I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: October 23, 2018] Courtney Barnett

S. and I saw Courtney Barnett back in May when her latest album Tell Me How You Really Feel just came out.  She did a few shows where she played the whole album in its entirety.  Our show sold out very quickly and I was lucky to get tickets.

This time around she played the larger Fillmore and did not sell out the venue.  Is it better to play a small club and sell out, or a larger one and not sell out?  I’m still not sure why this one didn’t.

So why would we go to see someone five months after we had just seen her?

Well, primarily because I thought that this show would be different–bigger, longer and a bit more fun. Not that the first wasn’t fun–it was.  But at that show, she had a mission to play that album and make us like it.  This time, we already had the album and we liked it, we just wanted to hear it again!

And man was this show terrific.

I assumed she would not play the album straight through again.  But I shouldn’t have been surprised that she opened with the first two songs.  The stage was bathed in red (terrible for pictures so I didn’t bother trying to get any).  However, I love watching her play guitar–her technique is so bizarre to me and yet it sounds wonderful.  It must hurt like the dickens.  You can see her playing with no pick very clearly in this clip from “City Looks Pretty.” 

But rather than play the next song “Charity,” she jumped back in her catalog to play “Avant Gardener.”  This is still one of my favorites from her and I loved hearing it again.

Then she returned to the new album (I really like this album a lot so this was all fine by me) to play “Need a Little Time.”  Continuing with the album meant that next up was the awesome single “Nameless, Faceless.”  I like it more each time I hear it and hearing it live is even better.  As is hearing the next song “I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch.”   On the record, this song is a short burst of righteous anger.  Live, the song explodes into a whole sense of fury.  Courtney wails on guitar.  The band is loud and abrasive.  It’s like 2 minutes of controlled anger.  Spectacular.

Apparently “Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Self Confidence” is the new single–she played in on Seth Meyers’ show the other night.  I didn’t notice last time that bassist Bones Sloane and guitarist Katie Harkin sang the title of the album during the chorus.  I have this kind of bet with myself to see if I can get a good picture of Bones.  This is the third time I’ve seen him play and I just can’t ever seem to get a decent picture of him.  Mostly that’s because I’m usually on the left side and he’s on the right.  But he seems to be always darkly lit and  hidden behind hair and a hat.  I think he wears glasses but I can never tell.  Here’s my latest attempt where at least you can see him smile.

With three songs remaining from Tell Me she took a detour back to the Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit album with “Small Poppies.”  This song is a slow, bluesy number which at about three minutes in allows for some really wild soloing.  It is so much fun to see her stomping around the stage wailing and wailing on the guitar.

After this was a brand new song called “Small Talk.”  It’s a simple meandering quiet song that does seem to be mostly small talk.  This seem like she could have a lot of fun improvising on this song live.

Back to Sit for a few more songs (and I realized that I don’t know this album all that well).  I know the singles but not he deeper cuts.  So “Debbie Downer” was almost new to me.

When we saw her at Union Transfer she played Depreston with Kurt Vile in the encore.  This time she played it mid set and I loved how quietly it opened–with her noodling on the guitar before starting the opening riff.  I also assumed this meant there’d be no Kurt visit on this show (which was fine).

Courtney has a few bluesy song that follow a simple riff and which she narrates in her idiosyncratic way.  Like “Are You Looking After Yourself” on which I noticed that Bones was singing backing vocals on.  So I took the opportunity to film him playing a bit (you still can’t see him very well).

She returned to Tell Me with “Walking on Eggshells” and then invited Katie Crutchfield out to sing a duet of “Houses” a song by Elyse Weinberg that I didn’t know. Their voices worked nicely together.

I love “Elevator Operator,” a great song from Sit which was followed by “Lance Jr” a song from one of her early EPs that I don’t really know.

She played one more song from Tell Me before the set ended.  It was a great version of “Charity” which is rapidly becoming my favorite song on the record (but it’s so hard to choose). I wanted to get a bit of Katie Harkin playing before focusing back on Courtney in this song.

The set ended with “History Eraser” which features Bones chanting the chorus “In my brains I rearrange the letters on the page to spell your name.”  It’s a great rocking song and a terrific way to end the set.

When she came back from the encore break, she announced she was playing a solo cover song, “Everything is Free” by Gillian Welch.  I had just heard Phoebe Bridgers do this song live a few months ago (her version was amazing).  I had never heard of this song before that show.  Then to have another great artist cover it in the span of a few months is pretty crazy.  It’s even crazier that this song if from 2001.  It is a really wonderful song and is amazingly pertinent 17 years later.

The band came back out for “Anonymous Club.”  This is a slow moody song that she played live last time.  I like the song but not really as a live song or as an encore.  It’s just too slow and trippy.  It also seems to go on for a pretty long time.  It nearly ended when she walked back to Dave Mudie on drums, but that was jut a quiet moment before the song built up again.

But I knew that she couldn’t end the show with that because there was one song that everyone was waiting for.  She played the crunchy opening chords of Pedestrian at Best and everyone went berserk.  It was a fantastic ending to a great show.

Courtney doesn’t speak a lot to the crowd–amazingly, she seems kind of nervous as she chats.  But she is not at all nervous when she plays.  Her stage show is all about the music and it was great.

Setlists

October 2018, Fillmore	May 2018, Union Transfer
Hopefulessness ¥	Tell Me How You Really Feel (album in total)
City Looks Pretty ¥	Hopefulessness
Avant Gardener ⊗	City Looks Pretty
Need a Little Time ¥	Charity
Nameless, Faceless ¥	Need a Little Time
I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch ¥	Nameless, Faceless
Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Self Confidence ¥	I’m Not Your Mother, I’m Not Your Bitch
Small Poppies $	Crippling Self Doubt and a General Lack of Self Confidence
Small Talk [new]	Help Your Self
Debbie Downer $	Walkin’ on Eggshells
Depreston $	Sunday Roast
Are You Looking After Yourself Œ	end of album break
Walkin’ on Eggshells ¥	Avant Gardener
Houses (Elyse Weinberg cover) (with Waxahatchee)	Anonymous Club
Elevator Operator $	Small Poppies
Lance Jr Œ	Elevator Operator
Charity ¥	History Eraser
History Eraser ⊗	encore
encore	Over Everything (with Kurt Vile)
Everything is Free (Gillain Welch cover)	Depreston (with Kurt Vile)
Anonymous Club ⊗	Pedestrian at Best
Pedestrian at Best $

¥ Tell Me How You Really Feel (2018)
$ Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (2015)
⊗ How to Carve a Carrot Into a Rose (2013)
Œ I’ve Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris (2012)