Courtney Barnett jams with Kurt Vile to close out XPNFest

Courtney Barnett shreds. The Australian-born singer, guitarist, and overall rockstar hit the River Stage to close out WXPN’s XPoNential Music Festival on Sunday.

With the sun setting behind her over the Philadelphia skyline, the trio had a larger sound than what should be possible with only three people. Barnett was joined by longtime bandmate Bones Sloane on bass and recent collaborator Stella Mozgawa on drums, and between the three of them, the stage radiated with an insane amount of musical talent and camaraderie. It was so chill that it almost felt like we were intruding on a garage jam session. There were moments when Barnett seemed to remember there were hundreds of people in front of her and she played to the crowd, but mostly it seemed like she casually shreds all the time, and this is just another day. Which, I guess for someone like her, is true.

Barnett played two of her rockier songs – “Pedestrian at Best” and “Mother” – one leading into the next. While her vocal can be more chill on record, in these songs especially she has a live grittiness that reminds us how talented of a vocalist she is, and how impressive it is to belt her lyrically-packed songs while also playing her riff-heavy guitar parts. In both these tracks, she touches on gender roles and the pressure to perform them.

The devastating “Depreston” hit us about halfway through the set. In this song, Barnett is looking to move into a place she can afford to live, and she thinks about the possibility of moving to a suburb in Australia called Preston. The lyrics read as if she’s regurgitating the real estate agent’s jargon, “It’s got a lovely garden / And 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’s estate / Aren’t the pressed metal ceilings great?” On the surface they may seem kind of boring, but when you really listen you hear the story of a whole life lived in this house before Courtney entered it. If you think about it harder, you also hear a story about classism. Needing to move further away from where you want to be in order to save some money, and needing a ton of that money if you even want to think about starting something new. This song builds on itself like how in the lyrics, she builds her life on top of the former homeowner.

This show, for area fans, was a long-awaited one. Barnett’s last visit to Philly, in 2023, was an intimate show where she played the instrumental album End of the Day at the sanctuary of the First Unitarian Church. Her previous two appearances would have happened in 2022, but one was cancelled due to extreme weather (a Mann Center show that July with Lucy Dacus and Samia), and the other was cancelled due to COVID in the touring party (a February Met show with Julia Jacklin). Prior to that, we last saw Barnett in person playing solo at The Queen in Wilmington in January of 2020, just before the pandemic. Five years in the making, this XPoNential set made up for lost time, and Barnett even had a surprise in store as the night wound down.

For the song “Over Everything,” she brought out collaborator and Philly native Kurt Vile. Together the two put out an album called Lotta Sea Lice back in 2017. Almost 10 years later, it was amazing to see her bring out a local legend for her show near his hometown. She called him onstage as the crowd let out a loud cheer, and the two traded off on singing and solos alike, Vile taking a verse and Barnett taking the next, their guitar leads going back and forth, and then joining together for a big finish. And for an even bigger finish, Barnett and the band went out on a careening version of early favorite “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party.”