“Avant Gardener” by Courtney Barnett

"Avant Gardener" was Courtney Barnett's debut single, pulled from her 2013 EP How to Carve a Carrot into a Rose and folded that same year into the compilation The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas. The Australian songwriter wrote it alone, Simon Cotter recorded it and Dan Luscombe mixed it, and it lopes along with a loose, jangling drawl that has had people hearing Bob Dylan and the Byrds in it.

The story is gloriously mundane until it isn't: a woman finally drags herself outdoors to pull some weeds, chats with the neighbour, and ends up in the grip of a panic attack brought on by anaphylaxis. Barnett tells it deadpan. The video swaps the garden for a tennis court, where a bored umpire buried in a book about Butch Cassidy blows a close line call and the match turns into a punch-up.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.