#depreston

3:23 AM EDT June 28, 2023:

Courtney Barnett - "Depreston" From the album   Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (March 20, 2015)

SHOW PREVIEW: Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile (and The Sea Lice) 

Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile teaming up is a match made in indie heaven. The two singer-songwriters are going on a tour of North America this fall to promote their collaborative album, which comes out later this year.

Courtney Barnett is an Australian known for her deadpan style of singing and witty lyrics in hits such as “Depreston” and “Elevator Operator,” the latter of which was featured on a playlist from former president, Barack Obama. Barnett has garnered critical acclaim in her home country and abroad, winning awards including the Best Female Artist ARIA Music Award in 2015.

Kurt Vile is the former lead guitarist for The War on Drugs, but has since made a name for himself from his solo lo-fi folk rock. Pitchfork named his sixth studio album, 2015’s b’lieve i’m goin down, Best New Music, praising the album’s “impeccably recorded” mix of “folk, new wave, and country.”

On their tour, Barnett and Vile will perform their collaborative material as well as duet on each other’s songs. They will be joined by The Sea Lice, which includes Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney and Wild Flag and Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint.

Catch Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile with their band The Sea Lice on November 7 at The Anthem.

-Gabby Brooks

Depreston by Courtney Barnett

Song Aesthetic

“How’s that for first impressions? This place seems depressing. It’s a California bungalow in a cul-de-sac.”

you could knock it down

4. Courtney Barnett - “Depreston”

This song is steeped in a heavy dose of existentialism. It tackles the endemic theme of our generation’s discontent with society and life in general. It’s a discontent with a number of causes, but I believe that ultimately it can be boiled down into two, with one rising from within and the other rising from without.

The first is a sort of forced temperance or self-flagellation, meaning denying something, not because you don’t want it, but because it’s impossible to attain. You see its easy for us to shirk the lives of our parents or even willingly slow down the typical process of growing up, because disguising it as a conscious decision and placing it on some sort of intellectual high ground allows us to feel like we have some sense of choice or control. Do we want to get married? - No. Do we want to be successful? – No. Do we want a family? - No. Do we want a house? - No. Do we want the perfect suburban life? - No. Now don’t get me wrong, there are perfectly good and valid explanations for each of these denials, but I believe that underlying all of them is the fact that even if we were to want these things, the ability to achieve them – at least in the fashion that our parents did, would be impossible. Those opportunities don’t exist anymore. So out of fear we shun them. Rather than trying to attain them and falling short, we claim to have never wanted them to begin with.

But that explanation seems too simple. Our discontent must be fueled by something more than a sense of inadequacy or self-preservation. After all, our generation is often accused of being self-centered and unrealistic by those who came before us. We idealize the world. We shun the established order. We misplace our priorities. It’s a list that could go on and on. These accusations are often hurled at us from those who passed us the baton. The same individuals who after the most rigorous set of mental gymnastics humanly possible somehow manage to rationalize claiming no sense of responsibility for who we are. To them it’s as if we sprouted into existence out of nothingness, emerging from technology to plague the earth with our awful presence. None of them seem willing to examine their own role. They can’t fathom - or don’t even care to examine, the meager and slow rise in wages, compared to the exorbitant rise in the cost of living, price of education and healthcare. It’s easier for them to make us into the ‘other’, rather than blaming the system that formed us - the very same system that they created. For them the problem lies in our unrealistic ideals that challenge the established order of things, or the lack of a character that aligns with theirs. They see the solution lying in the past, within the idyllic and halcyon days of yore, days that conveniently didn’t involve us and barring the development of a time machine, will never come back. The future, the vanguard of progress and the semblance of fact are to be greeted with skepticism. In this scenario, it’s not our own sense of inadequacy that motivates us, but rather the inadequacy forced on us by others. We are told we are inadequate, and want to prove them wrong, only to be greeted by a world that, shaped by our forebears, confirms said inadequacy.

Either way there are conflicting emotions at work. The desire to prove ourselves wrestles with the desire to deny ourselves, and it is under this dual yoke that we greet adulthood. After all, we all eventually reach the tipping point where we realize that we are no longer a child and strive for some sort of normalcy, but even as we strive for normalcy we’re greeted by the emptiness and futility of it all. We feel like we’re selling out even though we’re only doing what the system necessitates. We feel guilty, and we don’t know where to reach, because every solution only carries partial answers. We want to pick and choose, but we live in a world that’s too often forced into a dichotomy. We’re scattered, reaching every which way trying to find balance when the very nature of life denies that balance.

8:23 AM EDT August 29, 2021:

Courtney Barnett - "Depreston" From the album   Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (March 20, 2015)

8:29 PM EDT September 7, 2024:

Courtney Barnett - "Depreston" From the album   Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (March 20, 2015)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

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