Great Advice

There is a particular variety of dismissal that arrives wearing the costume of helpfulness. It comes from managers, critics, relatives, and strangers online: the gentle note about how you might want to adjust your approach, the quiet suggestion that your presentation could use some work, the patient observation that things would go more smoothly if only you would. “Great Advice,” the penultimate track on Courtney Barnett’s fourth studio album Creature of Habit, is a song that has heard all of this, filed it under the appropriate heading, and responded with elaborate, entirely insincere gratitude.

Background: A Life Being Remade

By March 2026, when Creature of Habit was released, Barnett was navigating one of the most disruptive periods in her adult life. In 2023, she closed Milk! Records, the independent Melbourne label she co-founded with musician Jen Cloher in 2012 and had run for over a decade, citing financial pressures that had become unsustainable.^[1] The closure ended not just a business but a community: more than sixty releases, a decade of infrastructure, a way of being in the music world that had shaped her identity for years.^[2]

She relocated from Melbourne to Los Angeles, began therapy, took up surfing and the gym, cut back on drinking, and started making pottery.^[3] These are the behavioral specifics behind the album’s more abstract metaphor of habit and change. Creature of Habit is partly a record about the discovery that reinvention is not a feeling but an accumulation of small decisions made daily, none of them dramatic in isolation.

The writing process was deliberately structured. Barnett describes working each morning at a kitchen table, guitar in hand, filling notebooks before editing began.^[4] The songs that emerged trace an arc the album title signals from the start: a creature trying to get out from under her own patterns, and meeting resistance both inward and outward along the way.

Advice as Injury

Where much of Creature of Habit looks inward, examining Barnett’s own fears and habits with careful, sometimes uncomfortable honesty, “Great Advice” turns to face outward. It has an audience, and it has something to say to them.

The song offers elaborate, clearly insincere thanks to an unnamed recipient, comparing the value of their opinion to a sharp object driven deliberately into the eye. The image is the heart of the track.^[5] It does not simply say the advice was unwelcome. It equates unsolicited direction with physical harm, the kind of pain no one would voluntarily invite. The simile is precise in a way that feels clinically accurate: bad advice is not neutral. It costs something to receive it and then have to resist it.

Among the specific refusals the narrator delivers is a refusal to comply with conventional appearance expectations, including how one’s hair should be styled. This is not incidental.^[6] For women in public-facing creative professions, commentary about presentation arrives with professional frequency and is rarely identified as the claim of authority that it is. It comes wrapped in care and good intentions. “Great Advice” strips off the wrapping.

The tone is not rage, and this matters. The song is sardonic, measured, and in places genuinely funny. The narrator’s equanimity in the face of the advice is more destabilizing than anger would be. Anger can be managed, contextualized, dismissed as emotional. Cheerful indifference is harder to negotiate with.^[5] When the song’s central refrain asserts satisfaction with exactly how things are, it does so with the unassailable calm of someone who does not need agreement from anyone.

The arrangement suits the argument. The track is percussion-heavy and propulsive, its choppy riffs and cowbell-and-cymbal interplay carrying echoes of the Rolling Stones at their most physical.^[7] Guitar World noted the guitar playing in particular, observing tonal echoes of idiosyncratic players like Kurt Vile, Carlos Alomar, and Marc Ribot.^[8] The music does not attempt elegance. It does not smooth its edges. This is a deliberate choice that mirrors the song’s argument: the right to be exactly what you are, unadjusted.

Where the Album Places This Song

Positioning “Great Advice” ninth of ten tracks is not incidental. Creature of Habit is a record with a traceable arc. It begins in stasis and anxiety, with an opening track that captures the paralysis of knowing you need to change but being unable to move.^[4] It moves through self-examination and searching before turning, in its final third, toward something approaching resolution.

By the time “Great Advice” arrives, the narrator has done substantial internal work. The earlier tracks are honest about the ways habits calcify and the effort required to break them. This context matters for understanding what “Great Advice” is and is not. It is not the refusal of someone who hasn’t examined herself. It is the refusal of someone who has done the examining and now knows, with some precision, what kind of external input is worth taking in.^[9]

The album’s closer, “Another Beautiful Day,” follows with imagery of rebirth and a new morning beginning.^[1] “Great Advice” functions as the clearing before that final turn: an unburdening that makes space for the more open-hearted statement to come. The sequence reads as purposeful. You set down what doesn’t belong to you before you begin again.

The Politics of Being Told What to Be

Barnett has never matched the template of what a successful female artist is assumed to look or sound like, and the mismatch has been visible throughout her career. From her earliest appearances in Melbourne’s indie scene through the Grammy nominations and international attention that followed Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (2015), she has operated in the specific way she operates: guitar-forward, conversational, and relatively unbothered about meeting external expectations of polish or presentation.^[3]

“Great Advice” connects to that history without being weighed down by it. It does not read as a statement about the music industry or as feminist reclamation or anything so heavy. It reads as a song written by someone with a great deal of experience being on the receiving end of other people’s certainty about what she should be doing differently.^[10] The experience is described without self-pity and without the performance of toughness. It is delivered with the ease of someone who stopped taking the advice seriously some time ago.

What Barnett models in the song is worth noting. She does not argue. She does not explain herself. She thanks the advisor and proceeds. The more common artistic response to being managed or corrected is to issue a counter-argument, to demonstrate that the advisor was wrong. Barnett simply establishes that she was right all along and moves on.^[6] This is a specific kind of response, and a relatively rare one. It refuses the premise that the advice required a response at all.

Other Ways of Hearing It

The most obvious reading positions the unsolicited opinion-giver as a social actor: a friend, family member, or colleague who has overstepped. But the song’s address is sufficiently abstract to accommodate other targets. Industry pressures, management notes, the accumulated suggestions of anyone with commercial interest in how an artist presents herself: all of these fit comfortably in the frame the song constructs.^[11]

There is also the question of whether the “advice” in question is internal. The album’s period of personal reckoning included therapy, journaling, and a deliberate excavation of old patterns. One of the harder tasks of that kind of self-examination is distinguishing between useful self-awareness and the exhausting project of measuring yourself by criteria you absorbed from somewhere else and never consciously accepted.^[7] The internalized critic often sounds a great deal like everyone who ever told you what to do. In this reading, “Great Advice” is not about dismissing an external voice but about finally silencing an internal one.^[9]

Small Song, Complete Statement

“Great Advice” runs just over two and a half minutes. It says what it has to say. It does not linger.

This economy is itself an argument. Creature of Habit is, in places, an album of patience and extended reflection, full of moments where Barnett sits with difficulty rather than rushing past it. “Great Advice” is different. It has the quality of a decision already made, arriving as a clean statement rather than a process of reasoning. There is nothing to work through here. The work is done. The advice has been received, evaluated, and found wanting.

The sharp simile at the song’s center will stay with listeners. So will the quality of the delivery: the particular ease of someone who has fully considered a perspective and chosen not to be moved by it. The refrain of satisfaction with exactly how things already are is not defiance in the heated sense. It is something quieter: the simple, settled confidence of someone who has stopped outsourcing their self-assessment.

In the broader context of Creature of Habit, the song is the record’s most compressed argument. The album, at its heart, is about the project of becoming more genuinely yourself: not a new self, not an improved self, but the version of yourself that has shed what never belonged. “Great Advice” is the moment where Barnett’s narrator turns to anyone who was hoping to help with that project from the outside and politely, firmly, definitively declines the offer.