The temperature was over 100 degrees, or rather, 40 on the Celsius scale, as Courtney Barnett wondered if she was going to die while pulling weeds in her Melbourne, Australia, garden. The 20-something, as yet unknown musician struggled back inside. Later, she recalled to The Huffington Post, "I was just looking at myself in the mirror and freaking out."
Up until this point, Barnett had been a smoker. On this day, just the physical activity of gardening combined with the high heat was enough to force her to take an ambulance despite the unaffordable cost.
"I was like, oh, my God, why do I smoke?" Barnett said with a laugh.
She'd quit a month later and write a song about the whole thing.
The now 28-year-old canonized this incident with the song, "Avant Gardener," which became Barnett's first massively popular hit as a musician after its 2013 release. Although the song has no clear chorus or pop structure, Barnett found a way to make a very specific incident from her life relatable. One memorable line repeats throughout the song: the declarative, but vague enough, "I’m having trouble breathing in."
Since this early success, Barnett has continued to find a both wide and critic-heavy audience following this diary-esque approach to songwriting. Her latest album, "Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit," was recently named one of the top 10 of 2015 by publications such as Rolling Stone and Pitchfork.
"Avant Gardener" has been heard millions of times. In the song, Barnett sings, "The paramedic thinks I'm clever cause I play guitar / I think she’s clever 'cause she stops people dying."
When you just worry about doing what you know, you have a chance at being the best for the job.
Back on her fateful gardening day, Barnett accrued an expensive bill along with the discovery of a rash all over her arms and legs, which she thinks might have caused by an additional allergic reaction to a plant in the garden. According to the musician, the doctor didn't know what to diagnose her with. The episode had no clear, complete villain to blame.
All Barnett could do was try and become better to try and avoid the same pain in the future. You can curse the sun, but some inevitable forces of pain can't be defeated. The cigarettes could stop. Writing could help make sense of it all in her own head and restore her power over the situation and herself.
The ambulance bill ended up getting waived, which is lucky, as Barnett wasn't in the position to easily pay for it. Around that time, Barnett had worked local jobs such as a shoe salesman -- "I wasn't really of the kind of hard-sell mentality" -- and bartender, but was focusing on setting up a record label for her and her friends' music.
Barnett founded that label, Milk! Records, in 2012, with the help of her fellow songwriter girlfriend, Jen Cloher. The two still run the label from their shared home in Melbourne, with Barnett's recent meteoric success certainly changing the bottom line.
In publication profiles, the musician is often described with terms like "needless" or "slacker," but that seems more based in her aesthetic than reality. Barnett said that she has a "fear of failing," explaining that sometimes her mentality is along the lines of, "Well, I'm just not going to try because then I can't be bad at it." Barnett continued, "Because I know that I'm bad at it and it would take a lot of work [to try something], so it's just me being lazy."
But as a musician and songwriter this perceived laziness really isn't true. Even at the early age of 10, the left-handed Barnett pushed through on learning how to play a right-handed guitar, the only kind available to her. She then re-learned on a left-handed guitar in her early teens and now can play both. Her New Year's resolution for 2016 is to learn piano by taking on a Beatles songbook, along with the other planned touring and recording. She writes constantly in books and books of lyrics, as producing rhymes is her self-prescribed activity for boredom.
Barnett may not have put in the hours to become a paramedic, but instead found her own thing. "I don't really have any massive goals. I think every day, just take it as it comes, see what happens," Barnett said. When you do you, producing isn't insurmountable, but inherent.
Speaking about "Avant Gardener," Barnett claimed, "I remember kind of working hard on it and it had come out of this very surreal experience, so it was important to me." Barnett continued, "When it all came together, I felt such a sense of accomplishment, because it was hard to fit all those words in. Get the whole story."
As long as you really do try to be better, just care about what you care about.
The first lines of "Avant Gardener" are "I sleep in late / Another day / Oh what a wonder / Oh what a waste." By the end of writing, recording, self-releasing and touring the song, Barnett certainly seized the day in her own way.
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