Fresh off the release of her latest experimental record End of the Day and the closing of her label Milk! Records, Courtney Barnett takes Laura David through the songs that have inspired and defined her latest chapter.
For Australian indie legend Courtney Barnett, it’s a time of change.
It’s morning in Joshua Tree, and Courtney Barnett is having tea. It’s also the release day of her latest album, End of the Day. The body of work is a standout from all her previous projects – it’s an album composed of only instrumental tracks that she recorded as the score for Anonymous Club, Danny Cohen’s documentary film on her life and art. For a musician famed for her lyrical wit, a fully-instrumental album certainly marks a step outside the box.
But Barnett is unphased. If anything, she’s at a point in her career where she’s able to just sit back and enjoy it. “Every time I release something, the day before I’m running around and stressing out,” she tells me. “But I just feel really proud of (the album), and happy to release it. It feels really good.”
End of the Day wasn’t initially meant for an album release, nor were the songs meant to live outside of Anonymous Club at all – they’ve been sitting in Barnett’s archive since 2021. “It certainly crossed my mind that it wasn’t a typical release,” she explains. “And then I just kind of thought, ‘Well, I really love it. And I’m really proud of it. And I love listening to it.’”
Her newest album is also the final release from Milk! Records, the Melbourne-based DIY label she founded at the age of 24 that has since become an indie staple. “It’s been a real consistent and important part of my life, but it just seemed to be the right time to move on,” Barnett says. “It’s been emotional, but I know it’s the right decision. So far, it’s been nice looking back and reminiscing on the amazing memories and what an incredible community of people and artists Milk! Records has accumulated over the years.”
Really, though, the latest record is one that’s fundamentally born from relishing in the journey over the finished product. When Cohen was ready to present the final cut of his film to Barnett, the pair holed up in a Melbourne studio for two days where Barnett, along with her frequent collaborator Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint, and improvised a soundtrack straight to the film.
“We went in and didn’t spend too long discussing a direction or a sound or any influences,” she recalls. “I think neither of us really wanted to. We didn’t want to set any parameters or be influenced too much by anything in the moment.” Working in this way — allowing herself to follow any whim, and to feel rather than intellectualise — was liberating for Barnett. While she’d explored this kind of free-range experimentation in the comfort of her own home, working this way in front of collaborators proved a whole new experience. “With other ears suddenly around, I felt really intimidated,” she confesses, “but I think that’s why I’m so proud of the album. The freedom of it is really special."
That’s not to say Barnett doesn’t have strong influences. “Obviously, all these things creep in there. And, you know, the whole musical landscape patchwork quilt of my life is sitting there being funnelled into this new music.” And it’s these very influences that we spend the remainder of our time discussing. The Nine Songs that, she believes, were in some way instrumental to the creation of End of the Day.
As is the case with most music lovers, whittling down her selections proved tricky. “I went on this full journey of making a playlist of the most important songs of my life, with the first songs I can remember as a child,” she says. “I didn’t know how to trim it down! So I had to set myself this parameter of, you know, songs that I was listening to in the last few years that tied in with my new album.”
Many of the tracks, as you might then expect, are instrumental and experimental. But, like End of the Day itself, the most significant thread that ties these works together is a feeling that they’re all able to capture. They’re emotive rather than cerebral, meant to make us pause rather than to stimulate us, and they too place process over product.
In her Nine Songs, like on her new album, Barnett gives us a preview of the creative mind at its most essential, its most vulnerable, and its most pure.
“Saku” by Susumu Yokota
I put this one song on, but to be fair, it’s the whole album, Sakura. I came across it by total mistake. I feel like it was kind of algorithmic and mysterious… It just popped into my life somehow, but probably based on some other music I was listening to.
I hadn’t heard about Susumu Yokota before, and I hadn’t heard any of his music, but I just really fell in love with the whole album. I listened to it all the time, every day. There was something really peaceful about it. And this, like I mentioned about my selection as a whole, works in tandem with my instrumental album.
“Journey in Satchidananda” by Alice Coltrane
Again, it’s this song especially but definitely the whole album. I think I got my hands on this album around the same time I found Susumu Yokota, and I did really connect with it. I think there’s such a strong spiritual and meditative feeling that goes along with it. There’s this transcendence that comes with the album that overtook me the first time I listened to it – I remember the feeling.
Stella Mozgawa and I were working on my last albumThings Take Time, Take Time before we started recording the End of the Day soundtrack. We were listening to a lot of music together, and in that process, she introduced me to a lot of new music. This, I reckon, was one of those finds from Stella’s playlists.
“Thursday Afternoon” by Brian Eno
This is an important one. This one was definitely recommended by Stella in 2020. I remember she sent it to me when I was in one of the Melbourne lockdowns. It was a longer than usual lockdown and she just said, “You know, I think you might like this.” At the time, I’d only listened to a few of Brian Eno’s records, and, at that, mostly more of his traditional, lyric-based songs. Eno is regarded as one of the masters of ambient and instrumental music, so it only makes sense that he ended up on a list like this. This album in particular had an audiovisual component, similar to End of the Day and even some of the other selections on this Nine Songs list, so it fit quite nicely in the world of the record.
So, anyway, I hadn’t really listened to much of his ambient music. This one really connected with me, I think because it was lockdown, and I would just go on these long walks every day. I mean we weren’t really allowed to do anything else, so I would just listen to it. It’s an hour long musical soundscape, so, you know, I would sit at home and meditate and listen to it. It just became a really important part of my musical soundscape.
“The Köln Concert” by Keith Jarrett
When I was doing the original playlist idea, like the massive playlist of my life, I texted my mom asking, “Can you send a photo of the CDs in the collection you and dad have that we used to listen to growing up?” They listen to a lot of classical and jazz blues, so we would just have that on around the house.
With parental music tastes and parental music influences, it’s an interesting thing. Because on a surface level, it doesn’t really match up. But on a deeper, more influential and spiritual level, there’s something to it. Even in a lot of the music I still listen to. It’s been particularly interesting doing this project and looking back on things and seeing the connections. I think the power of that influence is really strong. I mean, it builds the whole foundation for how you see and listen to music.
Looking at it now, I find it interesting to see me discovering people like Alice Coltrane in my thirties and all the while I’d already listened to John Coltrane as a kid. With Keith Jarrett, we listened to a few of his records in my dad’s collection. That was my introduction to him, but I don’t think the Koln concert was on that list. I remember discovering it somewhere in my twenties and really loving it.
I had a double vinyl of the performance, and I would just sit and listen to it. I love how you get immersed in the soundscape – you can hear all the little extra sounds like his footsteps on the piano, and him kind of singing along. I really, really love this album.
“The Name Of The Next Song” by Arthur Russell
When I was making the last album, Things Take Time, Take Time, I listened to a lot of Arthur Russell. This was another one from one of the playlists Stella had made me — as you can tell, she opened my ears to a lot of incredible new music.
I went down a real Arthur Russell hole, and I just started digging through all of his albums. I would study each one, and I loved how different they all were. I love the way he approached music-making and songwriting. I think how varied his music was and how he wasn’t afraid to move from one sound to another was inspiring to me. ButWorld of Echo, which this song is on, is definitely a lot more experimental than some of the others. So, this one I was listening to a lot more around the making of End of the Day.
“The Unquestioned Answer” by Laurie Spiegel
I first heard about Laurie Spiegel when I watched a documentary called Sisters with Transistors, a film about the women who pioneered electronic music in the late 20th century. They were engineers and experimenters and created this whole new method of making music. So, we see their lives and their work through the lens of a history that hasn’t really been explored before. It’s an incredible film, and I think they interviewed her for it. Watching that opened the doors for me – a whole world I hadn’t been exposed to opened up.
It was also definitely a good reference point for my own documentary. I learned to look at music within film and television a different way. Your ears pick up on things and you think, “Oh! That’s an interesting choice.” It’s something I’d maybe just taken for granted before, but when something is done really well, you notice it. What’s more, you notice especially how emotionally powerful it can be.
“Soul Vibrations” by Dorothy Ashby
Again, the jazz connection here is definitely from my dad growing up. There are a bunch of selections here from jazz greats, and I credit that to him. Jazz was his main love. We listened to a lot of Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Dave Brubeck — all that kind of stuff. But I hadn’t heard Dorothy Ashby until about 2020. Stella, actually, got me a copy of this album for my birthday on vinyl, and I loved it. She’s been a huge part of my creative process and has introduced me to so many of my current influences.
“Dead Man" (Soundtrack) by Neil Young
Oh, I really remember this one! When I first started working with my manager, Nick, in maybe 2011, he sent me a copy of this record and I just loved it. Around that time, I had only just started listening to Neil Young. I didn’t grow up with his music or anything, so it was in my early twenties and I heard a few of his albums and loved them. When Nick sent me this, it was obviously so different to the other stuff, and I was really captured by it.
I love how improvised this record sounds, but also how sure of itself it sounds at the same time. There’s such a confident, open energy. The music feels so open to the world around it, like it’s soaking everything in and turning that into sound. I remember reading about the way he recorded it: he was in the cinema with the movie on and played along and recorded right there. And this is actually how we recorded our soundtrack. We played the film on the wall in the recording studio and responded in real time to the images we were seeing. It just feels like it gives us extra depth, especially for something without lyrics. You can almost hear what’s being felt in the moment.
“Birth” by Floating Points
I had actually been listening to the Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders’ album Promises that came out a couple of years ago. After listening to that, I moved on to this older Floating Points album called Crush. There was something about the album that really became part of my daily musical landscape. I particularly love the dynamic feeling of Crush; everything shifts from one end of the spectrum to the other. The song I chose to include here, “Birth”, was one of the more quiet and peaceful ones.
It was really this Floating Points album and the Susumu Yokota album that I listened to daily during the creation ofEnd of the Day. They became such major points of context for the record. I often had voices in my head questioning if an experimental record was the right choice and if I should really release it. I would wonder if people would like it or hate it. But I had to gently let go of those voices, because I knew I was proud of the work.
End Of The Day is out now via Mom+Pop
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