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How Courtney Barnett made her new album by retreating to the desert: ‘It nearly drove me mad’
MusicMusic News•March 1, 2026 at 3:52 PMNational

How Courtney Barnett made her new album by retreating to the desert: ‘It nearly drove me mad’

By Brodie Lancaster•The Guardian Music

After closing her scene-making record label and moving to the US, Barnett decamped to Joshua Tree – where she learned to slow down and make noise againIn the early months of 2024, Courtney Barnett was living in the kind of limbo that usually precedes a major psychic shift. The Grammy-nominated Australian musician was bouncing between sublets as a transplant to Los Angeles – a city she still navigates via a mental map of Melbourne, the place that made her: “Silver Lake is kind of like Collingwood,” she says, laughing. She was simultaneously winding down Milk! Records, the independent label she co-founded more than a decade earlier, and writing her fourth record. Her head was spinning.“It felt like the end of a chapter, and then the next chapter kind of began without me totally realising.” Continue reading...

After closing her scene-making record label and moving to the US, Barnett decamped to Joshua Tree – where she learned to slow down and make noise again

In the early months of 2024, Courtney Barnett was living in the kind of limbo that usually precedes a major psychic shift. The Grammy-nominated Australian musician was bouncing between sublets as a transplant to Los Angeles – a city she still navigates via a mental map of Melbourne, the place that made her: “Silver Lake is kind of like Collingwood,” she says, laughing. She was simultaneously winding down Milk! Records, the independent label she co-founded more than a decade earlier, and writing her fourth record. Her head was spinning.

“It felt like the end of a chapter, and then the next chapter kind of began without me totally realising.”

Continue reading...

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