Courtney Barnett, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (2014)

Released in 2015, Barnett's debut album Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit is a wordy slab of indie rock, full of humour and candour, covering themes of personal relationships, identity, consumerism and environmentalism. What follows is a consideration of Sometimes I Sit in the context of two trajectories of popular music history, which I will loosely term 'grunge; incorporating an indie rock continuum from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, and the singer-songwriter incorporating a particular strain I will refer to as the quotidian. Inherent in this contextualization is the broader observation that as a singer-songwriter-guitarist leading a traditional rock three-piece (in 2018 augmented by a keyboardist), Barnett's approach is at odds with the pop mainstream. A quick survey of the US Billboard 200 album chart for 11 April 2015, the week when Sometimes I Sit debuted at number 20, illustrates this. Barnett is one of just four artists in the top fifty that might reasonably be described as rock music, the others being Imagine Dragons, Fall Out Boy and Modest Mouse. The top fifty is otherwise dominated by hip hop (Kendrick Lamar at number 1, Nicki Minaj, Earl Sweatshirt, etc.), and pop (One Direction, Maroon s, Meghan Trainor, Ed Sheeran, etc.), with some country and electronic music as well as a couple of heritage artists (Madonna and Van Morrison).