Courtney Barnett found her stride by letting go of insecurity
- Text by Alex Robert Ross
This time last year, Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett’s music had already blown through the Internet on a cloud of smoke. On the back of debut singles ‘Avant Gardner’ and ‘History Eraser’ and the critical acclaim that they’d drawn, Barnett was touring the world with her band and had a full length LP in the works. It was then that we took her out to look at cool shirts in a Brighton thrift store, shortly after her show at The Great Escape 2014.
Since then, Barnett has released Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, a rambling, stream-of-conscious record on which she refines almost to perfection her knack for the beautiful mundane. It’s also a record with a defiant edge that touring had already brought out last summer:
“I used to be so self-conscious about what people thought,” she shares in this short video, “and then you start realising that it doesn’t matter. I don’t really care what people think that much.”
Things I Learned Along The Way is a film series that accompanies Huck’s Fiftieth Special – a compendium of personal stories about the lessons life throws us when we’re busy doing what we love.
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