Review Summary: "Someday we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny."
I am a sucker for contextual influence on an album. Personal, professional, political… I always look for what factors may be told and revealed in the writing process.
And yes, I know that most albums are not a soap opera soundtrack to the artist’s life at the time. But boy, do I
luuurve it when an album is so very obviously a product of what its maker was going through in recording. And that’s what Courtney Barnett’s third album
Things Take Time, Take Time is.
Barnett’s home city of Melbourne spent more than 200 days under carrying degrees of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions from March of last year to the (hopefully) final lifting earlier this month. Lockdown is the backdrop for
Things Take Time. The way life changed, the way people dealt with this scary, boring new world, the way relationships distanced or deepened. Who knows – in the years to come, this might be a primary musical document of a weird time in the world.
Album opener and first single ‘Rae Street’ is a monologue of an isolated person watching the world turn through a suburban keyhole. The socially-distanced walkers, the young family next door struggling with remote learning, the first-responder tribute candles… all details that may have been imperceptible prior to the pandemic and are now associated with lockdown to Melburnians.
“All our candles, hopes and prayers, though well-meanin', they don't mean a thing,” sighs Barnett as she watches. That growing despondency of boredom and frustration feeds into the short, sharp cynicism of ‘Take It Day By Day’, a grumpy satire on the well-intended but ultimately hollow R U OK? style truisms to which we so often resort to get ourselves and our loved ones through times we cannot control.
It’s the lone self-sorry tantrum on the album, however. Patience and gratitude are more prevailing sentiments; expressed through the narrator proud of a couple buying their first house together in ‘Sunfair Sundown’ and more explicitly in the self-explanatory ‘Write a List of Things to Look Forward To’.
‘Here’s the Thing’ and If I Don’t Hear From You Tonight’ are out-of-reach confessions of love, the former of which may or may not have nicked a line from the Moody Blues, but also has the gorgeous moment of gratitude when “the windowsill is momentarily filled with sun/And it's these small thrills that get me through the day until the next one”.
Circumstance affects the sound of these 10 songs too; in an interview with Apple Music, Barnett described the writing process taking place almost entirely in her apartment. As a result of Barnett’s concern for her neighbours, the squalling rockers are gone in favour of mellow, slowed down acoustics and up-and-down riffs. Barnett’s mopey, melancholy lead guitar suits the sad sigh of her lyrics on ‘Before You Gotta Go’, in which we are hearing a relationship end in what feels like real time: Barnett conflicts love with anger, acceptance of the splintering with a resolution to work things out. Small wonder the song ends with the narrator singing, “You got to get away/Yeah, I know and I don’t blame you.”
The album cover’s predominant cover is blue – apt, perhaps. However, it is playfully and happily arranged. It could be the art project of the cooped-up kids of ‘Rae Street’: an album expressively making the most of an uncertain time.
