Courtney Barnett / Write a List of Things to Look Forward To - Single / 2021
Write a List of Things to Look Forward To
weary, tender, quietly despairing
A short, spare meditation on persisting through existential dread, built around a single tether to hope: correspondence with someone absent. Barnett sets grand cyclical images of birth and death against a mundane domestic anchor, suggesting that intimacy, not meaning, is what keeps people moving forward.
climate anxiety interpersonal connection as survival futility and persistence self-reproach cyclical time
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addressing an absent 'you', likely a loved one or correspondent; the voice is candid and unguarded, more confessional than performative, with a self-aware weariness about collective human failure.
What happens
The song opens with a philosophical shrug about continued striving, paired with anticipation for a letter. A second verse widens the lens to birth and death occurring simultaneously, reinforcing the sense of indifferent continuity, while the letter-longing repeats as a stabilizing refrain. The bridge shifts to a collective 'we', watching the world deteriorate and offering hollow self-justifications. The song closes not with resolution but with a physical image of the narrator walking with her head down, pushing something away, suggesting avoidance or quiet endurance rather than catharsis.
How it's built
The song uses a loose verse-refrain pattern without a traditional chorus hook. Two short verses share an identical refrain, creating a ritualistic sameness that mirrors the lyric's theme of repetition. The bridge breaks from this by moving into first-person plural and addressing collective guilt, then the song dissolves into a chant-like outro built on present-participle repetition, replacing narrative with gesture.
Section by section
First verse and refrain
“Nobody knows why we keep tryin'”
The opening line frames persistence as unexplainable rather than heroic, setting a tone of resigned continuation. The refrain about anticipating a letter immediately scales the cosmic question down to something intimate, implying that personal connection substitutes for larger meaning.
Second verse
“A baby is born as a man lay dying”
This image universalizes the cycle of life and death into simultaneity, stripping events of individual weight. Repeating the refrain afterward reinforces that amid indifferent cosmic churn, the narrator's hope remains fixed on something small and human.
Bridge
The pronoun shifts from 'I' to 'we,' implicating a broader collective in environmental and moral failure. The self-righteous scream and the hollow justification of having tried one's best read as critique of performative concern that changes nothing, exposing the gap between intention and consequence.
Outro
The song ends without resolution, trading lyrical statement for repeated physical gestures of withdrawal. The head-down walking and the act of pushing something away suggest avoidance, exhaustion, or quiet self-protection rather than any triumphant endurance, leaving the listener in unresolved tension.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated phrase 'and so on it goes' after each verse enacts the cyclical, indifferent continuation the lyric describes, making form mirror content.
- juxtaposition
- Pairing a birth with a death in adjacent lines collapses opposites into simultaneity, suggesting the world's processes are indifferent to individual significance.
- present participle repetition
- The closing lines stack ongoing verb forms like walking and pushing, replacing discrete action with continuous, unresolved motion that mimics emotional stasis.
- understatement
- Against apocalyptic imagery of the world burning, the narrator's stated hope is something as small as a letter, deliberately deflating the scale of the crisis into something personal and manageable.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a meditation on living through climate-era despair, where grand existential and ecological anxieties are held at bay by small, specific acts of intimacy—waiting for a letter becomes a stand-in for hope itself. An alternative reading focuses less on climate and more on personal grief or distance, with the burning world functioning as metaphor for a relationship or internal state rather than literal environmental collapse; the ambiguity is likely intentional, letting both readings coexist.
Context
Released as a standalone single in 2021, outside a full album cycle, which may explain its compressed, fragment-like structure compared to Barnett's usually more narrative, detail-heavy songwriting. I don't have confirmed biographical details about the song's specific origin or writing circumstances, so this contextual reading is inferential rather than sourced.
Listen for
- the flat, repeated cadence of the 'and so on it goes' refrain and how it resists musical build
- the contrast between the sparse instrumentation and the apocalyptic imagery in the bridge
- the shift from singular to plural pronouns marking a move from personal to collective reflection
- the way the outro trades melody and image for repetitive, almost mantra-like phrasing
- Barnett's deadpan vocal delivery, which keeps even the bridge's indictment from sounding dramatic
About Courtney Barnett
Courtney Melba Barnett is an Australian singer, songwriter, and musician. Known for her deadpan singing style and witty, rambling lyrics, she attracted attention with the release of her debut EP I've Got a Friend Called Emily Ferris in 2012.
b. 1987 / Australia
Full biography and catalogue