Courtney Barnett – Depreston Lyrics

Courtney Barnett – Depreston Lyrics

Depreston Lyrics by Courtney Barnett

Though this track appears on her 2015 album Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, Barnett started performing the song live at the start of 2014. (These lyrics have been taken from her acoustic performance of the song at WFUV Radio in March of that year.) She explained the song in her own words on the Song Exploder podcast on January 7, 2016.

The song’s narrative structure – quite typical for the Barnett – takes a mundane subject and sings about it with mundane delivery. However, like much of Barnett’s work, the ostensibly mundane observations trace her gradual exploration of a central theme. The effect is a transformation of the banal into something more nebulous and beautiful – in this song bungalow for sale in Preston, Australia serves as a proverbial location for Courtney to explore certain experiences as a young adult.

For example, the title phrase “Depreston” – a portmanteau – puns on the similarity between the word “depression” and the name of the Australian township. The contraction therefore compares the distress Barnett feels in her inability to afford a house in the inner suburbs of Melbourne (Collingwood, Northcote, Brunswick) with the the confronting images of mortality from a deceased estate. The permanence that homeownership offers is confronted with the ultimate destabilizing force, death.

Moreover, Barnett seems to feel guilty for her preoccupations with death and mortality because her actual real life problems are limited to the quality of her coffee. Towards the end of the song, in a delightfully honest twist, she admits to returning to her own concerns (“And I wonder what she bought it for”) even after considering the dark mortality of the deceased homeowner.

[Verse 1]
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 saving twenty-three dollars a week

[Verse 2]
We drive to a house in Preston
We see police arresting
A man with his hand in a bag
How’s that for first impressions?
This place seems depressing
It’s a Californian bungalow in a cul-de-sac

[Verse 3]
It’s got a lovely garden
A garage for two cars to park in
Or a lot of room for storage if you’ve just got one
“And it’s going pretty cheap,” you say
Well, it’s a deceased estate
Aren’t the pressed metal ceilings great?

[Verse 4]
Then I see the handrail in the shower
A collection of those canisters for coffee, tea and flour
And a photo of a young man in a van in Vietnam
And I can’t think of floorboards anymore
Whether the front room faces south or north
And I wonder what she bought it for

[Refrain]
If you’ve got a spare half a million
You could knock it down and start rebuildin’
If you’ve got a spare half a million
You could knock it down and start rebuildin’
If you’ve got a spare half a million
You could knock it down and start rebuildin’
If you’ve got a spare half a million
You could knock it down and start rebuildin’
If you’ve got a spare half a million
You could knock it down and start rebuildin’
If you’ve got a spare half a million
You could knock it down and start rebuildin’