If you were still clinging to the hope that Melbourne-based singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett could remain your personal thing—even after her debut studio album, Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, wound up on numerous Best Of 2015 lists (including one from a small, up-and-coming website called The A.V. Club) and landed her a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist—it’s probably time to accept that her indie-rock paeans to mundanity are for the masses.
The 28-year-old musician was last night’s musical guest on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, performing “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go To The Party” from her increasingly popular album. And she did it wearing a Midnight Oil T-shirt. (That’s another Australian musical act that made the leap from being criminally under-appreciated to massively mainstream when their 1987 album Diesel And Dust went platinum seven times over.) “It kind of feels nice because of the type of music I play, and where I’ve come from, like putting out my own records, running my record label from my house still in Australia,” Barnett tells Rolling Stone of her unexpected celebrity. “And to be touring around and to then be, suddenly, on this level of recognition, on the other side of the world, feels really nice.”