Courtney Barnett shares "Before You Gotta Go" video and launches interactive mixer site

Publish Date
Wednesday, 15 September 2021, 9:09AM

Courtney Barnett has shared the video for 'Before You Gotta Go", taken from the much anticipated forthcoming album 'Things Take Time, Take Time' - out November 12.

Intimately detailed and gorgeously sketched, 'Things Take Time, Take Time' pulls back the curtain to reveal an optimistic and beautifully serene side to Barnett. "Before You Gotta Go", is one of the luminous highlights, turning a frustrated kiss-off into the most gracious of love songs “If something were to happen my dear, I wouldn’t want the last words you hear to be unkind.” Meanwhile, Barnett and co-producer Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint, Cate le Bon, Kurt Vile) perform an elegant illusion; starting with a simple warm drone, they add myriad layers of synth, guitars, drums and percussion in slow crescendo. There’s a lot going on, yet they create a sense of boundless space.

The beautifully offbeat video directed by Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore, meanwhile, casts Barnett as an ethnographer of the most delightfully idiosyncratic kind, collecting field recordings of dogs and horses, mushrooms and insects, and, most surreally, what looks like enormous statues and plants with her own face on them pushing through the ground.

On the "Before You Gotta Go" video, director Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore shares: “Making this clip was an interestingly polarising experience for me. I love how brilliantly simple Courtney’s idea was, it brought real joy shooting part of it together, just me, her and my DOP with the other part being two long days directing over zoom across the Tasman Sea. I watch it now and feel that sense of peace, that potent calm you can only get immersed in the beauty of nature.”

In order to give fans and music-lovers more insight into the creative process behind 'Things Take Time, Take Time', Barnett also launched an engrossing interactive website which allows the listener to isolate, mute and mix different instruments and vocal-parts of these recordings. The listener can (for example) listen to Barnett’s dry vocal harmonies as an acapella, or focus on the rhythms of drummer Stella Mozgawa, or Barnett’s beautiful and sensitive finger-picked electric guitar. At the moment the site hosts the mixes of previous single 'Rae Street' and 'Before You Gotta Go', but in time it will be populated by additional mixes from the album. Visit the site HERE!

“Sometimes I try to say everything in one song, or put my whole belief system into a vox pop, but you just can't do that — it's impossible,” Courtney says. Things Take Time, Take Time, then, represents a realisation that ideology is represented through the way you treat others, not what you say in a song — that some things are more felt than said. This is Courtney’s world – full of the strangeness, busyness and undeniable warmth of life - and you will definitely want to spend some time in it.

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