‘Mostly Patient’: What can we expect from the next Courtney Barnett album?
Back in June, Courtney Barnett started playing a couple of mystery songs on stage at the Grand Rapids RiverFest. Eagle-eyed fans (and Far Out Magazine) also spotted that she was indeed playing brand new material.
Now, Barnett has revealed, during a two-night stint at the end of September, on stage at the intimate Levon Helm Studios in Upstate New York, that she has enough new songs to make up a whole new album. Even more excitingly, she told those lucky enough to be in attendance that the album is already recorded. Unfortunately, she also let on that the record won’t be released for “a while”.
But, thanks to the forethought of the fans who captured the songs at the Levon Helm Studios, and the power of the internet, we can get a pretty good idea of what we can expect her new record to sound like, even if we haven’t got a good idea of when to expect it.
Back in June, Barnett played two new tunes, ‘Mantis’ and ‘Stay in Your Lane’. At her shows this weekend, she added a whole bunch of new material to her show, including tracks called ‘Wonder’, ‘One Thing at a Time’, ‘Same’, ‘Great Advice’, ‘Mostly Patient’ and ‘Sugar Plum’.
If you’ve liked any of her previous work, then you’ll surely like all of these as well. On ‘Stay in Your Lane’, Barnett bites into an aggressive, mechanical and biting guitar line. “Stay in my lane,” she chants towards the end of the song, “stay the same way”. And, in a way, the music behind the lyrics mimics what she is singing, but, crucially, these songs stay true to the way she has always written and sounded, and yet they still sound fresh and new. These songs are like a lot of her older ones, only maybe more so.
Backed and complemented by Stella Mozgawa on drums and long-time bass player Bones Sloane, with both chipping in regularly with beautiful harmonies and backing vocals, Barnett is back at her beautiful racket-making best with angular guitar lines and unexpected lyrical left turns galore.
Her most recent studio album, Things Take Time, Take Time, was a more gentle meditation on falling out and then back into love, coming to terms with yourself and slowing down after a whirlwind few years than the furious album that came directly before it, the excellent Tell Me How You Really Feel.
On Things Take Time, Barnett sounded lighter than she had in years, almost wistful. Not exactly carefree, but something a little closer to caring-less than she had on the album before. And though the new songs that she’s exhibiting sound sonically more in line with Tell Me How You Really Feel, that is not at all to say that it sounds like she’s taking a step backwards.
Instead, it sounds like she is bringing all of her output together into a batch of incredibly strong new songs. There is still incredibly deft and astute wordplay and ingenuity, which has been present ever since her earliest EPs and is the most impressive aspect of her full length debut Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. And, just like on Tell Me How You Really Feel there is a sense of urgency, a sense of needing to rectify an immediate injustice and of attacking the subject with the full force, but there is also a feeling, carried over from Things Take Time, Take Time, of a gentle confidence in herself. Having finally come to terms with her limitless and mercurial talents, we could be on the brink of a powerful artistic statement if Barnett is ready to fully bring together everything that she has done so far in her career.
Barnett has not made a bad record yet, and on the evidence of the new songs she is playing live at the moment, she isn’t about to start now.
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