How Courtney Barnett made her new album by retreating to the desert: ‘It nearly drove me mad’

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In the early months of 2024, Courtney Barnett was living in the kind of limbo that usually precedes a major psychic shift. The Grammy-nominated Australian musician was bouncing between sublets as a transplant to Los Angeles – a city she still navigates via a mental map of Melbourne, the place that made her: “Silver Lake is kind of like Collingwood,” she says, laughing. She was simultaneously winding down Milk! Records, the independent label she co-founded more than a decade earlier, and writing her fourth record. Her head was spinning.

“It felt like the end of a chapter, and then the next chapter kind of began without me totally realising.”

That disorientation is the engine behind her new album, Creature of Habit. It opens with the synthy thrum of Stay in Your Lane, a track that addresses the friction of this transition with a characteristically blunt self-assessment: “Feels like I’m going backwards / Each day I preach my practice / And still it seems I wasn’t ready for this.”

If her 2021 record, Things Take Time, Take Time, was the sound of a woman sequestered by protracted, emotionally exhausting lockdowns (“It’s timid and doesn’t want to upset the neighbours,” she says), then Creature of Habit is the sound of the door being kicked off its hinges.

The music is confident and cheeky even if it’s lyrically self-effacing. Tracks from Creature of Habit had their first run live late last year, when Barnett played in Hobart, New York City, and then a “dirty rock show” at the Punters Club in Melbourne – a homecoming in a pub after supporting the Foo Fighters. “Sometimes on those huge, huge stages, you’re just like, ‘Is anybody out there?’ … In those small shows, it’s like you could reach out and touch someone. I could accidentally hit someone with my guitar when I’m spinning around.”

By the time she began writing the record, Barnett was a decade on from her breakout. Her version of long service leave saw her decamp to the desert for close to a year.

In Joshua Tree she found the space to “make a lot of noise” and obsess about another artist who famously swapped urban clamour for the desert’s silence: Georgia O’Keeffe. She became immersed in the painter’s world, piling a dozen books on her coffee table, including A Painter’s Kitchen: Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe.

“There was something so sweet and simple about … these tiny glimpses into her daily life and photos of her herbs in her kitchen and the things that were growing in her garden,” Barnett says. She would pull the cookbook out when it was her turn to cook for the band, while they made the record. A creature of habit in every way.

O’Keeffe famously developed a fascination with “crossed senses” – the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye, or maybe the experience so many modern pop stars claim as synesthesia. In her New Mexico home, O’Keeffe would lie in a lounge chair, intensely absorbing classical records or live performances from visiting musicians.

When Barnett performed last September at a festival at Ghost Ranch, O’Keeffe’s former home, the two artists were finally connected across time. Barnett noticed the record player where O’Keeffe would listen to music with an intensity of focus that she began applying to her own paintings. The desert conjures that kind of clarity.

The album’s title comes from the track Mantis, a song that began as a synth-and-drum demo by Barnett’s longtime collaborator Stella Mozgawa years earlier. For so long, Barnett felt like she was “banging [her] head against the wall”, unable to crack the lyrics.

“I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I’m a failure,’” she says, laughing. The breakthrough eventually came in the desert. “I was by myself, feeling particularly lost, and I saw a little praying mantis. It felt like this strange, beautiful sign from the universe.” Barnett compares it to reading horoscopes: cherry-picking the things you want and ignoring the rest. “I was like, ‘That is the sign that’s telling me that I’m on the right path and I’m following all the right things.’ That became the chorus, and suddenly the song made sense.”

At home in LA, Barnett tried to keep pushing against her habits. She has taken surfing lessons and pottery classes. Picking up new hobbies without the expectation of perfection and success has been good for her, even if the first classes – when everyone inevitably has to introduce themselves to a group of strangers – still makes her claw anxiously at her chest.

But change is good. Change has led to Barnett finally getting the dog she has wanted for years. “I noticed how I interacted with the neighbours in a different way, and it brought me out of my shell just a little bit to talk to strangers,” she says. “I had more of an excuse because I had a dog, so suddenly my life was just a little bit different.”

The album concludes on a note of hard-won optimism with Another Beautiful Day. Over the soft, rhythmic pulse of Mozgawa’s drums and a shimmering haze of layered falsetto, Barnett finally grants herself the permission she has been seeking for a decade: “You gotta put yourself first sometimes.”

“I really had to trust my gut,” she says. The album-writing deadlines she set for herself were massaged, then extended. When everyone else thought it sounded good, Barnett resisted. She knew how it felt when a song was right. “It nearly drove me mad. But now I love this album. I love the songs. I really love how it all sounds. And that is a very good feeling: that there’s not even a little regret on there.”

By the end of our conversation, the image of Barnett in Joshua Tree begins to merge with O’Keeffe in Abiquiú: two artists in the desert waiting for the moment a habit becomes an idea and comes to life. Waiting for the spark she trusts will arrive – if she just gives it time.