‘Lotta Love’: Courtney Barnett’s best new release since ‘Tell Me How You Really Feel’

Posted On February 13, 2025February 13, 2025

Courtney Barnett might be one of our best modern songwriters, but she is also no stranger to singing other people’s songs. As well as performing plenty of covers on stage over the years, she has also contributed to a wide range of tribute albums to artists like The Velvet Underground, Wilco, Grateful Dead, Kev Carmody and Sleater-Kinney, too.

And now, she has released her take on Neil Young’s ‘Lotta Love’ from the upcoming Heart of Gold: The Songs of Neil Young—which will see all proceeds go to The Bridge School, where Young also famously holds an annual benefit show for—and feature songs from some fantastic, luminous names like Fiona Apple, Brandi Carlisle and Sharon Van Etten.

The first song released from the album, ‘Lotta Love’, finds Barnett in great voice and is by far and away the best that the Australian rocker has sounded in years. She is singing here sweetly, with more honesty and earnestness in her voice than maybe even ever before. 

On top of a smooth bed of drifting and lilting guitars, soft occasional backing vocals, gentle keys and a tight rhythm section, Barnett sounds angelic with Young’s words in her mouth. She smooths out the cracked and rougher edges and outer limits of Young’s own vocal and elevates the gorgeous melody of the song, which originally appeared on his 1978 album Comes a Time, on to further heights than even the original reaches.  

In her two seminal solo works, Sometimes I Sit and Think and Sometimes I Just Sit and Tell Me How You Really Feel, Barnett’s voice was full of sarcasm, scorn and sneering, and her sardonic slashes with both her vocals and guitar could cut you like a knife. Her next album, Things Take Time, Take Time, felt a little flatter in comparison to the two that went before it, as if Barnett had lost some of her bite and cutting edge.

In hindsight, though, the album was just displaying a more gentle and considered side to her singing and songwriting than we’d been allowed to see for a while, and showed a more mellow, reflective and sombre angle of the artist. It was perhaps the lofty expectation of the audience that let the album down, rather than the other way around, and on returning to the album now, you can hear that there are plenty of great songs on it, like ‘Rae Street’ (which recalls her best early work), ‘Here’s the Thing’, ‘Before You Gotta Go’ and ‘If I Don’t Hear From You Tonight’. Some albums hit you right away, like Tell Me How You Really Feel did, and in other cases, Things Take Time, Take Time.

It is that softer, mellow side that Barnett is returning to and perfecting here with ‘Lotta Love’, but while the songs on Things Take Time, Take Time are tinged with regret, remorse, sadness, pain and everything else that goes along with the breakup and dissolution of a marriage, ‘Lotta Love’ is carefree, light and serene. It’s that happy, hazy, hopeful quality that elevates her performance, and lets this recording drift into the upper echelons of her studio work.     

Barnett has previously sung the Neil Young song ‘Cinnamon Girl’ once in concert, whilst Young was one of the backing musicians on a song Barnett has covered much more frequently, Elyse Weinberg’s laconic, loose and often-overlooked 1969 masterpiece, ‘Houses’. 

Over the last few years, Barnett has shared credits with collaborations on projects with other artists, such as the lonesome and gorgeous cover of ‘Reason to Believe’ she worked on with Vagabon; has released her first soundtrack album, End of the Day, featuring her score from her documentary film Anonymous Club and toured all over the world, releasing her first two live albums in the process. If ‘Lotta Love’ can be taken as any indication of the kind of form she is in, then hopefully, she will have a new album of original material on the way soon to capture this special quality in her singing and playing.