Last year, Courtney Barnett released a song called “Avant Gardener” about surviving a near-fatal asthma attack. It describes a moment in her garden in Melbourne, Australia, that landed her in a hospital.
“It was scary, I thought I was dying,” she says. “I had real difficulty breathing. I had to get an adrenaline shot, an EpiPen in my thigh.” She also got a heck of a song out of it, the centerpiece of her second, self-released EP, “How to Carve a Carrot into a Rose.”
“I write about what I know,” she says. “I thought it might be kind of boring, (stuff) no one would care about. So everyday, plain. I thought it was strange people focused on that one (‘Avant Gardener’). I thought it was weird song. Obviously, I was wrong.”
With its psychedelic daydream vibe and conversational delivery, “Avant Gardener” sounds matter-of-fact, and brings sly humor to the potentially tragic events: “Halfway down High Street, Andy looks ambivalent / He’s probably wondering what I’m doing getting in an ambulance.” In the end, she’s learned her lesson about getting too ambitious about weeding her back yard: “Should’ve stayed in bed today.”
Barnett had a reason to get out of bed after the song won acclaim worldwide. It led to her first concert outside Melbourne, at the CMJ Music Marathon in New York last October. That night, whatever anxiety she might have been feeling didn’t lead to a life-or-death ambulance ride.
“I was nervous but there was also this weird thing, a strange calmness, being in this other place,” she says. “It didn’t seem real, so I didn’t have to care. I got through it and felt good afterward.”
After five years of quietly going about her work as a songwriter, guitarist, band leader and indie-label owner, Barnett was ready for her moment. She grew up in Sydney’s Northern Beaches with a ballet-dancing mother and artist father, who introduced her to “hipster jazz” and classical music. At 10, she picked up a guitar, and learned some Nirvana chords from her older brother and drew inspiration from an older girl at school “who could play better than all the boys.”
She went to art school in Tasmania, but found that she liked writing and playing songs better than going to class. She split time between a cover band that focused on Top-40 fare from Toto, Michael Jackson and UB40, and writing her own songs in a similar pop vein. “I tried to emulate other singers because I really didn’t know how to sing,” she says. “It was only when I stopped doing that, that I was able to find my voice and write the first load of songs for the first EP. I was just writing songs without consideration of showing them to people. They were scruffy, more like demos, without me trying to sing them too perfectly.”
Barnett formed her own label, Milk! Records, in 2012 to self-release her debut EP, “I’ve Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris.” “There was never any clarity about a career or anything like that,” she says. “I didn’t know anything about approaching labels (to release my music). It all seemed too hard, but it seemed pretty easy to just put it out myself on the Internet. It’s easy in one way, but hard in other ways. It’s a lot of work to do everything yourself, so I learned how to delegate and trust other people to do jobs.”
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The success of “Avant Gardener” and the follow-up EP earned Barnett an international record deal, and the two EP’s were repackaged as “A Sea of Split Peas” and released in America earlier this year. Its deadpan vocals, insinuating melodies and catchy guitar riffs suggest that at 26, Barnett has arrived at what others might call a music career.
She acknowledged as much when she finally bid goodbye to her longtime bartending job back in Australia. “I’ve worked full-time until February this year,” she says. “I had to keep asking my bosses for time off to tour, and when I started asking them for three months off at a time, I knew it just wasn’t fair.”
Barnett has a new album ready for release early next year, which she recorded with her band a few months ago. Despite playing hundreds of shows over the last five years and developing into a sly songwriter and dynamic guitarist, she has no grand expectations. “Every time I write, I hope a song comes,” she says. “It’s a gamble every time. I collect a bunch of (stuff) and then we record live with the band. The songs are a lot of me figuring myself out. I’m only 26, I still don’t know myself.”
No worries, I suggest. Self-knowledge takes a lifetime.
“Oh, great,” she sighs. “I’ll be writing poetry forever.”
Also worth hearing
Rosanne Cash: The singer-songwriter’s latest album, “The River and the Thread,” is among her best, a poetic and moving examination of her Southern heritage. 8 p.m. Saturday at the North Shore Center for Performing Arts, Skokie, Ill., $40, $50, $58; northshorecenter.org
St. Paul and the Broken Bones: Its recordings don’t really do justice to the way the Birmingham, Ala., sextet revs up the blue-flame soul in concert. 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Metro, 3730 N. Clark St., $20; metrochicago.com
Greg Kot co-hosts “Sound Opinions” at 8 p.m. Fridays and 11 a.m. Saturdays on WBEZ (FM-91.5).
Twitter @gregkot
Courtney Barnett
When: 8 p.m. Monday
Where: Metro, 3730 N. Clark St.
Tickets: $16; metrochicago.com