Sonic storytelling: The song Courtney Barnett took five years to complete
Courtney Barnett’s slacker-style ramblings seem to flow out of her mouth with ease. Her delivery always emulates a shrug, careless and casual, hiding the poetry and vulnerability in her lyricism. Lines spill over into new ones as she draws comparisons between her inner thoughts and the world around her, almost as if she’s scribbling in a diary, struggling to get it all down before the thoughts escape her.
From the style and flow of her lyrics, you may assume her romantic ramblings and accidental admissions tumble out of her pen with ease. Perhaps some of them do, but not ‘Elevator Operator’. Serving as the opener to her debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, the track preempted the distinctive style that would define Barnett’s entire discography.
Guitars scrape against a pulsing beat as Barnett’s long-winded thoughts trail over them, sprawling unapologetically. Though the story of the song flows out of her mouth with ease, it didn’t come quite as easily during the writing process. During a conversation with Vulture, the Aussie songwriter revealed that the track took her five years to finish.
She first found inspiration for the song when her friend came to her with a story of a strange encounter. He had been taking the elevator to the top floor of a building in Melbourne when a lady stopped him. “This lady accosted him and thought he was trying to commit suicide,” Barnett explained, “She tried to talk him out of it.”
“It’s a few seconds of being in an elevator together,” she added, “how had she totally concocted this story?” Inspired by the strange interaction, Barnett set out to concoct a story herself and set it to song. This would eventually lead her to ‘Elevator Operator’, but only after she spent five years ruminating on the idea.
For some reason, she couldn’t quite finish the song. Struggling with the third-person narrative and story, she would only find it in her to complete it when she set out to make Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. The track may have taken her half a decade to finalise, but it was well worth the wait and the perfect introduction to her sound.
With the pumping percussion and strange guitars, Barnett perfectly captures the eccentricity of the story that inspired the song, but, as usual, her lyricism is where she truly comes into her own. Applying her ranting, rambling style to a story about someone other than herself could have been difficult to translate, but it seemed to work for the subject matter.
Barnett veers between the point of view of her friend – “I think you’re projecting the way that you’re feeling, I’m not suicidal, just idling insignificantly” – and the woman who spoke to him in the elevator – “Don’t jump little boy, don’t jump off that youth” – in what has become one of her signature songs. The song maintains her conversational writing style as she takes on the voices of her characters, but it also works perfectly as a narrative song.
Once she had finally finished the track, Barnett even took on the role of the titular occupation in her accompanying music video. Watch the video for ‘Elevator Operator’, the song that took Courtney Barnett five years to write, below.
