Courtney Barnett: the godfather of grunge, AI and music

Courtney Barnett has had a busy 2025. In March she appeared on the Neil Young tribute album Heart of Gold with a gorgeous dream pop-inspired cover of 'Lotta Love'. For anyone drawn to the stripped back suburban intimacy of her breakthrough LP Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, the Young rendition – with its spectral reverb and woozy textures – may come as a surprise.

But perhaps it's not really a surprise: her most recent song-oriented LP, Thing Take Time, Take Time was a stylistically diverse affair – a truth somewhat obscured by the fact that Barnett's voice and lyricism tends to take centre stage. Those elements are foregrounded for good reason, but it was nevertheless illuminating to hear Barnett's 2023 soundtrack album End of the Day, which removed all traces of voice and narrative in favour of a gentle, melancholic instrumental approach that foregrounds Barnett's textural interests as a guitarist. If you've ever wondered why an electric guitarist would play without a plectrum, first look up what Jeff Beck has to say about it, and if that doesn't convince you, listen to End of the Day.

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Yeah I chose this song, and I really love it. There's something really special about it. I've done a couple of his songs over the years, but never officially. We just spent the day in the studio, and I just let the producer and the engineer do their thing in the control room. I think it actually started out a little more reckless, and then within a couple of takes in the studio it changed direction, which is kind of nice because I wasn't expecting it. We added the acoustic, and I think we kinda dropped the electric, or at least it's toned down a bit.

Sometimes I find it hard to know because I'm so into it, I'm just writing all these different songs and sometimes I don't completely see the differences in dynamics in them or whatever. I'm working on a new album now, and the songs… I guess they're kind of varied. It depends on the mood and energy that's necessary for the song. Sometimes it's not even intentional, I just have to follow. I like it when things move around and when everything doesn't sound the same.

The second one. It's normally how I do it: flesh things out as much as I can and then bring it to the band. Sometimes I'll wait until the last minute to bring it to the studio, just for that extra piece of magic [that comes with] people not knowing what they're doing, which sometimes backfires. But it's an exercise, an experiment. Sometimes I like to go into the studio with an idea of what I'm doing but not the full picture. Sometimes there's something special that comes out of those stressful moments of being powerless and out of control a little bit. Some sort of subconscious idea shines through.

I think that song especially is a really good example of going into the studio with just a rough sketch and not the whole idea painted out. It started off a lot more guitar-based, but it actually sounded like another one of my old songs so we had to totally switch directions in the studio. So, in a way we deconstructed it in the studio and pieced it back together in this different way, and if that hadn't happened then it wouldn't have grown into what it's become now. There's a part of me that wishes I'd spent months with that older version, perfecting it, playing it live and then had gone into the studio to capture this awesome version. But I don't know: that's the thing about songwriting and recording that I do like: there are these different versions that exist and you might not have one version without the other, and I really love what ['Turning Green' has] grown into when it's performed live. It's become its own monster which I really love. It's my favourite song to perform when I'm playing with the band. I rarely play it solo, it's not as much of an adventure.

I did have lessons and had an awesome teacher. I don't quite remember – I probably used a pick or something, and actually, I've started playing with a pick again these days. But 'Before You Gotta Go' will always be pick-less. I don't quite remember when I was learning, but I remember when I started playing solo, when I was eighteen or so, doing open mics and stuff, that I'd play an acoustic. I think it was the sound of the pick on the acoustic that I really didn't like. Performing solo, I kinda had to jump between rhythm with a little bit of lead, and there was something about having no pick that made it easier to jump around. So many people ask me about it and it's just such an unconscious thing.

Yeah, I think it's just something to do with the resonance, which, you know, could also have to do obviously with effects and pedals as well. I think there was something that just felt extra chunky about the Jag. At that time I was playing with the guitarist Dan Luscombe [Dan Kelly, formerly of The Drones], who was on the first few records and toured with me a lot. He's one of my favourite guitar players. He couldn't do the next tour and it was really scary, because I kinda relied on him. I could just look at him and know that the solo part was taken care of because he's so good. I was like, "Oh my god, I have to learn to do that now, I have to step up". It was a good exercise of learning how to mash those things together, those parts together. I think I've always done that a little bit, just from jumping between solo and playing a lot as a three-piece, but something about having that other guitarist maybe made me a bit lazy or something. Also I had to learn his parts because he played a lot of that stuff on the early records, so I kinda made my own frankenstein versions of his guitar solos. It was a challenge but it was a really good learning curve. It's informed my guitar playing, I think.

I noticed that when I was out of the tour cycle and schedule, just how easy it is just to get lazy. I don't really practice, I just play, but I've been making a point of practicing and trying to learn new things, because I fall into these patterns where I rely on what I do. If I pick up a guitar I always go to the same chord or do the same thing. It's about trying to break those patterns a bit and trying to push myself out of that. Even just learning new chords, or learning inversions, or scales… just trying to be a bit more disciplined. It's a good goal to have.

I think open G. I used to play slide guitar in a band, so I tuned to that – I think it was G. I did write a song two years ago, actually i haven't finished it – I'm really good at starting songs and not finishing them – that's in some sort of open tuning, I always forget, I have to check my notes whenever i work on it. But yes, it creates so much space, it tricks the brain and you just find yourself doing new things, even finding new melodies and stuff. I love it and I always say I want to do more in different tunings.

That's a big conversation. I don't know, but I think that people are always going to come back to a human connection. I don't know how to articulate this, but there's something really timeless about the realness of playing, or of writing, or of connecting with people's stories on an empathetic level. I think all that stuff is pretty fascinating and the conversations around it are fascinating, but I think music, like real music, and all kinds of performance is always going to shine through when all the computers fall apart; when the world, you know, burns to the ground. There's going to be one guitar left, and we'll have to listen to that.

Yeah, I mean, they can do everything, but that's not what makes it interesting. I was on holiday in Greece and I got a ticket at the last minute to see Kraftwerk, and it was such an awesome show. But my favorite part was when someone on stage made the tiniest mistake. Someone fumbled on a keyboard. Because [when you see a group like Kraftwerk] I think you're like, "well, it's all programmed", or there's so much that's on the grid or synced up to something or whatever, but then there was this one little mistake. It didn't break me out in a bad way: It made me appreciate how good the rest of the show had been. It made them, really. It was something about it that I loved.

Shaun Prescott is the editor of Australian Guitar Magazine. He has written across a variety of publications, including The Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald, and Guitarist Magazine.