2007-10-15 - PopWire / PopMatters

Indie-pop band Of Montreal are touring as they work on their next CD.

15 October 2007

by Len Righi

Guitarist-vocalist Bryan Poole has worked closely with Of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes for more than a decade. But it wasn’t until last year that he felt he had a real clue why Barnes would often compose and complete songs and albums with almost no input from other members of the band.
“I found out sitting next to him on an airplane that he never had real friends until he was 10 or 11 years old, people he could watch cartoons with or roughhouse with,” says Poole just hours before Of Montreal is to play at Oberlin College in Ohio.
“He had to create his own playland. He had to make up characters to keep himself entertained. He was able to explore his mind. To me, that’s a really great insight, and he just offered it up.”
Poole, who also has been part of pop experimenters Elf Power and The Olivia Tremor Control, admits that Athens, Ga.-based Of Montreal has had its “ups and downs and periods of drifting,” partly because of the way Barnes works. “But Kevin is kind of like Prince,” says Poole with admiration. “He can play and do everything himself, and he never has writers block.”
So although Of Montreal is still officially touring behind its fascinating late January release, “Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?,” a dizzying, autobiographical account of a crumbling psyche that Barnes recorded virtually by himself while living in Norway and Athens, Ga., the band already is shifting gears.
Barnes, Poole, drummer-keyboardist-trumpeter James Huggins, keyboardist Dottie Alexander and bassist Davey Pierce are already playing several new tunes that will be part of the band’s next CD.

Poole offers a few song titles and brief commentary:

“Our Last Summer as Independents”: “Lyrically, it’s pretty straightforward. The music is influenced by the current Swedish pop bands, Belle & Sebastian and The Cure.”
“Georgie’s Confession”: “Georgie Fruit is one of Kevin’s creations, one of his alter-egos. He’s a 50-year-old black she-male who has been in and out of prison. He loves Prince and all that older soul stuff, like Sly and the Family Stone, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Funkadelic. He always tells it like it is.
“He turned up on a couple of `Hissing Fauna’ tracks, including `Faberge Falls for Shuggie’ (which is sung in an unnerving falsetto).”
“Softcore”: “That’s another Georgie Fruit song. (Sings) `We can do it softcore if you want/We can do it both ways’ ... It has a weird pop edge to it, but it’s definitely funky with a lot of cool harmonies that (sound like) Prince, Bowie, whatever.”
“Mingusing”: “It’s got some different sections. It’s not dour or nihilistic - or necessarily by Georgie Fruit.”

Poole says that because of the personal nature of the material on “Hissing,” Barnes has a hard time performing it live. Barnes’ inspiration for the record was a self-described “insane year” he spent with his pregnant wife in her native Norway to take advantage of the country’s health-care benefits, his subsequent culture shock and problems after the birth of their daughter that almost sundered the marriage.
Thus, “Hissing’s” exuberant-sounding, Human League-tinged “A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger” has been sidestepped on this tour, and the 12-minute space-pop epic “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal” has been played just once because it puts Poole and Barnes “in a negative head space.”
Poole notes he has lobbied for the song “No Conclusion,” but that it, too, has remained absent from the set list. “`No Conclusion’ is a 10-minute song on an EP (`Icons, Abstract Thee’) we put out as a companion record to `Hissing,’” explains Poole. “It’s awesome and it rocks. But when it came time to tour, Kevin said, `I can’t do it.’ He couldn’t sing the lyrics. They were too depressing, with no hope. I can understand, because the songs were a purging of all these things ... a terrible awfulness that exploded out of him.”
Poole, 37, was born and reared in Nashville, Tenn. “Chet Atkins babysat me one afternoon when my mom was cutting radio commercials and voiceovers,” he says. “I was like, 2 years old at the time.”
Poole remembers “always liking music,” although he preferred the late `70s and early `80s funk his sister listened to over the Frank Zappa and Chick Corea albums favored by his brother.
Eventually he discovered punk rock. “The Dead Kennedys were the first band I really liked, and toward the end of high school I wanted to start a band,” he says.
So he moved to Athens “and started playing and playing and playing.” After a time became part of Elephant 6, a musicians collective that would spawn such well-regarded indie bands as The Apples in Stereo, The Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel and, of course, Of Montreal.
“I met Kevin in 1995, or early 1996,” says Poole, who was then a member of Elf Power. “He had come to town from Florida a few times before to find like-minded musicians to play with.
“A friend told me about him and said, `You two would get along.’ That he was already signed to a record label (Bar None) piqued my interest. And after I heard his demo tape, Kevin and I started hanging out.”

2009-01-30 - ITN

2008-11-13 - Paste (part 4)

Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes: The complete Paste interview

Steve LaBate, photo by Jeremy Cowart By on November 13, 2008 4:10 PM |

Paste: On the song “St. Exquisite’s Confessions” on the new record, when you say you’re “tired of sucking the dick of this cruel, cruel city,” are you talking about any city in particular or is it more of an imagined, kind of made-up situation?
Barnes: That’s kind of about Oslo. I have this really special relationship with Oslo because my wife’s from Norway and my daughter was born in Norway, and I spent a lot of time there, and I set up a little studio there and started recording that song there. And you know, it’s weird when you’re in a foreign country. Even though most people speak English there, it’s their second language, so you automatically feel like an outsider. And I’ve had really weird anxiety attacks and bad mental episodes in Oslo, but I’ve also had like some really great experiences. It’s a beautiful city and Norway is a beautiful country, but there’s a darkness there. There’s a real heavy darkness. There’s a lot of super-depressed people. When you have really strong experiences, they stick with you—they’re imprinted on your mind all the time. You walk down a street where you’ve had a weird experience and it kind of happens again; it’s like it never stops happening. So I wrote that song, in a way it’s that feeling of—when you feel beaten by your environment, and you’re trying to push on. Curtis Mayfield

sings about that a lot, like when you’re beaten down by your surroundings and your experiences, but you gotta keep on pushing and staying positive. I actually changed the original lyric [to “St. Exquisite’s Confessions”]. It used to be, “I was so used to sucking dick while I was in prison.” I thought that was funny—I liked the idea of this character: It would be like, “I got so used to sucking dick while I was in prison, I’ve forgotten what it’s like to please a woman, or what it takes to please a woman.” It’s kind of a funny idea, like if you’ve been in prison and you have to adapt to that world—you know, just suck some dick or whatever. It could be metaphorically speaking or actually sucking dick. Ad now you’re in the straight world again, and you’re free and you’re like, “OK, what’s it like? What do you have to do again to please a woman?” But I changed that because it just seemed too jokey, and I think the idea of sucking the dick of a city is more universal.

Paste: You touched on this in a post on your website this past summer, but, in regard to the title Skeletal Lamping, what skeletons are you spotlighting and have you gotten any further with the question you posed about whether you want to shoot them or capture them?
Barnes: [laughs] I just want to let ’em go. I always want to change and evolve and reject the past and not really worry about it so much. I don’t feel the need to inspect my motivation for things I’ve done; I just want to continually move forward. But I think, when you make art, like a record or whatever, it’s sort of frozen in time, so it’s like turning the light on in a room and leaving it on forever. But you can also walk away from the room with the lights on—or keep paying the electric bill, but move into a new house.

Paste: How, if at all, did the negative reaction you got about the Outback Steakhouse commercial affect your approach to the new record?
Barnes: The backlash from the Outback commercial really motivated me to push myself, to make something bold and different so people couldn’t marginalize me. When someone calls you a “sell-out,” they’re basically saying you have no value; that you’ve given it up for your bank account—”well,” I thought, “I’m going to prove you wrong.” It filled me with a great energy, the desire to show these people, even though they’re sort of invisible. Like when anyone writes on a blog they’re called like AJJohnson622 or whatever [laughs], it’s like they don’t really exist. But I think what they’re saying, the thought they’re posing—if it matters to you like it matters to me, I wouldn’t want people to think I was a sell-out. But then, I have a complicated relationship with that concept, the idea of selling out. I [eventually] realized that selling out isn’t possible—I can’t sell out because I don’t make music to make money; I make music because I feel compelled to do so. I never sit down and say, “OK, I haven’t written a song in a while. I gotta do this.” It’s never like that. I want to do this. This is what gives my life meaning, what gives me a sense of fulfillment. I’m not really trying to sell records. I mean, I’d like to sell records because it makes life easier when you do sell them, but that’s not the fundamental motivation behind it. I also can understand how people get upset ’cause [when you sell a song to a commercial], in a way you’re sacrificing the song, potentially forever. You know, if it develops negative associations with people, or if it deprives people of having a romantic connection to the song, because you can’t really have a romantic connection to Outback Steakhouse. Or you can, maybe, but it probably wouldn’t be on the same level.

Paste: Like, “Man, that Bloomin’ Onion was so good!”
Barnes: [laughs] Yeah, I’ll never forget that time I spent… But I can really understand both sides of it. It still kind of hurts me though. No one had ever really said that to me before, no one had ever called me a “sell-out.” It would’ve been impossible, really, unless they would be like—I mean, some people are actually like, “You were on Conan O’Brien, you’re a sell-out.” Some people are actually like that; it goes that far. Like, “Oh, I can’t like this band anymore because they were played on the radio.” I mean, some people are like that. But the sad reality is that—if you’re an indie artist—you have to look to other avenues to earn a living. And either it’s going to be a day job that has nothing to do with music, or you can try to find some way to use your talents to earn a living. And that was actually the first time I had ever been offered anything like that, and I was so broke, and I was like, “I can’t say no to this.” I couldn’t project into the future and imagine what the ramifications were going to be, or how it would be different, and I think that if I could go back in time, I wouldn’t do it again, but only because of the scope of it—only because it’s been like their ad campaign for like three years and it’s not going away. Most bands, maybe they do a commercial and it’s there for like a month, two months, tops. And this thing has been like [McDonald’s’] “I’m lovin’ it.” And so, [if I’d known it would be like that], I definitely wouldn’t have done it. But I was so green at the time—I didn’t have representation and I had no previous experience to put it up against. So it’s the price of an education on some level. But it also really helped me financially. I was like, “Well, let’s put some more money into this next production. And now I sort of compare it to an actor or director that will make like a big-budget film in order to fund their pet project, their art project. Like I said, sometimes you have to suck a little dick to get by, just like everyone else has to suck dick, you know? Everyone has to have this other job or this other thing that allows them the freedom to do other things. But now, whenever I’m doing [anything commercial], I try not to incorporate

Of Montreal songs in that world. If I’m gonna try to do something for hire, I don’t want to use any Of Montreal songs. I want to just make something new.

Paste: Well, now you can be like, “I’m the guy who wrote the song for the Outback commercial.”
Barnes: It’s a funny thing, too, ’cause other people—people who aren’t at all connected to the indie world, like my dad’s friends, you know, people like that,—they’re so impressed. They’re like, “Oh my god, that’s so great, man! That’s so wonderful!” Like for them, it’s like validation. And if you’re applying for a loan, and someone’s like, “What do you do?” You say “musician.” “Oh really? Have you written any songs I might know?” And then you can say, “Well, have you heard the Outback Steakhouse commercial?” [laughs] And then they’re like, “Yeah, I’ve heard that! Aw, that’s fantastic! I can’t wait to tell my friends that I met the guy who wrote the song from the Outback Steakhouse commercial!”

Paste: Tell me about how Dylan Thomas influenced the lyrics on Skeletal Lamping.
Barnes: He’s one of those writers that he has such an interesting—almost like a self-produced lexicon. His style of phrasing things and putting words together is so original that it bends my mind. A lot of the song titles from Hissing Fauna and Skeletal Lamping were results of reading a Dylan Thomas poem and then trying to stay in that spirit, that frame of mind, and just write whatever comes to mind. Just sort of automatic-writing style, where you just turn off your mind and write whatever comes out. It’s great; it’s almost like a drug, like a really quick drug. You just like read one poem and try to absorb it and be influenced by it, and see what comes out of you after taking the drug. I mean, I don’t really do drugs like that, but if drugs did that for me, then I would because it’s always good to bend the mind, to gets it out of the grocery-list mentality. You know, you make lists—these are things I have to do today, and these are the people I’m gonna talk to and it’s always situation-appropriate. But if you bend your mind, you can get out of the trappings of that. It can help you think really creatively.

Paste: Have you ever done any kind of trance writing in the past? Written songs where you let go like that?
Barnes: Yeah, I do that a lot, at night usually, when everyone else is asleep and I can just—almost like a meditative state, where I try to shut everything off and just let the stream of consciousness flow, and I come up with some things that I find really interesting. So I do a lot of writing like that. And it’s also good [to try that] if you have music [already]. I think a lot of hip-hop artists do this, where they just sort of ad-lib and don’t really know what they’re gonna say next, and maybe do 10 tracks of ad-libbing, and then pull something interesting together. I definitely do that.

Paste: Where do you think the collagist aesthetic on the new album comes from?
Barnes: I guess it comes from the desire to create something unpredictable, and so it’s things that are seemingly out of place with each other, which helps create that unpredictability, ’cause if you’re listening to a song, a lot of times you can predict where the person’s going to go—you know how they’re gonna resolve the melody line and when the chorus is gonna come, and to me that’s not that exciting. I wanted to make something that was really unpredictable because that’s the kind of music I like listening to, and I want to make the kind of music I want to hear. So what I’m trying to do is make something that’s really unpredictable, but also has an immediacy to it—something that’s not completely out there and so impossible to follow that it hurts the brain. I don’t want to hurt the head too much; I just want to create something interesting that has unexpected twists. When I listen to the first two Os Mutantes records, I can listen to them all the time because they’re speaking a language I don’t understand, so it has a mystery. Musically, if you’re not following along, and you’re not looking at the CD player and seeing, “OK, this changed from track 4 to track 5,” you don’t even know when one song starts and the other ends.

Paste: I had difficult time, when we were listening to the album the first time, trying to figure out where the track breaks were. I took notes, but when I went back and looked at it again, they were all wrong.
Barnes: A lot of times, when it would’ve made sense for it to end in one place, we were like, “No, let’s just include that other thing and say it’s part of the same song.” I wish there could be hyphenated track listings or hyphenated track markers—like, “OK, this is track 6.2 or something.”

Paste: A lot the past records you’ve put out with of Montreal have been really fantastical, but I feel like this one has almost a space-age vibe to it.
Barnes: I really want to make now music. I want to make music that feels progressive, like it’s reaching toward the future rather than being this sort of anachronistic retro thing. In the early days, I wanted to make something retro. That was the kind of music I was into. But now I really want to push music into this new area it’s never been before, and I haven’t yet, but that’s definitely the motivation. So I think that might give [my recent music] a sense of being more progressive. At least, the intent was to make something progressive. I feel like music is going in a really great direction. There’s a lot of bands that are doing really interesting things—bands like Health and Gang Gang Dance and Deerhoof and Animal Collective. I feel like we’re in the middle of something amazing, that people are going look back on 20 years from now and be like, “Holy shit! All these classic records were being made during this period,” like when I think about The Pretty Things and Pink Floyd and The Beatles, and all these bands making amazing records in 1967. And I hope that this continues, where people are using the technology of the time, the instruments that are there that weren’t before to create something now, something that really feels like this time period. Even if it sounds dated 20 years from now, it doesn’t matter as long as it has a personality and an identity outside of anything before or after. I mean, everything is inevitably going to sound dated. It’s amazing to me how the ’80s—the sound is such a really strong… it has such a strong personality, and the fashion…

Paste: The gated drums, the synthesizers…
Barnes: Yeah, everything. And I think that’s so fantastic. Like, the ’90s, it had that [distinct identity] to some degree, but not on that level like the ’80s. And people joke around about the ’80s—it definitely seems silly, you know, and we kind of laugh about it, but that’s really all you can hope for: to create something that has such a strong identity that it’s impossible to take it out of context.

Paste: Earlier you were talking about the way the tracks on Skeletal Lamping jump into each other and the erratic way the album is sequenced. All that chaos, when I’m listening to it, snaps me in and out of these trance states. What role do you think chaos plays in your music?
Barnes: Well, this is the first record where I really tried to incorporate tension, and tried to build tension in the songs and not just make it as melodic as possible. I tried to incorporate elements of dissonance. I think it’s really exciting to work in that area because that’s kind of a heavier, deeper form of composing, because you’re touching on all these different emotions. In the past, I’ve done a lot of electro-disco pop, which is basically like one emotion, maybe happy, with slightly intellectual lyrics. But this album, musically, I wanted it to have more depth and to create something that’s more mesmeric at times, even anxiety-producing at times, and in a way reflect my state of mind or the human condition ’cause you’re never just happy and you’re never just sad, there’s always varying levels of everything from moment to moment.

Paste: Why did you choose “Id Engager” as Skeletal Lamping’s first single?
Barnes: We felt like it was dancey and fun, but it was hard to pick one song.

Paste: Are you gonna put out a few singles?
Barnes: Yeah. We’ll definitely do a couple, but “Id Engager” seemed like a safe choice because it’s not such a dramatic departure from Hissing Fauna but it’s also kind of representative of the new record because it has so many different sections and it’s sort of out there, sort of like the freak-disco song on the record. I really pushed for “For Our Elegant Caste” because I thought that was a bit bolder of a statement. But, you know, people on the business side were like, “Well, maybe that might be a bit too much for the first single.” [The song’s chorus feature the lyric: “We can do it softcore if you like, but you should know I take it both ways.”] I feel like there’s no real way to ease people into this album—either they’re going to open-minded and cool with it or they’re not. So I felt like there was no real reason to try to dumb it down or pick the most accessible track. But at the same time, I like “Id Engager.” It’s not a totally simplistic love song. There is depth to it. And I think it’s an interesting song because the lyrics in the verse are in opposition to the lyrics in the chorus. The lyrics in the verse condemn this hedonistic, superficial relationship, and warn people against it. But in the chorus, there’s this unapologetic lyric about, “I just want to play with you, I don’t care about having a deep relationship. I just want to have a superficial, noncommittal experience.” It’s like the two voices are sort of fighting each other.

Paste: Sounds like something that goes on in people’s minds all the time.
Barnes: Yeah.

2008-10-10 - Emusic

eMusic Q&A: Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes
by Michaelangelo Matos
Ten years ago, Kevin Barnes would have seemed like the least-likely-to-succeed satellite of the Athens, Georgia-based Elephant 6 troupe, a loose collective of bands and artists that became a mini-phenomenon among indie-rock fans in the mid-to-late-'90s. Barnes' group, Of Montreal, were maybe the most whimsical of the E6'ers; their early records, even ones as good as 1999's The Gay Parade, were more notable for what they weren't (meaning, actually from the '60s) as for what they were (modern recordings that pined for the '60s).

Then, shortly after 2002's Aldhils Arboretum, Of Montreal fell apart. Barnes, newly married, moved out of the house shared by most of the band, and the group's power dynamic shifted. Later that same year, Barnes recorded Satanic Panic in the Attic alone, and regrouped the band. By 2005, Barnes had re-conceived Of Montreal as something just as knotty and psychedelic as before, but with wider spaces and deeper grooves. That approach has resulted in three albums that tower over the band's earlier work: 2005's The Sunlandic Twins, featuring the irresistible disco workout "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games" ("Let's pretend we don't exist/Let's pretend we're in Antarctica," goes the chorus); 2007's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, No. 8 in the eMusic user poll of 2007's Top 10 albums; and now the new Skeletal Lamping.

Skeletal Lamping is denser than the two albums preceding it, thanks to tunes and arrangements that jump all over the place stylistically a la the Fiery Furnaces, and looser, thanks to lyrics that both acknowledge and make fun of therapy-speak, as on "Id Engager": "Ladies, I'm screaming out to you from the depths of this phallocentric tyranny/My self-conceptions awaiting your invasion clumsy penetration punishment/When the hope of another wet nightmare is all we have to live for." Say that ten times fast.

eMusic spoke with Barnes over the phone from his home in Athens.

What would you say the primary difference is between Skeletal Lamping and Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? in terms of the way you made them? Did you work differently?
Not really. I guess maybe the way I've arranged the songs is a little different. I experimented with that on Hissing Fauna, and it's something I'd done more on older albums like [2001's] Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies and [1999's] The Gay Parade. But basically [on Skeletal Lamping] I'm creating fragmented songs out of separate sections that I just piece together. Some feel more random than others. Basically, I recorded everything myself in a home studio for both [Skeletal and Hissing], so the similarities are there in that aspect.

Was that something you went in knowing you wanted to do in advance?
I think I was naturally compelled to do that now — it was a more interesting way to write. I just wanted to have fun. Sometimes when you're trying to craft the perfect pop song or whatever, it can be a bit tedious: "I've got the music for the verse and chorus, and now I have to come up with the music for the second verse." I find it more interesting to just work with an idea until it becomes boring and then move onto something else, not force [myself] to make it kind of linear. It definitely works better with my attention span to constantly change things and not try to make things have a continuity, to just evolve in an abstract way.

When you put the album together, was everything in pieces waiting to be put in order, or did you have an idea for a sequence laid out beforehand?
I didn't really think about making a record very much, more so just thinking about making a one-and-a-half-minute piece of music. And then if I made another piece of music, I'd say, "Is it interesting together?" If not, I'd make another piece of music and see if it worked. I had about two hours' worth of these fragments — I didn't think about them as fragments, just as little pieces. It was fun to see what worked, to see what was interesting. I couldn't really lose; they were all different from each other. I wasn't trying to create something fragmented, just [something] that flowed and was consistently interesting.

Is there an element to Of Montreal, either musically or in concert, that you think is obvious but no one else seems to have caught onto?
I can't say that's ever really crossed my mind [laughs]. We don't have an agenda; we're just trying to do something that's artistically satisfying. We don't really think whether people like or want it; we do what we feel compelled to do. We're not checking bloggers or whatever.

On "An Eluardian Instance," you sing about "Koster Island" and then about climbing "upon the rocky shore and freak[ing] out to the Mountain Goats." Are you referring to Julian Koster and John Darnielle here?
I'm friends with them, but no: Koster Island is a place in Sweden, and it was the last place my wife and I were before out daughter was born.

How old is your daughter?
She's three.

How does she respond to your music? Is she an Of Montreal fan?
She likes it. I don't really listen to my music, so I don't really play it for her that often. But she does seem to respond to it. It's kind of funny, she's singing, "We can do softcore if you want" [from Skeletal Lamping's "For Our Elegant Caste"] — we don't try to hide any of that stuff from her. I couldn't care less about whether she says the word "fuck." It's kind of a Lenny Bruce thing [laughs]. We're not militant about it — she can say what she wants to say.

Athens is a college town, and you've written about academia a little — particularly on the song "Art Snob Solutions." Let's say Of Montreal dries up tomorrow and you went back to school. What would you major in?

I've never really responded to the world of academia for some reason. I sort of had this romantic view of intellectualism, and I've definitely tried on my own to broaden my mind and expose myself to different philosophies and things like that. I don't think I would ever go back to school. I dropped out of community college after three days; I never went beyond high school.

Who controls the tour-bus iPod?
[Laughs] We don't really have one. There is a communal area where people hang out afterwards, but we're into the same things. There are maybe some guilty pleasures that some of us might have.

What do you typically listen to while on tour?
Prince, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones — music that's more high energy, playful, and frisky. A lot of Sly & the Family Stone — mostly stuff from the '70s. We're all into Fela Kuti and Afrobeat and things like that — we'll put that stuff on, and the tried and true stuff we've grown up listening to.

Did any particular incident or situation inspire "Id Engager"? It's obviously an idea-driven lyric but it sounds like it could have come from a real-life situation.
With every song I've ever written, it's a mystery to me as well. Once it's written, in that spirit, I sort of lose the thread of what the inspiration was. I'm sure it had its root in something personal, but now I can't even recall it. Something to do with this concept of players — it's a bit weird, because the chorus is about, "I just wanna play with you, I just wanna have fun," and the verses are sort of condemning that. But it is what it is. It's hard for me: I'm not thinking about motivation or understanding why. I don't second-guess it; I just let it happen in an organic way. I'm moving on; I'm thinking about what I want to do next. I feel divorced from the songs in that way.

Maybe that's one reason why the lyrics on Skeletal Lamping generally feel even less inhibited than those of earlier Of Montreal albums. Some of them seem almost therapeutic.
I really felt this freedom to take chances and go somewhere that would have been more insecure in the past, and let it all out there. Part of that is the soul influence, the freedom that people Sly and Prince had. People that are basically — I don't even know if this is a term, but "freak-funk." It's intellectual but it hits you on a visceral level as well. One of my favorite contemporary artists is Erykah Badu: she embodies that spirit for me: soulful and playful and organic, but she can also turn and go really serious and introspective.