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Courtney Barnett and specificity


rsadasiv

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“Autobiographical” is another word commonly affixed to Barnett, but that’s not quite right, either. It’s technically true that Barnett writes about her own life, but she’s not a confessional diarist in the traditional singer-songwriter mode. Instead, she manages to be hyper-specific without ever coming off as myopic. Barnett writes around her heartache; she’s more likely to describe in comic detail the ugliness of the carpet in a room where a lovers’ spat occurs than the particulars of the spat itself. It’s a little like how Springsteen wrote about his dad’s used car in order to talk about the American class system on Nebraska.

 

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“Most of my songs are like that. They’re almost word-for-word of what’s happened,” she says. “The real estate lady was saying all the real estate things, and I realized that the house used to be owned by this old lady and she passed away and her family was trying to sell her house. All of her things were on the mantelpiece and stuff, and I just had a bit of a moment recognizing how life happens.”

 

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/courtney-barnett-writes-all-the-best-songs/

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