Courtney Barnett’s video for “Before You Gotta Go” is imaginative and you should probably watch it if you haven’t already. It just might rock your socks off. My socks are currently sticking to the wall but I don’t know what that has to do with Courtney Barnett.
Today, Courtney Barnett launches the video for “Before You Gotta Go”, taken from the much anticipated forthcoming album Things Take Time, Take Time.
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.
In Dalimore’s words –
“Making this clip was an interesting 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.”
