goes good," Barnett said, when asked if she feels she overthinks things.
Barnett followed "Dead Fox" with another song from her new album, "Depreston," a piece whose title is loosely based on a nearby neighborhood in Australia - "it's about anywhere," Barnett said - only interestingly enough, the house depicted in the song's story isn't actually located in Preston.
"The house I actually looked at was in this place called Koberg and I wrote the song about Preston and I realized a couple of days later that I was talking about the wrong place," she said. "But then I had all the good rhymes like 'depressing' and whatever else there are."
Barnett's droll sense of humor shone through throughout her exchange with the host - "There was a point in Grade 4 where I wanted to be a cartoonist, but I moved on from that," she offered, when asked if music was always "the plan."
"Like, in life?," she returned.
After pleasing everyone in the crowd by ripping off a quick, dirty rendition of her hit "Pedestrian At Best," the host's probing turned to Barnett's younger days and her fellow Melbourne-based creatives - a group which includes Fraser Gorman, another sometimes sweet, sometimes salty singer-songwriter, whose recent videos feature cameos from Barnett.
"There's a really cool music community in Melbourne, and I started a little record label a couple of years ago to release my first CD and then we've kind of added a couple of friends and we'll run around being crazy hoodlums together, doing things and we go in each other's videos and sing on each other's songs. It's fun," Barnett said.
Barnett, who mentioned Australian acts like Paul Kelly as early influences on her stylistically, admitted that she wasn't exposed to much of the American music - Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Lou Reed - which now seems to inform a fair amount of her sound, until her early 20s and even then her contact with them was due only to a friend leaving an old iPod at her house - "I stole it in the end."
"I started listening to all that, all that new stuff, because for some reason no one had shown me that and I liked it."
Reed was, per Barnett, a particularly strong influence while putting together "Sometimes."
"He's a big influence. When we were making the album I was probably listening to 'Transformer' a lot more than usual."
In a fitting bit of artistry, Barnett closed her set with "An Illustration of Loneliness: Sleepless in New York," which, Barnett revealed, was written in New York City during her first tour through the states.
"Yeah it was the first time," she shared. "Must've been October 2013 and the first time I left Australia, and yeah I did shows in New York and didn't sleep for about five days because I'd never experienced jet lag before and my world was kind of breaking down around me."
It's somehow comforting to know that even rockers, known for hard living and late nights, can succumb to the draw of the Big Apple and suffer the realities of a New York bender, though Barnett will probably handle her second NYC experience with aplomb.
Barnett will play two more nights at the Bowery before heading off to Sasquatch Festival in Washington and the wilds of the upper northwest, but she'll be back in New York to play Terminal 5 along with Speedy Ortiz and Torres in July.
It's the only one of her New York dates not yet sold out, but if her recent run of success is any indication, that's not likely to last.
