Every Song I Love — 9. Courtney Barnett : Depreston
Every Song I Love is a series where I try to write about every song that I love, or die trying. Sometimes I’ll explain why I love them, sometimes I’ll tell the stories behind how I fell in love with them, sometimes I’ll do both. Most importantly, I hope you love them too.
There are some experiences that thousands, even millions, of songs have been written about, such as falling in love. There are other experiences that, whilst almost as common in life, rarely appear in song, such as buying a house. Perhaps that is because falling in love is a giddy rush, a thrill analagous to that you get when you hear great music, whereas buying a house mainly involves filling in forms and waiting to hear from estate agents and solicitors.
Yet, buying a house is also an important part of our lives, an experience many of us are familiar with, even if current governments seem determined to make it as difficult as possible for anyone without wealthy parents. The relatability, but relative mundanity, of the subject matter perhaps makes it a more obvious subject for comedians than musicians. In Depreston (Preston being a suburb of Melbourne), Courtney Barnett approaches the early parts of the song with the eye of a satirist, riffing on the conversations we have with our partners or ourselves, the little choices and bargains we have to make when deciding where to live:
You said we should look out further
I guess it wouldn’t hurt us
We don’t have to be around all these coffee shops
Now we’ve got that percolator
Never made a latte greater
I’m savin’ 23 dollars a week
The first couple of verses are along that vein, and are excellent in their own right, witty in a way that too few songs dare to be, for fear of not being taken seriously. Where the song truly takes off though, is halfway through the third verse.
And it’s going pretty cheap, you say
Well, it’s a deceased estate
There’s a change in Barnett’s voice when she sings the line “it’s a deceased estate” that changes the song completely, so much emotion contained in that single moment. It pinpoints the weirdest part of buying a house, which is the feeling that while you’re wandering through someone’s house you’re also trampling over their life. Some people can be selling houses for a positive reason, because they’re moving to an exciting new job in another part of the country, or because they can afford to buy somewhere bigger and better. Just as often though, the house is for sale because of death or divorce, and it is hard not to feel that you are taking advantage of the sellers misery, and to wonder about their lives, to feel their pain.
We bought our first house about seven years ago. We must have looked at thirty before we found the right one, and had a few experiences like this, including one house where there was a clearly severely ill, bed-ridden elderly relative in one of the rooms we were looking around. It is hard to think about the sort of things you’re supposed to be thinking about when viewing a house, like storage and light, when confronted with human misery, and your own privilege relative to the person who’s about to be turfed out of their home. Similarly, for the remainder of Depreston, Barnett can no longer think about the house she is viewing, only the life of the woman who used to own it. Who was she, what were her hopes, her loves, her dreams?
It’s a song that has gained extra poignancy for me since the recent death of my 93 year old Nana. Visiting her house after her death was a strange, sad experience, everything the same as when she was still there, yet somehow totally different. Never was an absence more tangible. The estate agent described her house in its’ online advert, as a ‘blank canvas’, which felt extremely dismissive of the home, and life, my grandparents built there. I wonder if the potential buyers, like the narrator of Depreston, thought at all about the people who lived there before, felt that strange emotion of walking through someone else’s life.
Depreston is a song that has bought me to tears, and still makes me emotional, no matter how many times I hear it. It’s a rare song indeed that can pinpoint a specific emotion, a feeling that many of us have experienced but has rarely if ever been expressed in song before. It’s also a rare song that can imbue a line like “if you’ve got a spare half a million, you can knock it down and start rebuilding” with so much meaning. The greed and selfishness inherent in our property system, the disregard for other people, the lack of respect paid to their homes, their dignity.
I noticed when putting together a playlist of my very favourite songs, 50 or 60 of them, that there were very few recent ones. I don’t think it’s because music today is any worse, or better, than music of the past. Perhaps I just don’t have as much time to devote to new music since I had a family. Perhaps it just takes time for me to think of a song of a classic. Depreston is on there though, one of the few representatives of the last ten years. Courtney Barnett, one of our greatest current songwriters, and Depreston perhaps her greatest song.
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Originally published at http://markjwray.com on March 23, 2024.
