‘Before You Gotta Go’: The track Courtney Barnett track doesn’t want to call a “breakup song”
For perhaps the first time in her life, the indie rock world knew the ins and outs of Courtney Barnett and her personal life when she released Things Take Time, Take Time in 2021. Specifically, people knew about her breakup with fellow Australian singer-songwriter Jen Cloher in 2018. Reviewers and close listeners began to comb through the lyrics, looking for clues or hints to get some insight into the relationship and its potential final days.
The one song that most listeners grabbed onto was ‘Before You Gotta Go’, the melancholy second single that details a fight and an attempt at reconciliation. With lines like “we got angry, said some careless things / Who was wrong remains unclear”, ‘Before You Gotta Go’ seems the most obvious choice for a song that pulls back the curtain on Barnett’s real life.
“Sometimes I try to say everything in one song or put my whole belief system into a vox pop, but you just can’t do that — it’s impossible,” Barnett said about the track when it was first released. There was plenty to pull out of ‘Before You Gotta Go’, but Barnett baulked at the idea that she was a confessional songwriter or directly talking about her own life.
“My songs reveal themselves over time. To assume that even I know exactly what they mean is dangerous territory,” she told The Sun. “We as humans want to fit things tidily inside one box so we can have some understanding.”
Still, the prevailing narrative around ‘Before You Gotta Go’ was that it was a breakup song. Barnett had a history of writing songs about herself, most famously on tracks like ‘Avant Gardener’ and ‘Pedestrian at Best’, but she has also written pieces that are purposefully not about her own life, like ‘Elevator Operator’. For her part, Barnett didn’t want ‘Before You Gotta Go’ to be defined so narrowly.
“I’ve heard a few people refer to it as a breakup song, and I don’t want to say that anyone’s wrong or right, but I think it diminishes the intention of the song,” she said to The Guardian. “It’s more all-encompassing, and I feel like it would do a disservice to the song for me to box it into one moment or one person.”
Check out ‘Before You Gotta Go’ down below.
