About this song
- Though this track appears on her 2015 album "Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit", Barnett started performing the song live at the start of 2014. (These lyrics have been taken from her acoustic performance of the song at WFUV Radio in March of that year.) She explained the song in her own words on the Song Exploder podcast on January 7, 2016. The song���s narrative structure – quite typical for the Barnett – takes a mundane subject and sings about it with mundane delivery. However, like much of Barnett’s work, the ostensibly mundane observations trace her gradual exploration of a central theme. The effect is a transformation of the banal into something more nebulous and beautiful – in this song bungalow for sale in Preston, Australia serves as a proverbial location for Courtney to explore certain experiences as a young adult. For example, the title phrase “Depreston” – a portmanteau – puns on the similarity between the word “depression” and the name of the Australian township. The contraction therefore compares the distress Barnett feels in her inability to afford a house in the inner suburbs of Melbourne (Collingwood, Northcote, Brunswick) with the the confronting images of mortality from a deceased estate. The permanence that homeownership offers is confronted with the ultimate destabilizing force, death. Moreover, Barnett seems to feel guilty for her preoccupations with death and mortality because her actual real life problems are limited to the quality of her coffee. Towards the end of the song, in a delightfully honest twist, she admits to returning to her own concerns (“And I wonder what she bought it for”) even after considering the dark mortality of the deceased homeowner. "Preston is in the suburbs of Melbourne—trees and bigger backyards. So I went and looked at this house; I was house-hunting, and in the car ride home, the whole idea kind of came to me in that moment. It wasn’t a song or an idea I’d been sitting on for a while...The term “Depreston”, I always thought that that was funny. That wasn’t my invention. A couple of my friends said it, because I was unemployed for a little while, and I had to go to Preston once a week to do job-seeking stuff. It was a pretty dark time; I didn’t have any money and I was pretty down on myself. And I had to get the train there, and my housemates were like, “you going to Depreston today?” So it always kind of stuck in my mind. It’s not a bad place at all, but it has that kind of memory for me of that time specifically...This song’s obviously about looking for a house, but that’s not really what it’s about. I think it’s about mortality. You build this life. You work to make money, to get a house, to raise your family. And then you die." - via Song Exploder . User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply. — lastfm
Chart history
Peak position and weeks on chart across Australian community countdowns.
| Chart | Peak | Most recent | Weeks on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Triple J Hottest 100 | #76 | 2015-01-26 (#76) | 1 |
