On a particularly difficult writing morning, Courtney Barnett’s routine was interrupted by a praying mantis hanging upside down from her door frame. A quick internet search informed her that the sighting could symbolize she was on the right path. “There’s a million Google results of random stuff. You take what you want,” Barnett, 38, says with a laugh. “It felt like a sign from the universe.”
That welcome disruption became “this weird little symbol for the album” — her fourth full-length, Creature of Habit, is out March 27 — as well as inspiration for the cover art, which is fittingly a black-and-white photo of a praying mantis. “I was just exploring,” the Australian singer-songwriter-guitarist says, “trying to find a way to change some of my habits or patterns without being totally negative and self-critical. Noticing that I have this tendency, wouldn’t it be nice to gently try it another way?”
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Mnemonic Devices
Barnett admits she has a bad memory and found herself incorporating poems, riddles and songs in her daily life to strengthen her recall, much like classrooms teaching kids the colors of the rainbow with the acronym ROYGBIV. “It sounds like such a nerdy thing,” Barnett says. “There’s a line [on the track ‘Mantis’] that says, ‘Organizing all my thoughts, making them rhyme,’ that was loosely based on me writing all these little riddles and acrostic poems and using them as mnemonic devices.”
Oliver Sacks
While recording Creature of Habit, Barnett began reading works by British neurologist Oliver Sacks, who has written about various disorders including visual agnosia, a condition where people are unable to recognize familiar objects or people. “I was getting obsessed with that,” Barnett says. “I have trouble recognizing people’s faces and I realized over the years that it causes me social anxiety.” To learn more, Barnett pored over Sacks’ titles including his 1985 book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and his more recent 2010 release, The Mind’s Eye.
Dream Journaling
Barnett returned to an old routine of writing down her dreams while making Creature of Habit. “I tried to be really disciplined about it,” she says. “It is similar to my songwriting … I tap into the subconscious part of my brain to see what’s happening there.” At the same time, her girlfriend was reading Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind by Michelle Carr and shared her favorite chapters. “The author is talking about how anxiety dreams are sometimes a practice run for reality,” Barnett adds. “It’s like the brain trying to prepare us.”
This story appears in the March 7, 2026, issue of Billboard.
