Courtney Barnett is the most unassuming singer/songwriter to emerge into the indie pop world this decade. The 29-year-old Australian's music is characterized by her self effacing lyrics that expertly walk the line between being morose and hilarious as well as her keen ear for a catchy pop hook. While her music generally harkens back to the nineties alternative rock scene, her lyrics are devoted to the here and now.
She finds unexpected depth in the most mundane subject matter (swimming, house hunting, gardening) and offers a new perspective through her keen insights. It's this level of relatability that helps make Barnett's music such a witty look at what it feels like to be a young adult today. In "Depreston" she sings about venturing through Preston, an Australian suburb, and paints a larger picture of the basic type of house that most everyone has lived in at some point.
It's that kind of place where you know entire generations of families have come and gone before you, but the only evidence that they ever existed is the random little artifacts left behind. In this song those artifacts range from the every day ("a collection of those canisters for coffee tea and flour") to the deeply personal ("And a photo of a young man in a van in Vietnam").
What really makes "Depreston" so much more than just a tale of trying to find a new place to live is the way that Barnett comments on mortality. It's a heavy subject that never feels overbearing in this song thanks to the breezy nature of the instrumentation. The guitar part features a spare two chord progression that allows each verse to just sort of flow into the next in a similar manner to a real conversation.
This way Barnett can easily combine humorous anecdotes about her life ("Now we've got that percolator, never made a latte greater. I'm saving twenty 3 dollars a week") with bigger questions about houses and the people who used to live in them like ("And I wonder what she bought it for"). Barnett's delivery of her lyrics is also refreshingly sincere and heartfelt, which makes the song connect on a more meaningful level than most pop songs.
Listening to music is a great way to interact with larger questions about people, places and things. Although, many artists seem to forget that it's also supposed to be fun. "Depreston" has a sing song refrain at the end where Barnett muses, "if you've got a spare half a million you could knock it down and start rebuildin' that is not only slyly insightful, but also a joy to sing along to.
Ending the song on a note that seems to say "if you had enough money to rebuild yourself like a new house, would you?" leaves the listener with a catchy melody and an idea that will be in their head all day.
What have your house hunting experiences been like?
