Courtney Barnett works her way through writer's block with a little help from a praying mantis

Writer's block is the fear of any creative person, and it struck rock singer and songwriter Courtney Barnett hard as she made her new album

NEW YORK -- Courtney Barnett is proud of the new music she's releasing to the world this spring. Getting there, however, wasn't easy. It was a journey through writer's block that she overcame in part by writing about it.

The 38-year-old Australian makes melodic rock with a slight slacker's vibe that is memorable because of her sharply observant writing — witness songs like the stream-of-consciousness ambulance visit of “Avant Gardener,” the poignant house-hunting trip of “Depreston” and the ode to keeping perspective during an argument in “Before You Gotta Go.”

Work that feels effortless rarely is, of course. Barnett experienced some of that during the three-year process of making her new album, “Creature of Habit.” It's being released Friday.

“I'd come away from a day of writing with one word that I had changed that I was happy with. People in my life who had witnessed it would say, ‘I don’t understand how you can write all day and come up with nothing,'” she said.

“I was like, ‘yeah, me too.’”