Courtney Barnett live at Manchester Ritz (Photo: Gary Mather for Live4ever Media)
It was just Courtney Barnett and her acoustic guitar on a recent episode of The Tonight Show: At Home Edition.
Barnett was the guest for a bare-bones rendition of Sunday Roast, a track which features on Tell Me How You Really Feel – one of Live4ever’s top albums of 2018; “After one listen of Tell Me How You Really Feel you can almost imagine Courtney Barnett’s people hustling around you with canapes at the playback sessions, handing you a salmon terrine and then whispering conspiratorially at the same time, ‘This is her grunge album. We think she’s worked it out of her system now’,” our review opens.
“The title is an apt one for a record on which the Australian singer seems to be grafting for a handle on herself; part psychiatrist, part patient seeking a diagnosis for a condition which neither really understand. Barnett has spoken about the problems of overcoming writer’s block in following up 2015’s mercurial Sometimes I Sit And Think And Sometimes I Just Sit by degrees, filleting the tough subjects she would otherwise have avoided as a route to making ideas flow. Happiness, it seems, is no-one’s real muse.”