Courtney Barnett — Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit

It starts with Oliver Paul, twenty years old / Thick head of hair, worries he's going bald and you already know you’re hooked, your lined, your sinkered. You’re sat at the same Starbucks you’ve spent most of your evenings for the last couple of years and will spend most of your evenings for the next couple of years. 

By the time you hear Put me on a pedestal and I’ll only disappoint you / Tell me I’m exceptional, I promise to exploit you, you’re convinced everything you’ve told yourself about your predisposition for instrumental textures vs. lyrical dexterity is nonsense. It must be. After-all there’s so many faces you can imagine standing in the crowd as you stand on stage, guitar slung low, shouting Pedestrian At Best into a silver checkered microphone. I think you’re a joke but I don’t find you very funny. You’re telling me there’s nobody you want to say that to sarcastically as you look away to convey the cool exterior you’ve just developed? 

But you aren’t all snark, your emotional canon is rich and varied. You say things like I’m thinking of you too. But because of your new cool exterior, you deal with even the most unrequited of loves sardonically, calmly. Your self-awareness is no longer crippling; it’s an asset.

This album has come at just the right time in your life. You’re 24 and there’s a few things happening to you. One, you’re trying to balance work with completing a novel to which you don’t yet know you will devote another year of your life. Two, you don’t know how she feels about you, but you suspect you know: you suspect you shouldn’t think about it any further, but you can’t stop yourself. Three, you think you’re doing plenty wrong, but man if you aren’t doing more right than you were doing last year, the year before that, the year before that. I don't know quite who I am, oh, but man, I am trying / I make mistakes until I get it right / An eye for an eye for an eye for an eye for an eye / I used to hate myself but now I think I'm alright.

You get out of the Starbucks, go for a walk. Your mind has wandered to a future you hope to one day have with her; a house, a park, a garage. If you've got a / Spare half a million / You could knock it down / And start rebuilding. But you know that isn’t going to happen. It isn’t one of those little did he know situations, it’s one of those he knew but lied to himself situations. This song gets you wistful; it’s the light drumming, clean guitar arpeggiating, slide guitar doodling, the lyrical theme of house-hunting with a partner, everyday life elevated.

As you walk past the now-nearly-empty bus-stop towards home, when I came to you and your towel were gone. Courtney Barnett talks about your awkwardness and anxiety in a way that’s incredibly relatable, but somehow still doesn’t feel like a personal attack. Like on Aqua Profunda, when she talks about passing out doing swimming pool stunts trying to impress someone who has not noticed you at all, you remember all the stupid things you’ve done in the past few months. And for the first time, instead of cringing, you smile and go, well… from the outside looking in, it’s quite funny, to be fair.

You begin to appreciate the genius of improving on a well worn out formula. Anybody can assemble a sound consisting of a bass guitar, a rhythm guitar, a lead guitar, vocals, and drums. But to do it in a way that results in unforgettable music is virtually impossible. Every day, there’s a few thousand attempts to perfect this configuration. There’s one! two! three! four!, there’s one, two, three, one, two, three, there’s can you count to seventeen?, there’s waaaaaaaaah-doodle-doodle-doodly-do. But once in a while, there’s an album that perfects the recipe, like a food-cart perfecting the nacho.

As Dead Fox leads into Nobody Cares If You Don’t Go To The Party, you decide not to walk homewards and to keep walking instead. It’s an anthem, and you’d like to imagine yourself on stage a little while longer. I want to go out, but I want to stay home. 

I’m so sorry for all of my insecurities but it’s just a part of me. 

As the album winds down with Kim’s Caravan and Boxing Day Blues, you walk through them in a daze. As you take another round before going back home, you listen to the album again — that rare looped album — and you think, man, I don’t think I’m ever going to forget the first time I heard this album. Like Velvet Underground & Nico alone at night in your room, or Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat one languid afternoon. And you don’t.