MUSIC COURTNEY BARNETT no time for sitting around Courtney Barnett is one of the most clever and witty lyricists around today. It’s morning in Melbourne when Courtney Barnett calls me. She’s sitting in her car, wrapped in a blanket parked in her driveway. It’s raining, cold, and miserable outside. Her house has bad cellphone reception and it’s too frigid to sit on the lawn. Unpleasant circumstances aside, she’s still laughing. This situation could easily be the premise for one of her songs, because for Barnett, tragedy breeds comedy and the specifics of everyday mundanity are spun into relatable tales of heartbreak and triumph in the face of confusion. The Australian songwriter’s journey with music started as a kid living in the suburbs of Sydney. With a cool older brother and a neighbour willing to trade mixtapes as guiding lights, Barnett started learning guitar and writing music at an early age. At 18 she started performing her solo work, and though she dabbled in collaborating with bands for a while, she maintains throughout she was always doing her own thing. In line with this independent thinking was Barnett’s move to start her own label, Milk! Records, to facilitate the release of her first EP. Now a full fledged direct artist-to-listener operation, in the beginning Milk! Records was nothing more than a ploy to be heard. “It was pretty basic. I didn’t really have much money so I just set up a website and released my first EP on CD and digital. Not many people were buying them because not many people knew who I was, but it was kind of word of mouth and it spread a bit,” explains Barnett. Barnett managed to cobble together the means to get her music to other continents. With the help of money raised from localized touring, government arts grants, and labels by Maya-Roisin Slater in New York and London, she’s been touring beyond Australia regularly since the release of her double EP, A Sea of Split Peas. Her songs, which centre around exposing personal pitfalls, show that Barnett is a shy and anxious women. For her, touring was a way of facing her fears, like a kid being thrown into the pool to swim for their life. “I grew in many ways, as a musician, as a songwriter, as a person. I really had to learn some life skills and social skills. I’m very shy and not very good at socializing, but stuff like that really pushed me to have to do it. You have to meet people, you have to do press, you have to mingle with the bands, the other bands are sometimes really nice people. I try to stay open to experiences, I guess you can’t grow unless you push yourself in ways like that. It’s fun, it’s great playing your music in front of anyone, anyone who’ll listen, it’s amazing,” she explains. Back home after a long bout of touring and summer festivals in support of her debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit, released in 2015, Barnett is slowly but surely getting started on her next project. “I’m trying to make a new album. I just get distracted a lot,” she explains. Barnett hopes to have it out by next year, that goal and many others are sitting on a list for her horizon. “I’ve always had a lot of things I want to learn how to do,” she says. “You know, learn how to play piano, learn how to speak French, it never happens. But maybe that’ll get better in the next year. I’ll learn how to be a better person, all kinds of things.” Courtney Barnett plays the Commodore Ballroom <strong>April</strong> 19 BLEACHED LA band has a passion for thrashin’ Earlier this year, Annie Clark (St. Vincent) made headlines for designing a female-friendly guitar. If things go as planned, Bleached sister duo Jessica and Jennifer Clavin may be next in a movement of women musicians revolutionizing the onstage experience for female rockers. In their case, the Clavin’s education in fashion design would lend itself perfectly to a line of clothing that is also, as Jessica posits, “thrash-friendly.” It’s a no-brainer for the group, rounded out by bassist Micayla Grace and drummer Nick Pillot, the sole male member. The band’s female majority is unanimous on what comes most naturally to each of them individually: performing. With its careening guitar melodies, slightly unhinged momentum, and subtle snarl, Welcome The Worms is more conducive to thrashing than the band’s 2011 debut album, Ride Your Heart. Drug-references, tales of reckless abandonment, and self-destruction are abound on Bleached’s second LP, but the album isn’t intended to glorify these themes. Rather, it’s about “welcoming the dark side of life” along with the light. Speaking over the phone with Grace and the Clavin sisters the day after wrapping up their stint at SXSW and only hours before a show in San Antonio, the conversation steers towards juice and spa sessions rather than the deadly sugar-liquor combo of the new song “Sour Candy.” That Welcome The Worms was the first time that the Clavin sisters involved Grace in the writing process is a testament to the trustworthiness of the band’s newest permanent member. Jennifer is far from oblivious to her possessiveness of Bleached and is honest about the fact that the aspect of making music she finds most challenging is having her writing meddled with in production. However, she is just as forthcoming to say that the new approach to writing, which was done collectively as well as alone, allowed the individual members to let out their different sides. The outcome, says Grace, represents their personal and collective growth. The hope is that eventually the band will evolve to encompass what Jessica calls a “whole band concept,” akin to The Kinks and The Beatles, with their drummer also on board with the writing duties. If Bleached can keep on their current trajectory it seems a sure thing that whatever form their next collaboration takes on will have an exponentially greater outcome. Bleached perform at the Biltmore Cabaret on <strong>April</strong> 28 Bleached are embracing the “whole band” concept on their new LP. by Thalia Stopa photo: Nichole Anne Robbins 6 APRIL <strong>2016</strong> • Music
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