Courtney Barnett remembers the exact moment her new album, Creature of Habit, finally made sense.
She had just finished writing “Mantis,” one of the record’s defining tracks and the song that ultimately inspired the album’s cover. When the last pieces fell into place, the whole project suddenly clicked.
“When I finished writing that song, I felt the album come together like that,” Barnett tells Guitar.com. “The song felt like the glue. I don’t 100 percent know why, but it just made all of the songs make sense as a collection, instead of them just being random songs placed together.”
The song itself arrived after a moment of quiet inspiration. Barnett had been struggling to complete it; “Mantis” was missing a chorus, and the lyrics she had written so far felt scattered.
“I had some random lines that didn’t really make sense,” she says.
Then one day she noticed a praying mantis sitting on her windowsill. That small encounter helped her to reshape the song.
“I was in a moment where I was feeling really lost and really sad, and I was really having a hard time,” Barnett recalls. “And this tiny little mantis felt like this weird sign from the universe. This supportive little creature was kind of telling me I was going in the right direction, and so it became this symbol for me.”
The reassurance came at a time of significant upheaval in her life. Creature of Habit was written after Barnett relocated to Los Angeles from Melbourne and shut down her longtime label, Milk! Records. The changes forced her to confront deeper questions about identity, stability and the future of her career.
“This album is all about change,” Barnett says. “It’s in the lyrics, it's in the ideas. I can’t avoid it. It’s about embracing change, but also grieving the things that have changed, and the chaos and confusion of all of those feelings.”
Music has long been Barnett’s way of navigating that emotional terrain. She first picked up the guitar as a kid simply because her brother played.
“I wanted to copy him,” she says.
Not long after, a guitar teacher showed her just how simple songwriting could be.
“My guitar teacher said, ‘These four chords I’m about to show you — you can write any song you want with them.’”
My guitar teacher said, ‘These four chords I’m about to show you — you can write any song you want with them.’”
— Courtney Barnett
Much of Barnett’s songwriting since then has been built around a familiar companion: her left-handed Fender Kurt Cobain Jaguar electric.
“It feels like such a workhorse and it does everything I want it to do,” she says. “I can play all my songs on it. They all sound good to my ear on that guitar.”
Between the Jaguar and a white Fender Stratocaster, Barnett says her setup is intentionally minimal.
“I don’t really have any other ones here.”.
Those guitars anchor a set of songs on Creature of Habit that includes “Site Unseen,” featuring Waxahatchee, along with “Sugar Plum,” “Mantis,” and the lead single, “Stay in Your Lane.”
In the studio, Barnett often leans into spontaneity rather than precision. Guitar parts — especially solos — are frequently left until the final moments of a session, when instinct can take over.
“There’s a beauty in an in-between moment of figuring something out and capturing that sound in the studio,” she says. “It’s usually a guitar solo or something like that that I would typically leave to the last minute and do it based on feeling.
“I’m figuring it out in the moment, and I feel like I’m wasting everyone’s time, but at the same time it captures something really raw. It’s right on the edge of falling apart, or you can hear me searching for the notes — and I like that. It feels really, really honest.”
Barnett will bring that spirit to the stage this spring when she launches a North American tour behind Creature of Habit. The run begins May 1 in Austin and will include stops in Brooklyn, Nashville and Boston before wrapping in Los Angeles in August.
