‘Depreston’: how Courtney Barnett’s masterpiece captured the zeitgeist
There’s an old adage about death and taxes that I’d like to convert to be more suitable for millennials. So here it goes: there are three certainties in life – death, taxes and boomers telling you to stop buying £3.50 flat whites if you want to buy a house. And it seems Courtney Barnett was on to something in her indie hit ‘Depreston’ when she sang, ‘Now we’ve got that percolator / Never made a latte greater / I’m saving $23 dollars a week’.
It’s hardly surprising that Barnett delivers a line with such humorous poignancy, for she has quietly become the voice of a generation in the past ten years. While her discography includes three solo albums and one joint album with Kurt Vile, it’s hard to look past her stunning debut, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, as her standout release.
Effortless in its delivery and at times jagged in its melodic composition, it fluctuated between the observational and personal with relative ease, painting a visceral picture of modern life. Be it through a panic-laced allergic reaction in ‘Avant Gardener’ or the cutting diatribe of self-criticism in ‘Debbie Downer’, it was a record packed with wit and empathy in equal measures.
But on ‘Depreston’, Barnett’s skill to universalise a very direct narrative is crystalised into the record’s standout track. Born from mundanity and the everyday experience of viewing a prospective property. “That house-hunting experience, that kind of open-home, I feel really intrusive a lot of the time,” she told Song Exploder when explaining the track’s genesis.
“But this one was different because it was this lady who had passed away”, she said, “and it was this extra layer of intruding. I guess that was a kind of catalyst, and it opened up all these other thoughts”. What follows are very direct lyrics of the scene Barnett found herself in, submersed in empathy and curiosity as the quirks of a recently passed resident showcased the nuance of her personality.
“Then I see the handrail in the shower / A collection of those canisters for coffee, tea and flour / And a photo of a young man in a van in Vietnam” she sings on the fourth verse after the niceties with the estate agent had been exchanged. As the song enters its farewell reprise, Barnett repeatedly sings the line told to her by the estate agent: ‘If you’ve got a spare half a million / You could knock it down and start rebuilding’, unfolding the true inquisitive heart of her narrative voice.
“Not that it’s disrespectful, but just that this place that someone has built means nothing. It’s just a kind of physical thing that you can wipe out and start again,” she explained. Perhaps where this song took on a life of its own is Barnett’s ability to question existentialism through a bizarre social experience we’ve all found ourselves in. Be it someone lucky enough to buy or, perhaps more commonly, someone carefully treading into a prospective rental that’s peeling from wall to wall, we question our forthcoming future from the soon-to-be past of strangers and the possessions they’ve cobbled together.
It’s adulthood confronted, and existentialism questioned. What meaning do societal pressures of domesticating your life and shackling yourself to a life worth of debt have when a stranger comes and packs up your trinkets? While pondering the romance of a house of one person’s lifetime and the endless meaning hidden in its cracks and crevices, she debates whether replicating it is ultimately a meaningless pursuit.
