For the last few years, singer and songwriter Courtney Barnett has nursed a persistent, low grade obsession with the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. In March of 2024, while Barnett and her band were holed up in the studio in Joshua Tree, recording what would become her fourth album, “Creature of Habit,” out this spring, the singer would habitually open “A Painter’s Kitchen: Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe” when it was her turn to cook.

“I love it,” Barnett said of O’Keeffe’s cult cookbook. “It’s so beautiful and simple.”

Simplicity is particularly appealing when you’re feeling lost. And by the time Barnett gathered in the desert with her friends and fellow musicians last fall, she’d been through a number of years of chronic uncertainty. Barnett decided to stare it down, show up in the studio with much less of a plan than she’s used to and kind of let it rip.

The result is an album that continues to engage with the central question Barnett has been consumed by since she started writing songs: how to get out of your own way so you can truly feel your life.