The drive from Brooklyn to Clifton Park takes about three and a half hours, and the atmosphere in the van is jovial. “Are there any foods you won’t eat?” Barnett asks almost immediately. (“Eggplant,” she says, when I return the question.) We discuss Scientology (Luscombe recounts, over guffaws, taking the Church’s infamous stress test), the curiousness of Lou Reed’s “Women” (“A woman's love can lift you up, and women can inspire/ I feel like buying flowers and hiring a celestial choir!”), what a marmot is and does (lives in a burrow, eats grasses and roots, whistles at other marmots), “Dark Side”-flavor Skittles, the present headline of The New York Post (“HO-LEX: ‘Masseuse’ Snatches Client’s $25G Watch, Hides It In Her Privates”), road kill, and how when Barnett tells interviewers she’s been deeply inspired by Paul Kelly, a singer and guitarist from Adelaide, they frequently mishear it as R. Kelly.

Luscombe manages the stereo, for the most part—he’s riding shotgun—and when Elvis’s “Blue Moon” comes up on his iPod (the version from 1976’s The Sun Sessions, the one that features Presley’s ghostly, transparent falsetto, careening over a few barely-plucked guitar chords) Barnett gets especially quiet. “He makes me cry when he sings like that,” she finally says. “Singing is so vulnerable. Playing any kind of instrument is an expression of self, but the voice is a super different one. If it’s not, then you’re doing it wrong.”

Courtney Barnett: "Bein' Around" (Lemonheads cover) (via SoundCloud)

Barnett has been making music since she was small; an older brother played her Jeff Buckley records, Guns N’ Roses. “When I was about 10, I started playing guitar, and I started writing shitty songs soon thereafter,” she recalls. “When I was 18, I played my first original solo shows, open mic nights: super, super awkward.” I ask her what the origin of the pivot was—what made her decide to give music a shot, publicly. “It was just like, ‘Why the fuck not? What have you got to lose?’” she says. “You either do it and totally fail or don’t do it and continue to dwell on it.”

She’s right—you have to, as James Baldwin once said, “go the way your blood beats.” But that doesn’t mean the transition to public commodity is always smooth. The refrain of the slumping “Kim’s Caravan” (“Don’t ask me what I really mean/ I am just a reflection/ Of what you really wanna see / So take what you want from me”) seems like a reaction to what happens to an artist when people start interpreting the work in ways that make sense to them, but might not be in sync with the creator’s intent. Of course, that’s the nature of the transaction; that’s how performance functions. It’s a gassy idea, maybe—that music really lives outside of its maker—but that divestment is paramount and necessary, and I am often wary of artists who can’t understand what their own work means once it’s out in the world, the ones who punt on the “What’s this song about?” question, as if answering it might somehow tarnish the listener’s experience—as if they are not just a listener themselves now.

Barnett doesn’t do that, and I believe her when she says, with characteristic good-naturedness, that she also welcomes divergent readings of her stuff. Still, one of her most extraordinary talents as a writer is her specificity. She describes things that you maybe weren’t entirely sure other people feel or see, but you sort of suspected they might, and having it affirmed feels good—whole-making. That particular bit in “Kim’s Caravan” is anomalous in its vagueness; because so little is opaque in Barnett’s songs, I presume listeners are only recognizing things in her words, not inventing them.

“Artists are supposed to be a reflection of the audience, so when people interpret my songs in different ways, that’s how it’s supposed to work,” she says. “That line in ‘Kim’s Caravan’ covers everything.”

And it does—it’s all in there. We exist as we are beholden, an amalgamation of other people’s presumptions and hopes and anxieties and fears and ambitions. Barnett, at least, has made her peace with it.