COURTNEY BARNETT
Courtney Barnett’s second full-length release starts in a dark place. Opening with the groan of a guitar being tuned, a soft gasp, and the growl of feedback, “Hopefulessness” is the sound of tension searching for a place to escape. “You know what they say, no one is born to hate,” Barnett sings over ominously askew guitar lines. “We learn it somewhere along the way.” Before the song is over it will turn personal, and Barnett’s moody lattice work guitar leads will disintegrate into peals of howling distortion and “empty bottle blues” will be rhymed with “sleepin’ different rooms.” Just like that, Tell Me How You Really Feel establishes a tone—a seriousness, a sense of danger—that does not appear on any of her other recordings. “No one is born to hate” is not offered as a comforting truth. It sounds more like a warning.
“Some of the songs are about friends or close people, and it felt like I was writing a self-help book a little bit. It feels like a self-help album.”
“I looked it up, and I guess it’s kind of a paraphrase of a Nelson Mandela quote,” she says on a Los Angeles afternoon in early January. “But a lot of it is kind of a reflection of the climate of the last year or two years. The idea that no one is born to hate, you learn it as you grow up from family or your surroundings. Racism, sexism—they don’t come naturally. They come from some kind of fear, which I guess I don’t understand. I guess that is the anger and sadness of it.”
If you’ve followed Barnett’s music to this point, you know this sort of sweeping, universal statement is not exactly common in her body of work. Over the course of two EPs, one critically-lauded full-length (2015’s ) and one unexpectedly excellent collaborative album with Kurt Vile (2017’s ), Barnett has established herself as a songwriter with a rare eye for plainspoken detail and slice-of-life vignettes. There has been anger and sadness in her work—“I think you’re a joke, but I don’t find you very funny” still stings three years later—but it was always delivered with a grin and only after she’d already offered a self-deprecating aside. A study in balance, her work can be self-effacing without being self-pitying, clever without being precious, profound without being ponderous. These were not songs constructed out of bold strokes as much .
