You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Courtney Barnett released her debut album in March 2015.
By the end of the year, she had been nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist,
Spin named her the Songwriter of the Year,
and she had won four ARIA Music Awards in her native Australia.
In this episode, Courtney Barnett breaks down her song Deprestin,
which began with a visit to an open house on a house hunting trip she took in the town of Preston.
Thanks to Sonos for letting me record this interview at the Sonos studio in Los Angeles.
My name is Courtney Barnett.
I'm a songwriter from Melbourne in Australia.
Preston is the suburbs of Melbourne, trees and bigger backyards.
So I went and looked at this house.
I was house hunting and in the car ride home, the whole idea kind of came to me in that moment.
It wasn't a song or an idea I'd been sitting on for a while.
I had the idea in the car and then I went home.
and was sitting around with my guitar and I'd just been trying to teach myself this go-between song called Streets of Your Town.
And it's got this kind of riff in it.
And the riff for Depressed In was kind of born out of playing around with those chords and that melody.