Courtney Barnett made an album from bed—literally. Things Take Time, Take Time, her third LP, came together while she was stuck in a Melbourne flat during lockdown, writing songs half-asleep and half-awake, guitar balanced on the duvet. “It’s peaceful,” she told me. “I end up doing a lot of writing while I’m lying in bed… or listening to music or reading or whatever it is. I somehow end up spending a lot of time in bed.”
That inertia—the repetitive loop of morning, night, morning again—became part of the record’s quiet DNA. The songs hum with domestic rhythm: letters written but not sent, patience tested but not broken, communication turned into ritual. “It was a lesson in patience,” she said, laughing softly. “I think that’s a good way to put it.”
Barnett’s always been the kind of artist who could turn a grocery list into a manifesto. But this time, the world had shrunk. So she leaned in. “The album isn’t about the pandemic,” she said, “but you can’t deny what’s going on around you. It’s part of the backdrop and the emotion.”
You can hear that backdrop everywhere—from the half-dreamed opening of “Rae Street” to the sleepy-eyed closure of “Oh the Night.” “You wake up, and by the end, you’re back in bed,” I told her. She grinned. “Yeah, that’s funny, I didn’t plan it, but I guess it ended up that way.”
The bed, then, isn’t just a prop—it’s a character. It’s where she wrote, where she thought, where she watched the world disappear through a window. Even her favorite lyric, that wry “don’t stick that knife in the toaster” from “Take It Day by Day,” feels like a punchline from inside four familiar walls.
When I mentioned how “Rae Street” drops the line “All our candles, hopes, and prayers don’t mean a thing”, she nodded knowingly. “Sometimes things are more powerful when you leave them open,” she said. “People interpret things differently. That line can mean something new depending on the day.” For a songwriter known for her specificity, it’s a subtle shift—a willingness to let ambiguity do some of the storytelling.
The stripped-down arrangements weren’t aesthetic choices so much as necessity. “The lockdown limited what I could do musically,” she said. “But sometimes parameters make you more creative. When you don’t have a live band or all the instruments, it forces you to think differently.” The result—spare, glowing songs like “Sunfair Sundown”—feels both lonely and communal, the sound of someone making peace with solitude.
Still, even isolation can’t quiet her guitar. “Here’s the Thing” has one of those perfect Barnett riffs: hypnotic, cyclical, dreamlike. “I was watching TV, guitar in hand, and that line just came out of nowhere,” she said. “It created the space for everything else. You have to trust that subconscious creativity.”
Letters appear everywhere on the record—written, unsent, metaphorical. “It’s just a nice way to think about communication,” she said. “A letter could be a text or a conversation, but it paints a better picture to imagine it sailing through the air.”
She still sends real ones, too. “I love letters. I’ve got a bunch of people in my life who write them. It’s special. It makes me want to do it more.” She paused, amused by the old-fashioned sincerity of it. “It’s nice to get something that isn’t a bill.”
In the middle of all that stillness, she covered the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror” for a tribute project—a fitting song for an artist who’s spent her career reflecting the world back at itself. “I just love that song,” she said. “It’s really special.” And maybe not so coincidentally, her own “If I Don’t Hear from You Tonight” carries a little bit of that Lou Reed DNA in its easy jangle and romantic ache.
Barnett’s always balanced empathy with exasperation—her earlier work simmered with frustration at modern life and the weirdness of attention. This record feels like its quiet aftershock: patient, self-aware, tender. “I think I was thinking more about the process than the end result,” she said. “That helped me not get caught up in overthinking.”
In truth, Barnett’s been playing this balancing act since Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. Her rise—from Melbourne indie hero to global cult figure—was built on that plainspoken brilliance. “People used to call me an ‘unlikely success,’” she said in an earlier chat. “I guess it’s kind of a compliment. Lazy journalism, though.”
What she’s doing now feels like the natural extension of that shrug: finding grace in small spaces, humor in hopelessness, meaning in a letter you may never send. “You know,” she said once, “I think it’s harder to be hopeful than hopeless. It takes more energy.”
That might be true. But on Things Take Time, Take Time, Barnett makes it sound like the most natural thing in the world.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
