2021: Things Take Time, Take Time - Courtney Barnett

Here's the thing

Here’s the thing, I can’t stop thinking about this album.

I was so excited when the news broke that Courtney Barnett had new music on the way back in 2021. At the time, she was my favourite artist. I caught her live show five or six times between London and Nashville in 2018/19. I listened to her then latest album Tell Me How You Really Feel constantly in the years after it came out. I brought her music up in conversation constantly and flew the flag at every opportunity. I wore her merch wherever I went and even took her photos to my hairdresser to show exactly the cut I wanted. She was permanently on my record player or in my earphones. Later on, her music was a real friend and companion during lockdown, with songs like City Looks Pretty feeling more prescient and impactful than ever during that strange spring and summer of 2020 when I’d walk through the almost deserted streets of Brixton with the words “the city looks pretty when you’ve been indoors for twenty-three days” rattling around my brain.

But when Things Take Time, Take Time first turned up, whatever spell she had cast on me over the previous few years suddenly lifted. I couldn’t really get into the album at all, I didn’t really relate to it or care about in any way or on any level. It all felt a little jarring. It felt a little stale or stagnant and slow. It didn’t feel like the Courtney Barnett music that I loved or resonated with the most.

Tell Me How You Really Feel had hit me like a freight train. It felt like it had layers to peel away, depths to plumb and explore and darkness to illuminate. It felt physical and tangible. It felt like an album that cut you and soothed you and stung you and held you and warmed you and pushed you away and then called you back again to let you know you weren’t alone. It felt like an album that stood up with you against all the injustices in the world and all the hardships and an album that had your back when you felt like your back was to the wall. It felt course and angular and gritty and unknowable but also intimately empathetic and responsive and understandable. It’s everything I want from an album.

In comparison, the new record felt softer, and it is softer, but it also felt more shallow. It felt hollow. It didn’t feel like it went as deep or as hard or as far or as long as any of Barnett’s previous work had, or that it had as much to say for itself and it certainly didn’t have as much to say for you or me, either, or about the world.

I have had the record sat on my shelf for a long time, untouched and unloved, but I put it on the other day after hearing Barnett’s new Neil Young cover - which is exceptional - thinking that I knew what to expect, but I didn’t. I was wrongfooted and was plowed under the current of the songs which I had previously dismissed so easily. This wasn’t a shallow album at all, but I’d just been approaching it in a shallow way. I thought the album had let me down by not being Tell Me How You Really Feel Part 2, but I’d actually let the album down by expecting it to be.

In fact, if anything, this album doesn’t recall the record that immediately preceded it, but more so the works that immediately precede Barnett’s full length debut; these songs return to her intricately personal, reserved but insightful, sparse sounding but lyrically dense, contemplative and thought provoking early songs, style and sound that had first brought her esteem, renown and respect on her I've Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris and How to Carve a Carrot into a Rose EPs.

And while the songs sound stripped back and quite bare at times, the lyrics are anything but. They’re still just as rich as anything she ever did, as vivid and descriptive and detailed. She still has the ability to both create and destroy worlds in a single line, the ability to make and break you with a withering or welcoming lyric.

There is an interesting push and pull at the heart of this album in that it’s about the breakup of a marriage, but also about falling in love again. It’s about infatuation and the excitement of finding and feeling for someone new and remaking yourself at the start of a new relationship, but also about dealing with the ashes of an old self and old partnership that didn’t work out.

I still don’t love every song on the album. I still don’t think that it’s a masterpiece, but it is a lot better than I gave it credit for when it first came out. There are enough great songs here to reward repeated listenings. Rae Street, Here’s the Thing, Before You Gotta Go, If I Don’t Hear From You Tonight, Write a List of Things to Look Forward To and Oh the Night stand up with her best work. That’s over half the album, so pretty good by anybody’s standards.

The other songs are not bad either; Sunfair Sundown is a fine and gentle track which finds Barnett back in the suburbs of Depreston. Turning Green doesn’t have much to recommend it or make it stand out until Barnett starts slashing away at it with her guitar, one of the only times she really opens up on the instrument anywhere on this album. It’s not as blistering or as blustering as her solos had been on the last two records, but it’s probably more interesting and experimental than anything she played on those, in it’s way. Take It Day By Day feels like it has the skeleton of a good song sitting inside it, but I’m not quite sure that good song has been fully fleshed out or brought to life here. There’s not too much to say about the remaining song, Splendour, apart from that it’s more dour than splendid.

It’s not the most exciting album, it’s not the most adrenaline fuelled or thrilling or dynamic album, but when you find yourself needing to put something on when you want to sit and think, or if you want to just sit, you could do a lot worse than to reach for this one.

Sometimes, a new album can crash into your life and upend all your other interests; change your way of thinking and even who you are as a person, but on other occasions, and with other albums, like with this one, things take time, take time.