Watch the gut-punching video for Courtney Barnett's "Kim's Caravan"
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Courtney Barnett | Photo by Pooneh Ghana | courtesy of the artist

When Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett isn’t wowing us with her live performances or having her album debut at number 10 on the US Billboard album sales charts, she takes on other feats: releasing music videos that seamlessly complement her tracks. The visuals for “Kim’s Caravan” are no exception.

Barnett shared on her Facebook page that “Kim’s Caravan” is her favorite track from her latest album, Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit. 

It’s most certainly one of the more mellow tracks from the album, which Barnett said is broadly based on environmental concerns for the Great Barrier Reef. Barnett shared,

“Kim’s Caravan is an apocalyptic tale of our world painted black with oil and soot, painted red with blood and greed. The song was born when blessed with time to reflect, feeling the frustration and helplessness of the destruction of my environment and the litter of humans within it. It was partly inspired by watching Black Rain Falls, a documentary about Midnight Oil’s concerts out the front of the Exxon building in NYC in 1990.”

The track is the second-longest from the album, and the video is engaging over the span of almost seven minutes, where shots include Barnett standing on a desolate shoreline and lounging in a caravan.

The lyrics reveal helplessness and disappointment, with Barnett repeatedly crooning, “Take what you want from me,” so it’s fitting that by the end of the video, she’s completely submerged in the water and the caravan is up in flames.

Yeah, the video kicks you in the gut, but you can’t say she didn’t get her point across.

The video’s director, Bec Kingma, said,

“In conceptualizing a film clip for the track I was keen to explore the adult attempt to return to that place of childish innocence. If you have ever returned to a childhood holiday haunt in the offseason, it’s likely you’ve discovered the sad realisation that the place barely resembles your idyllic memories. As grown ups we all yearn for a time and place where our biggest concerns were the sand in our bathers and the mosquito’s eating us alive.”

Catch the track on Record Store Day as a special 12″ with John Cale’s “Close Watch” as the B-Side.

Barnett will play a sold-out show at Union Transfer on June 15; she’ll also be at this little thing called the XPoNential Music Festival in July; tickets and more information can be found here.

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