Songfacts®:

• Living alone in a friend's empty Melbourne apartment during lockdown, Courtney Barnett watched the seasons change.
  
  The trees are turning green
  And this springtime lethargy
  Is kinda forcing you to see
  Flowers in the weeds
  
  As the reality of lockdown sank in, Barnett observed the world outside, guitar in hand. "Turning Green" reflects her experience of finding renewed hope. "I sat by that window, and there was a huge tree at the front, so I watched the seasons change," she told Rolling Stone. "I guess it's also metaphorical. There's something so joyous about that song. You feel that the characters have been through some sort of transformation, and they've come out on the other side."
• Barnett recorded "Turning Green" with producer Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint, Cate Le Bon, Kurt Vile) at Sydney's Golden Retriever Studios. She sings over a beat from a vintage drum machine she'd picked up from Wilco's The Loft studio. "Starting out, we did this whole version that sounded like a jangly guitar-pop song," Barnett told Apple Music. "But it didn't grab me, so we pulled it apart and Stella reprogrammed some drums. I put the guitar down because it just didn't seem like it fit, and we kind of flipped it on its head to see if it would inspire a better feeling. And it did, straight away - just singing along to it made the words come to life in a different way."
• "Turning Green" started as a guitar-heavy song until Barnett figured it sounded too much like her older material, so she stripped it back to a Germanic drum-machine pulse and Can-like bass guitar. "I was singing to a Wurlitzer when we tracked it," she told Uncut magazine, "But then I took that out as well. It sounds a little bit unsettling and doesn't sound as pretty as it could be, but I like it more like this. I got rid of the guitar until the silly guitar solo at the end."
• This is mixer David Wrench's favorite track on Things Take Time, Take Time. "We didn't want the mix to be too polished or too slick," Wrench said. "I love all those old '70s drum machines as well - so we wanted them to drive it, then have the real percussion and drums on there as well."