Hours before the unofficial start of her tour, the lo-fi singer-songwriter and casual existentialist Courtney Barnett was comfortably lost in the basement of Rockefeller Center, theoretically close to the record store where she would be playing.
Wearing a sleek wool coat and a black beanie over a wolfish shag haircut, she spun in some wide circles on the stone floor as she drifted past storefronts and tourists. A security guard was recruited, but failed to orient her. Lost, curious and in no hurry to resolve anything: This is peak Courtney Barnett.
Barnett, 38, has made a career and a name for herself condensing ambient worries into springy guitar riffs and coiled wit. Her leading thematic concern is concern itself. There are songs about work, creativity, home, partnership, boredom and the nagging sensation that you’re not making anything of your life as you’re worrying about it.
After a decade of acclaimed albums (starting with her first, in 2015, “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit”) and sold-out tours (she is set to play Kings Theater in Brooklyn on Saturday), Barnett’s preoccupation with an unknown future hasn’t changed, though her approach has. Worries about not making successful art and instead just living life have transformed into worries about not living life while making successful art. As she nears 40, Barnett is still the bard of figuring it out.
On her latest album, “Creature of Habit,” Barnett has managed to locate 30-something versions of uncertainty. One way to upend oneself: move to a new country, get a little lost, do as the locals do. Since moving from her native Australia to California in 2024, Barnett has hit all the artist-who-just-got-to-Los-Angeles stations of the cross: Orchestrating a profound experience in Joshua Tree National Park. Getting a dog (né Scooter, renamed Larry, currently responding to Larry David Lynch). Making ceramics. Participating in ocean worship.
Barnett took a monthlong pottery class, in which she made several ramekins and “a lot of things to put salt into.” She also took up surfing, a pastime that, having grown up in Melbourne, she has had lifelong access to. But it took a change of continents for the realization to dawn that she was an adult, and she had free will.
“This was one of those things where I realized I’ve always wanted to do that and I can,” she said. “I can do whatever I want — I’m grown up.’”
The years have quelled her 20-something angst and transformed it into 30-something hobbyist wonder. Part of the appeal of her recent pursuits — surfing, ceramics, dog stewardship — is that none of them have anything to do with her music career, and her initial lack of skill was a nonissue. “It’s really nice to do something that isn’t connected to success,” Barnett said. “That process was really powerful for me.”
Early on, Barnett’s music, starting with her 2013 breakout song, “Avant Gardener,” was associated with slacker rock and praised for its Lou Reed-esque conversational story-song structure and its Pavement-esque pert wordplay. Barnett is ambivalent about “slacker” as a descriptor. “Years ago, my grandma would read interviews, and she’d get really offended at the term ‘slacker,’” Barnett recalled. “She was like, ‘You worked so hard.’”
In 2012, Barnett started a music label in Melbourne: Milk! Records, with her former partner Jen Cloher. The couple started the label partly out of a desire to cultivate a creative community in Melbourne, partly out of their frustrations trying to break into the music scene. Two and a half years ago, with great ambivalence, Barnett dissolved Milk!, mostly because of financial pressures.
After the end of the label and with the intercontinental move, it took Barnett a while to get back to writing. The five years since Barnett’s last solo LP, “Things Take Time, Take Time,” has been the longest period between albums since she started making them. To get back to her creative world, Barnett made a habit of sitting in her garden, first thing in the morning, with her yellow legal pads and facing the constant twist of procrastination.
“I’d be at Home Depot buying wood and tools, saying: ‘I need to write. I need to build a new writing desk, because this one isn’t inspiring enough,’” she said with a laugh. “But it’s also, it’s good. All those things are good. Procrastination is good in its own way.” Indeed, it’s often the subject of a song.
“Creature of Habit” is Barnett’s first album written outside Australia. For the meat of the album, Barnett and her band went to Joshua Tree, where they admired nature and prepared recipes from the cookbook of a fellow desert lover, Georgia O’Keeffe.
Barnett described creating “Things Take Time, Take Time” under Australia’s early Covid restrictions. “I was in a small apartment in Melbourne, and when I listen back to that album, it sounds small — it sounds timid and quiet,” she said. “This album, I wrote in the desert, and it feels big and vast and loud.”
“Creature of Habit” concerns the tension of wanting to find a home, and realizing you’ve found it and no longer have that search to drive you. “There’s this duality,” Barnett said. “I want to be a creature of habit; I want my comforts and I want my homey support that I can rely on or return to. But I also want new challenges and new adventures. I want both things, but you can’t really have both.”
For her music — both writing and playing it — Barnett’s approach now seems to be hard-won ease, a leather polished by time and wear. In fact, something that might induce anxiety for most performers, the thought of making a mistake, Barnett welcomes more than anything else right now.
“I love a little bit of error,” Barnett said, the location of her gig and green room still unknown to her. “That’s the kind of music that I like. I think there’s something more attractive about seeing a band perform amazingly with a few mistakes or a few bad notes. I’d much prefer that than a perfect, boring show.”
When you’ve been good at something for a while, she reasons, what better time to try something you can be bad at?
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