‘Houses’: Courtney Barnett’s greatest cover sounds like her own
Courtney Barnett took the world by storm in 2015 following the release of her full-length debut album, the fantastic Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit. Those who were familiar with her earlier EPs already knew what the rest of the world was quickly learning: Courtney Barnett is one of the great songwriters of our time.
Thanks to a blend of intense, rapid-fire imagery, a combination of gritty realism and occasionally absurd yet relatable lyrics, as well as her keen social commentary, investigations of the self and the modern psyche, she is one of the preeminent lyrics writers working in the rock field today. Barnett can casually switch between the profound and the mundane, exploding the everyday into something more existential and reducing the biggest worries and modern pressures into manageable issues.
With her second album, Tell Me How You Really Feel, Barnett crafted an even more mature work than her debut record. Her new album was darker, more biting, weary, and lyrically more concise. Coupled with her fantastic, elemental and earthy guitar playing, her languid and carefree singing voice/drawl and the casual intensity of her live shows, Barnett very quickly established herself as one of the leading lights in a crowd of incredibly talented indie women who have been lighting up the rock music scene for the last ten years.
Thanks to her reputation as such a fine performer, singer, songwriter, and artist, her endorsement carries weight. When she highlights the work of another artist, it is a seal of approval that you know you can trust. As well as being a great artist, she is also a great champion of other people’s work. For years, she ran the Milk Records label, which had an exciting roster of talented young rockers who she really believed in.
In addition to running her own label, another way Barnett champions other artists is by covering their music. She approaches the material with a deep respect and reverence that shines through in her performances, elevating the songs to new heights. Yet, while honouring the originals, Barnett seamlessly weaves the tracks into her own style, making them sound as though they were always hers.
When she sang Leonard Cohen’s ‘So Long, Marianne’ during her MTV Unplugged show, Barnett sang with the conviction as if the song were her own. When she performed a heart-breaking rendition of Hank Williams’ ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ on a solo tour of the West Coast in early 2020, the heartbreak in the song sounded like it was her own.
Elsewhere, she has covered the Grateful Dead’s ‘New Speedway Boogie’ and The Go-Betweens’ ‘Streets of Your Town’ as well as giving a great, laconic performance of Wilco’s ‘Dawned on Me’ to a welcoming singalong crowd at the Chicago alt-rockers own Sky Blue Sky festival in 2020.
The song she has covered most, though, is Gillian Welch’s masterpiece for modern music fans, ‘Everything is Free’. Barnett has played the song almost 50 times in concert, recorded a performance for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, and dueted on the track on a live stream in lockdown with Phoebe Bridgers.
Written in 2001, Welch penned the song in response to the Napster panic and the anxieties surrounding music piracy in the early 21st century. However, its lyrics have only grown more prescient over time, as streaming has become the dominant way to consume music, stripping songs of much of their cultural significance and, for artists, their financial value.
One of Barnett’s greatest covers, though, was of a less well-known song than any of those mentioned here, as she shone a light on the underrated and underappreciated talents of Elyse Weinberg and her 1968 song ‘Houses’. In the same way that Barnett later made ‘So Long, Marianne’ and ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ her own, she did the same with ‘Houses’ when she recorded and performed it in 2018. In fact, the song sounds like it was just waiting for her to come along and cover it – or uncover it, really, and bring it to greater prominence – after so many years in the wilderness.
The song has so much in common with Barnett’s own music – a sleepy, hazy sense of time; a dreamy outcast lyric about looking towards the inside, plenty of room for an offhand guitar lick and all undercut with a snap in its step and a bite in its reserved atmosphere – that makes her the perfect singer, aside from Elyse Weinberg herself, to sing this song.
