One Thing At A Time

There is a particular kind of paralysis that comes not from having too little to do but from having too much to feel. Courtney Barnett has spent years writing songs from exactly that vantage point: the view from inside your own head, where small tasks loom enormous and the noise of modern life drowns out anything that might pass for clarity. "One Thing At A Time," the fifth track on her fourth album Creature of Habit and the final single released before the album's March 2026 arrival, plants a flag in that territory and then, over the course of four remarkable minutes, finds a way out.

The song works as both mirror and roadmap. It acknowledges the exhaustion of being perpetually overwhelmed, then responds not with grand resolution but with something quieter and more durable: the decision to simply begin.

A Five-Year Reckoning

To understand where this song comes from, you have to understand what preceded it. The years between Barnett's third album Things Take Time, Take Time (2021) and Creature of Habit were, by her own account, among the most turbulent of her life.

First came the slow unraveling of Milk! Records, the independent Melbourne label she had co-founded with Jen Cloher in 2012. For more than a decade, Milk! had been not just a business but a community anchor for Melbourne's indie music scene, a place built on the belief that art could sustain itself on its own terms. The label closed in 2023, citing persistent financial concerns compounded by the long shadow of Australia's COVID-19 restrictions.^[1] For Barnett, the closure was both a practical loss and something more personal: the end of a project that had defined a large part of her adult life.

Around the same time, she found herself living in Los Angeles, a relocation she described as largely accidental.^[2] She was processing not just the label's end but a deeper reckoning with doubts that had been building since the release of Tell Me How You Really Feel in 2018. "I was so fucking sad and depressed," she told The Line of Best Fit. "I didn't know if I wanted to do this anymore."^[2]

What brought her back was a combination of deliberate habit-building and honest self-examination. She started therapy, reduced her drinking, took up meditation and regular exercise, and began showing up at a kitchen table each morning in a rented place in the mountains outside the city, notebook and guitar in hand.^[3] "I was just writing pages and pages of whatever was in my head," she told Dork magazine. "My main goal was trying to tap into that subconscious part of the brain, the bit before thoughts get filtered."^[3]

Out of that process came Creature of Habit, and out of its first five tracks came its emotional center: "One Thing At A Time."

The Anatomy of Being Stuck

The title is doing significant work before the song even begins. "One thing at a time" is the phrase most people reach for in moments of overwhelm, the verbal equivalent of taking a breath. It is advice and admission at once: the world demands too much, and the only survivable response is to narrow your focus to the task immediately in front of you.

Barnett builds the song from that premise. The narrator is caught in a familiar loop of self-obstruction, acutely aware of her own habits but seemingly unable to stop enacting them. There is a self-deprecating honesty to the imagery, the kind of hard-won clarity that comes only after spending long enough in difficult self-reflection to be able to name your own patterns without flinching. She does not romanticize the stuckness. She describes it plainly, even drily, with the deadpan specificity that has always been her signature.

The Flood Magazine review described Barnett as "21st-century rock music's Buster Keaton" for exactly this quality: a stillness at the center of chaos, an apparent calm that does not deny the surrounding disorder but refuses to be undone by it.^[4] "One Thing At A Time" is that quality made into a song.

What makes the thematic execution remarkable is the formal architecture. The first half maintains a measured, wary momentum, the groove pleasantly ambling but with an undercurrent of tension. Barnett layers observations about inertia and self-defeat with off-hand precision that makes her best writing feel less like songwriting and more like transcription of thought. She is not performing her confusion. She is reporting it.

Then comes the turn. Around the midpoint, the emotional register shifts. The language becomes less self-critical and more forward-looking, arriving at a simple declaration: she is ready for a change. It does not arrive as a shout or a revelation. It lands the way genuine resolutions do, as something that has been building quietly and finally says itself aloud.

The Guitar Solo as Argument

Where most songs would end, Barnett begins the last and arguably most important section: an extended guitar solo that runs for more than two minutes, swelling and shimmering in a way that bypasses language entirely. MOJO described it as "an incandescent guitar solo as eloquent as Neil Young or J Mascis,"^[5] a comparison that captures both its emotional directness and its capacity to carry weight that words have already run out of carrying.

The solo is not decoration. It is the essay's final paragraph, written in a different language. After a song spent carefully narrating the experience of being stuck, Barnett allows herself to simply play her way through the other side. There is something viscerally satisfying about this choice, the moment when the analytical intellect steps aside and the hands take over.

The music video, directed by Lance Bangs, makes the subtext literal: Barnett calmly shreds while escalating chaos erupts around her, culminating in a sequence of her playing the solo against an LA sunset, styled in deliberate visual homage to the myth of the guitar hero. The imagery is playful but pointed. Amid life's disorder, she plays. That is the thing she knows how to do. That is the one thing, done at a time.

An Unexpected Collaboration

One detail of the recording drew considerable attention: Flea, the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, plays on this track.^[6] On paper the pairing seems unlikely. In practice, it makes complete sense.

Flea's bass provides the song's gravitational center, a muscular and grounded pulse that keeps the track from floating away into abstraction. His playing does not call attention to itself. It simply holds everything together, which is exactly what the song's central argument requires. A song about learning to focus needs a rhythm section with focus.

The collaboration also underscores how Barnett assembled Creature of Habit as a collective endeavor. The album features Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint on drums throughout, was produced alongside John Congleton and Marta Salogni, and was recorded partly at Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree, a desert studio with a legacy tied to artists including Queens of the Stone Age.^[7] The sessions had a quality of community and intentional presence that the album's themes reflect.

Structural Pivot

"One Thing At A Time" occupies a specific and important position on Creature of Habit. It is the fifth of ten tracks, sitting precisely at the album's midpoint. The first four songs orbit anxiety and stasis. The second five move toward action and renewal. This song is the seam between those two halves, the moment the album stops diagnosing the problem and begins gesturing toward a way through.^[5]

That structural logic mirrors the song's internal emotional arc. It is about the moment just before change: not the transformation itself, not the triumphant aftermath, but the instant of decision. That is a harder and more specific subject than it might appear. Songs about transformation tend to dwell on arrival rather than departure. Barnett is interested in the harder part, the one where you are still uncertain, still entangled in your habits, but beginning to understand that remaining entangled is also a choice.

The Honi Soit review noted that Creature of Habit is "less quick-witted" than early Barnett but "possesses an honesty that her early lyrics sometimes lacked."^[8] That trade feels intentional. Barnett has spent years celebrated for wry observations. On this album, she is interested in something harder to perform: sincerity. The deadpan is still present, but it is no longer a shield.

Universal in the Specific

The song is personal in origin but universal in resonance. The specific circumstances of Barnett's situation are not present in the lyrics. What remains is the emotional architecture: the recognition of self-sabotage, the weight of accumulated habits, the improbable but genuine moment of readiness for change.

For listeners who have never relocated between continents or built and lost a record label, the song works because its subject is more fundamental than any of those particulars. It is about getting out of your own way. It is about the frustration of knowing exactly what you should do and being unable to do it, and the slow, unglamorous work of learning how. It is, in other words, about being human in a world that makes being human unusually difficult.

The guitar solo speaks to this universality. It does not narrate or explain. It expresses. Whatever specific circumstances produced it, the emotion it carries has no biography.

A Practice, Not a Destination

Courtney Barnett has described the making of Creature of Habit as an embrace of the positive things amid the harder ones, a conscious choice toward gratitude after years of doubt.^[3] "I'm just trying to embrace all the positive things amongst the other shit," she told Dork. "I feel a lot of gratitude for what I have in my life."

By the time "One Thing At A Time" ends, Barnett has not resolved her contradictions or arrived at a destination. She has simply decided to begin moving. The song closes with a statement of readiness that feels earned because the preceding four minutes have made the cost of readiness clear.

That is the gift of the song, and the thing that makes it the emotional core of Creature of Habit. It does not offer transformation as a product. It offers it as a practice: something you return to, imperfectly, one thing at a time.