Courtney Barnett covers Chastity Belt on her new single.

Credit: Mia Mala McDonald
Suicide Squeeze celebrates Chastity Belt with the latest in its split 7″ single series–a pair of covers by Friends of the Band and tourmates Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile. For this release, Kurt and Courtney each recorded a song from the band’s third album, 2017’s I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone, in their signature styles.  
Today, you can listen to Side C for Courtney’s take on “Different Now,” where she pulls the song from its Pacific Northwest haze, leaves it out to dry in the middle of the desert, and wrings something almost joyous from the original’s ambiguity. 
Side K is Kurt’s version of “This Time of Night,” on which he lovingly recreates the anxious interplay of Julia Shapiro and Lydia Lund’s guitars, stretching each note of the song’s fraught vocal melody to its breaking point. “This Time of Night” / “Different Now” will be available October 27 on vinyl and digital platforms, with a one-time vinyl pressing limited to 1500 (250 pink, 250 black, 1000 blue) copies.
On the track Courtney Barnett offers: “This song is so special to me. I remember when the album came out and I listened to ‘different now’ over and over, I thought they were singing directly to me. It’s a perfect piece of songwriting, I showed it to Kurt and he would always sing it to me on tour. I love Chastity Belt. I’m pretty sure we met in 2014 at a record store in Seattle, then we toured together in 2015 and we’ve been friends ever since. 
I originally played it as a little folk acoustic version, then I asked Stella [Mozgawa] to program some drums and it turned into something a lot more fun. we tracked straight to the Tascam 388 and it was a real joy to make.”

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[Thanks to Andi at Terrorbird Media.]