2001-06-06 - Thriller Mag (interview from 2008)

James Husband – Of Montreal

By Thriller Monday June 6, 2011

It is not always easy to be a sideman in a band, but it is especially hard if . . .your front man suddenly takes control of the music, leaving no room for your input. And, it is even harder when you are a songwriter who can play a handful of instruments ranging from the guitar, to piano, to trumpet. James Huggins, sometimes known by his stage name, James Husband, was in the strange position of dealing with all of these things at once when Kevin Barnes took control of basically every part of his band, Of Montreal. After roughly a decade of striving and five albums (plus four compilations) that ranged from lo-fi brilliance (their debut, Cherry Peel), to occasionally unbearable whimsy (Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies), OM had very little to show for their work. They were still grinding it out on the road, still playing for the same twenty or thirty die-hards, still going basically nowhere. In 2004, Barnes admitted to his band that he was thinking of quitting if the new album, Satanic Panic in the Attic, didn’t go over any better. The band already felt a bit weird, since Barnes had recorded the album almost entirely by himself for the first time in their history, so they might not have been too surprised at his admission. But, Satanic Panic was the most intricate, well-rounded, pop-oriented album the band had released. It was, in fact, something of a masterpiece. And that’s when the whole thing started to take off. Barnes followed quickly with Sunlandic Twins, which was great but not as good as its predecessor. Then, he topped himself again with Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? The group grew in popularity exponentially as the other members’ input decreased seemingly in the same proportion. However, the band’s heightened profile—including an Outback Steakhouse commercial that changed the lyrics to “Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games”, which many saw as a traitorous act—seemed to weight on Barnes’ conscience. So, he began recording a challenge to everyone who said he’d sold out. The resulting album, Skeletal Lamping, was kind of the indie rock Bitches Brew, except that it kept all of the frustrating parts of Miles Davis’ most controversial album and didn’t really show any of the brilliance that make Brew such an essential classic. It sold well and was widely praised, but it is a tedious affair made up of short snippets of songs—most less than a minute long—that are patched together by transitions that are often jarring. Right after it was released, Thriller caught up with Huggins. Since the interview, he has left the band to pursue his solo career, and OM has released another decent but not great album, False Priest.

james2You’ve taken a serious step up in terms of stage performance. What has that been like?

It’s been an experiment that I think has gone very well. There are a lot of changes this time around, and we’re doing, by far, our biggest production in an increasing series of big productions, but this one takes the cake by a landslide.

The first thing I thought when I heard Skeletal Lamping, the only thing I could think of was how in the hell anyone would perform it live. It seems impossible, with all of the drastic changes in the songs. Was that hard to learn and is it hard to perform?

I’m so glad you asked, because no one ever asks about actually performing the music. It seems like most of the attention that the live spectacle gains is from the visual, and I think it’s very easy to forget, even for us, that the whole thing is supposed to be based on the music. We spent about two months before a single costume was tried on or a single prop design was built, learning the actual music. Sure, it’s difficult to learn something that disjointed. I think for Kevin, it’s very natural because he’s spent months with that material, kind of cutting it up and playing it backwards and forwards and inside out, and when he had decided on what he thought would be the final mixes, a lot of the stuff, that was the first time we heard it. Some of it we played on, some of it we had been playing live for months before he put out the album, but I would say a good sixty to seventy per cent of it was new to us, the same as it would be to a fan. Basically, it takes us several weeks where we just take each section and isolate a part or two or three that we think we want to do and try to make the closest representation to the album as possible, which is impossible because most of the songs have a minimum of about forty-eight tracks, some of them up into the hundreds. So, basically, between the six of us, we have to find the essence of three or four parts each and try to condense that into the most basic arrangement of what he has recorded.

It seems like that would take a while to get used to.

It definitely gets easier the more we do it and makes more sense slowly as we do it. But at first, it was very difficult and frustrating because I’m used to, sort of doing one thing or the other on a particular song. So, I could pretty much dedicate myself in the past to playing the bass or the keyboards or the guitar or the drums for about two or three minutes. But, I still look at this new stuff as each segment being its own song, so even if its seventeen seconds or thirty-one seconds, I still think of it as a song, independently that flows together in a segue or something. So, for me, there are a lot more challenging instrument switches, where I don’t think the consideration of the flow of the order of the songs is based on what I’m doing. I have to adapt to it, which means on a lot of these songs in the new set, I will be picking up and putting down as many as four instruments in one track, and that track might only be two minutes long. So, it’s definitely challenging, but then again, that’s just me griping that I get to do all that shit, because the truth is, it’s fun.

Skeletal Lamping is not an accessible album, really. What did you think when you first heard it?

It was challenging for me. I didn’t even like it for the first several weeks. I found it tedious to listen to. Now, I feel like it’s second nature and it makes perfect sense to me, but it took dozens of listens. And then, after learning it, I can’t listen to it, because now it’s like I can’t see it as an album that you sit down and listen to for forty minutes or whatever. I know too much, you know what I mean? That’s the sacrifice for us; we can’t allow ourselves to be fans because we’re too close to it.

How has your audience received it?

I’m surprised, people seem to love it just like it’s a fucking new Beatles record or something. I don’t get it. I, as an older indie rocker, presumed that the kids would have the attitude I had when I would go see bands, which was, “Oh, God. I hope they don’t just play their new album.” To me, that was always the attitude that, like, if you loved a band, especially if it was a band that you thought was your band, like even slightly underground, and then you see them start to get a bigger audience. I was afraid that all these kids would think we were too big or are losing it or whatever, and are just playing our new album – “They didn’t play anything off of Satanic Panic.” Which is funny to me, because most people think of that as our first record, and I still get people asking why don’t we play stuff off Gay Parade, which was when most of our current fans were still in single digits. That said, I’ve been pleasantly surprised, instead of having that attitude, it’s been the opposite, where most of the people only want to hear the new album and they are freaking out at the beginning, it’s like, you can tell when you play the first three seconds of a song that a couple of hundred of them all know the lyrics and they’ll start singing immediately and singing the entire thing. And they’re not easy lyrics to remember. I don’t even know half of them.

I’m one of those who enjoys hearing the old stuff as much as the new.

But, most of the time, the new material gets the biggest response. We’ve been playing some oldies—we did a couple of songs off of Satanic Panic and a couple of songs off of Sunlandic Twins, and those have been fun for us to play and I’m sure that plenty of people have enjoyed watching them, but they don’t get that instant roar that some of the new shit does.

I mean, I even want you to play stuff off of your first album, Cherry Peel, which came out in 1997.

Yeah, man, fucking another lifetime away from that stuff.

You all made about nine albums before one really hit. What is it like to work for so long at something and then finally get the recognition almost a decade later?

It has been gratifying in a sort of jaded, “It’s long overdue” kind of way. All of us have been like, “What the fuck? It took ten years to even get to a mild cult indie status.” We thought we were putting out great shit in 1998. To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t some sort of big surprise. It was more of a relief. Because we were going to keep doing it either way, but it makes it a whole lot easier to have people supportive of it and to be able to slightly make a living off of it and to be able to relax a little bit and focus more on it, than have it be this thing you’re fighting for.

Do you remember what you wanted out of the band when it started?

I don’t know, I can’t even remember what I was thinking then. I just know that we have always wanted to be full-time functional touring putting out as much stuff as possible kind of band. But for a lot of time, for several albums, it felt like more of a struggle to make that happen instead of an opportunity to let it happen. That’s why right now, we’re all able to completely focus on doing this, and so it makes it easier for us to really take it all the way, which is what we’re doing, I hope.

That’s nice, but I think what most people don’t realize is that being a successful touring act is hard fucking work.

It’s a full-time job, and it is a job, no matter what anyone says. Because there’s a lot more than jus that hour on stage, especially when we’re doing overseas stuff. We’ve been doing a lot of flying in and flying out, spending two or three days in the airport, thousands of dollars on weird travel expenses—you can’t imagine what it’s like traveling with instruments these day—just to do a thirty-minute radio program in England and come home. So, a lot of times, just a single performance has six or eight people’s lives tangled up for three or four days to make happen.

Since Satanic Panic, Kevin Barnes has really taken the reins in terms of writing and recording everything himself. Was that weird for the band when that happened?

Totally. I mean, it’s a very slow, natural adaptation we’ve had to go through. For me, the performance has little to do with songwriting or initial creation of the material. It’s always separate anyway, whether I wrote it and played it or whatever. I just think of it as acting. I’m still an actor and it’s my job and my talent, but I have a script. Instead of being a writer/director/actor, on this particular journey, I’m mostly just doing the performance for myself and for Kevin, and it’s still a very improvisational thing for me. I mean, a lot of it is obviously heavily organized, but within that, I still feel like I’m playing with as much freedom as I did when I was writing my own parts to the albums four years ago.

Does he give you any input as he’s recording or let you hear things as they develop?

Sure, I get to hear as much or as little as I care to. And a lot of times, I prefer to wait. During the creation of this album, Kevin would be sending mp3s of half-assed mixed songs every couple of days for four months, and I probably opened up a third of them.

He seems to be writing increasingly about his personal life—almost painfully direct songs about whatever he’s going through. Do you have any sense of where that comes from, or do you have any input on it?

It’s not that simple. There’s a lot more interpersonal, psychological ping-pong going on than that. Plus, a lot of that has to do with physical proximity. I haven’t really been living in Athens, and for most of the creation of this, our only contact was email and very little phone conversation. So, it’s not like a daily thing, getting up and making coffee, “Oh, what are you writing about today, Kevin?” It’s more like three or four weeks go by and I’ll get an mp3, “Hey, James, what do you think of this? Should the ending be this long?” You know, “I don’t know, it’s your song, dude, what do you think?”

2010-02-18 - The Vanderbilt Hustler

1 Versus: Music Q&A with of Montreal's James Huggins: "Nashville has always been a wild place for us" By Alex Daly Published Feb. 18, 2010. 921 views

of Montreal

Versus Magazine: How are you? You look tired …
James Huggins: Good, I woke up this afternoon and immediately was whisked away to play this Grimey’s in-store thing.

VM: And how did that go?
JH: It went really well, considering that I hadn’t even had half a cup of coffee let alone breakfast. And [one of our instruments] broke within the first five minutes, so we had to improvise ... but it’s a really cool little venue.

VM: How is the tour going so far?
JH: It’s almost over, actually. Tonight is the last night, and it’s disappointing, really, because I want to keep going. It’s been so short — it’s only been like, ten shows, and it kind of came out of nowhere. We had planned to take the whole winter off and then suddenly these dates popped up in January and we just kind of threw it together. It’s been short but it’s been really fun and super exhausting.

VM: Where were you guys before Nashville?
JH: This is honestly one of those embarrassing moments where I can’t remember.

VM: It’s probably a huge blur by now …
JH: I am totally ashamed to say that I can’t remember.

VM: Were there any gigs that come to mind as favorites so far?
JH: New York was incredible. We played the Hi-Line Ballroom. I hadn’t been there before and it’s relatively new.

VM: How is it doing two projects now [of Montreal and solo opening act James Husband]?
JH: It’s not something that I’m not comfortable with, because I’ve done it before. It’s just different this time because it’s the first real push of my new band, so I’ve had a lot of responsibility there. In addition to that, what used to be a sort of easy job for me has now been redefined, so I’m doing ten times the physical effort during the of Montreal shows, and it’s been physically exhausting me. I used to play the drums in the band for most of the songs for six of seven years, but for the last five years I’ve also been playing guitar, bass, keyboards, trumpet and only touching the drum set for like, four songs out of the set.
And on this thing I turn all of the last four albums which [consists of] electronic, dance-pop, very much drum-machine oriented music into straight up rock tunes. So the only things we have on stage are two guitarists, the bassist and a drum kit, so I’m playing for 90 minutes. And this makes me sound like some kind of light eight, but I’m just not used to doing that ... I have an hour of cerebral, emotional performance, and then I have to switch off my brain and just bash the drums for an hour and a half, so the physical end of it is what’s really killing me. But every night we’ve done it, and I’m still kicking, so we’ll do it again tonight.

VM: What inspired you to do the solo act?
JH: Well it’s not really a new thing; it’s just newly officially billed. I’ve been doing it for, like, over ten years. I guess things are starting to finally slow down for of Montreal, because in the last few years we haven’t had more than a couple weeks off at a time in a year. We did something like 267 shows in 2007 and roughly the same in 2008, so I just haven’t had time.

But now [I] have time. I went to a couple of different studios, I was living overseas in Sweden, and I had time and I had access to a studio and [went for] it. It was just kind of long overdue, so the time came and I decided to just stick it out there.

VM: Listening to your music, it’s a very dynamic sound and ranges so much from the first song to the last. And it doesn’t sound anything like of Montreal. What inspired you?
JH: Well, it had very little to do with of Montreal. It’s more [about] the timetable and the places where the songs were recorded, because this is very much a collection of scattered recording from all over the place and from different times. So if they sound all over the place, it’s because one might have been recorded in my bedroom in 2002 and another might have been recorded in a proper studio in Stockholm in 2008. It depends on who I might have had with me to record with, or what I had written earlier in the year.

The whole point of it is that it’s not just meant to be an album. Many people have the misconception that it’s a new album and that I just went in with ten hot songs and I recorded them all in a week, but it’s much more like a collection of snapshots, like a scrapbook — like, “Here’s me at summer camp with my parents in 1983,” and “Here’s me at my college graduation” … it’s like that, but with songs.

VM: I was reading about that, about how you crafted this as just a huge collection of snapshots from different moments. And this style really brings diversity to the album.
JH: I’m all about diversity.

VM: Have you guys ever played here in Nashville before?
JH: Oh yeah, many many times.

VM: What do you think of the city?
JH: We love Nashville! Nashville has always been a wild place for us. People love to meet us up here and we tend to get whisked away. We have done probably six or seven other shows with [this promoter] both in two other small venues and twice in this venue. And I have performed once solo at the Ryman, but that was during tour when they just let me stand up there and play. It’s like a dream to play there. Nashville has a million other venues, but they don’t all cater to the kind of show we do. We have gone to very small rooms, as well, and played in Nashville at least 15 times over the last 11 years.

VM: I have personally never seen you perform before, so what are your shows like? What are they like for you?
JH: Well that’s the trouble with people who see us for the first time and people who saw us once even three, five or seven years ago, or even people who saw us once only three, five or seven months ago. We try to do a completely different show every time. And that doesn’t just mean in terms of a set list, I mean in terms of members in the band, different people on our performance crew, different video projects, different stage lighting … and for the past several years we have building our own stages to put on top of the venue’s stage.

And we have been getting bigger and bigger, and now we have these video projection things, because we have these groups of, well, I wouldn’t call them actors, I definitely don’t like to call them performance artists and I certainly wouldn’t call them dancers … but they kind of do something resembling all three. And for the last couple of years, [the show] has gotten really elaborate — we have 19 people on the road and only six in the band. We have tried to blow it out as big as we can get it for the bigger venues and festivals, but now we are doing these smaller shows and doing, like I said, rock ‘n’ roll versions of the grandeur of the past several years.

So in some ways I hope that someone like yourself wouldn’t feel gypped, because there is this legend looming out there that we are always going to put on this outrageous stage show. And we still are, to some degree, but I think it’s more interesting for us to focus on the music and do it in a different way. So if you look at the last four or five albums, what we do tonight will not sonically represent the album very well, but the songs are presented in a very live way.

We haven’t heard any complaints, but in the past it’s always been about totally recreating the record exactly. And we’d have two different computers, two different electronic brains that would control sound effects and drum patterns, and loops that go to our ears, so we’d all be playing along with the grid — it was all very robotic and complex, and it was all about blowing out as much sound and as much of the album as possible. But tonight it’s a much more minimalist approach [than] that.

It’s not some new thing we’re doing, but we decided that since we’re doing a small tour in the winter we might as well do it in a way that’s fun for us. So we’re going to try to play like we’re a live band again.

VM: Is it a collaborative thing, this creative side to the performances? Is it even the band that takes care of that or is there a side team?
JH: It’s all-inclusive — everyone in the band and on the crew has equal say and tends to get equal ideas rejected and accepted. It’s sort of compartmentalized, in a way. I mean, David Barnes, Kevin’s brother, who has always been kind of the sixth member of the band, doesn’t play any instruments, but he’s an artist and does all the artwork (well, most of the artwork — Kevin’s wife started doing some of the late stuff). But all of the imagery and artwork and videos that feature things that have to do with our band are done by David. He also kind of directs the performance bits and is responsible for most of the costumes and one-act plays that take place, so he pretty much gets free reign when it comes to that department.

But as far as the set and stage design, I have had a lot to do with that, and also our sound engineer and video engineer have hand-built everything together. Everything we use is hand-made, and those guys are the carpenters/electrical-engineers. And input for the video screens comes from Nick and also Dottie, the keyboard player’s fiance. We’ve been planning a big wedding party for them in the spring.

And then you’ve got everyone from our tour manager, who is onstage in costume every night, to various road managers and workers who are in costume doing their thing each night. But it’s like I said — I don’t think we have ever done the same show twice.

VM: Do you have any background in art or design? Or did you just figure this all out as the years went by?
JH: I grew up in a very musical but also very church-oriented, Southern Baptist family in Georgia, and my father is the musical director [of our church]. So not only did he make sing in the church choir and all that crap, but he would always put on the Christmas pageant and the school play etc. and my mom would always design the props, make backdrops and make costumes by hand and stuff. I had this very home-spun, “Waiting for Guffman”-style, tiny town theater experience, and I have always been acting in little plays. So I pretty much started out doing that stuff before we had any money.

In fact, five or six years ago, I had borrowed these huge slide projection screens from my uncle (I had used them for these church productions in the ‘80s). I set up three screens with old-school clips and slides of carousels and projected the whole slideshow behind the band. And then we started to get some money and decided to buy a bunch of new, high-tech electronics, so I turned things over to Nick. I was running this crap while playing drums in the middle of the show … Now, I have less of a hands-on approach and more just suggestions.

VM: You definitely have to come back and play at the Ryman with this theatrical aspect!
JH: We could do at least the most visually stunning show there, but certainly not the best musically, since every legend in the world has played there. Unless The Flaming Lips have played there — they are our one big competitor. It seems like everything we do, they end up doing bigger. But we’re close on their heels, and we’re doing it in a similar spirit but a different way.

VM: What do you foresee happening in the future with both James Husband? Do you see yourself continuing with your solo project?
JH: Absolutely. It’s not like it’s some kind of whim. It’s just a long overdue beginning of something that will be the focus of my attention from this point on. And that’s not to say that I’m going to stop playing with of Montreal — in fact, I think for the rest of this year [I’m] continuing to do both. I think we are going to do another leg or two this way.

But this whole temporary diversion of being a straight up rock band is not going to last very long. I think the plan for the next record, which is not going to come out until the end of the summer, is to totally revamp the whole thing, bring in additional musicians, and expand the band so the musicians are able to more closely recreate the record but without all the previous sampling technology that we were using. The idea is to have about ten or twelve [musicians] and multiple percussionists so we can do complex rhythms, because it’s just impossible for me to do as one man, especially since I’m not using any drum pads or anything. We want to bring in a couple of extra string players and horn players and make it more of a big-band sound, really a ’70s kind of band that would have that sort of instrumentation. But that all depends on us finding all of the right people — we are going to start auditioning people, talking to all of our friends in various bands and seeing their availability.

If we can pull it off it would be something of like a super group and much more focused on the music. I’m sure there will still be some sort of elaborate stage production, but the idea is to sort of scrap everything we have been doing for the last year and a half and create some new characters. We also want to get rid of the more colorful things and instead create some darker settings and lighting.

VM: Do you opt for the same kind of stage shows for James Husband?
JH: No, with that, it’s just about the music. I mean we already have all the [of Montreal stuff] set up there, so we sometimes will throw some of that on for the colors, but I think most of that would just distract you. The point of the James Husband project is for me to feel comfortable singing the songs. We tried doing it like a big rock band to make it more exciting, but the truth of the matter is, you listen to the album and it’s all pretty mellow — it’s all just about my singing. And I can’t sing very loudly or very well when a lot is going on, so I tried to make it a very soft band. I have a cellist and a clarinet player and I play mostly acoustic guitar … so it’s very, very much the opposite of a [loud rock show].

VM: You mentioned that tonight is your last show on this tour. Any idea when you’ll start up again?
JH: Well, I’m doing another run by myself, which is obviously not as easy because everything falls to my own resources. I don’t have the tour bus, I don’t have the crew of ten people … which is why it’s so nice to tour with of Montreal because, sure, I’m a member of the band, and it’s all my equipment and my money in a way (at least a fifth of it), but at the same time I’m looking at it like I’m a new artist and I got an opportunity to play with a band like of Montreal. So you remove the obvious conflict of interest, and it makes things a whole lot easier [to look at].

But, that being said, the five or six of us will jump in a van and do a small club tour in March, and then of Montreal will [start touring again] in June, so I’m doing both worlds for the next few months. Then we have Dottie’s wedding, which we are all taking a month off for, and then ... who knows. Maybe we’ll play some festivals, or something.

2010-01-25 - Express Night Out

On His Toes: James Huggins III on Of Montreal, James Husband

YOU MIGHT HAVE been surprised when — seemingly out of nowhere — Of Montreal announced new tour dates on Jan. 7. So was James Huggins III, the group's de facto drummer.

"It was announced online on the Polyvinyl Records Web site and Of Montreal Web site the night we were asked if we could do it," said Huggins, who will also open all the shows (including stops in Baltimore and D.C. this week) under the moniker James Husband. "I actually had no idea I'd be doing these Husband shows. I thought I'd have until March. So for me it's like scrambling to get it together."

This included assembling a backing band and rehearsing, which when we spoke to Huggins on the afternoon of Jan. 15, his band had yet to do.

Such is the life of a musician working for Kevin Barnes.

of Montreal

"It's incredibly frustrating," Huggins said of his boss, the enigmatic of Montreal mastermind. "He just doesn't work at the pace, or the schedule, or the sort of hours of operation, or linear mental process of anyone else on earth.

"He is so singularly devoted to this one thing that it's not, in his mind, unreasonable to call me at 5:30 a.m. and ask me if I've heard that rare Curtis Mayfield track from 1973 and do I think I can make a drum sound like that. And this is after having not spoken for a week," he continued. "He's only focused on making the album and that's what he does every night, and he's a super, super night owl. He wakes up when the sun sets and goes to sleep when it rises."

Additionally, the indie poppers had only rehearsed once for this tour at that point. For a band that spent most of 2009 on the road, it normally wouldn't matter, but Of Montreal live shows are far from normal. The 2008-2009 "Skeletal Lamping" tour saw David Barnes, Kevin's brother, creating the group's most elaborate stage setup yet, with moving set pieces, costume changes, actors and — at one show in New York — Barnes riding a white horse.

Barnes recently decided he wants to eliminate all pre-recorded backing tracks from the theatrical live show — telling Stereogum earlier this month that he'd like to have a massive 10-person band. For now, the group remains six members deep, but this tour will be the first without backing tracks, which means Huggins — who usually spends about half the show on drums and the rest on keyboards, synthesizers, guitar and bass — will stay at his kit for most of the show.

"I think were going to try to do all the 'Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?,' 'Skeletal Lamping', 'Sunlandic Twins' hits, but without any of the backing drum tracks so it's going to be a stripped-down-rock approach," he said. "It's something I've done before, but a lot of those songs have such complex multi-layered electronic sounds on them, and that's kind of the personality of doing them live. ... We've only tried it one day and so far a lot of the songs I do the big keyboard leads on — [like "Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse"], that's the song where I play the main big part, and its not even there — I'm playing the drums. It doesn't sound as weird as you think. We did it once and we were all just looking at each other like, 'Shit, that was fun,' so it will be what it is.

"It's kind of like: take a deep breath and hang on to your hat because this is the last hurrah," he added.

Huggins seems to be anticipating quite the shift once Barnes finishes Of Montreal's 10th album, which should come out later this year. As Huggins mentioned earlier, Barnes takes a very insular approach when recording, often composing and recording most of an album's parts by himself. This time, though, he may open himself up to another voice as he plans to mix the album with acclaimed producer Jon Brion.

"It sounds very similar to 'Skeletal Lamping,'" Huggins said of what he's heard of the record. "It sounds kind of like Part B of that or something, and there are definitely some differences ... Hopefully the fidelity will be a little bit different because the Jon Brion thing is happening, as far as we know, so it will be one different layer to the mixing. It will just be super hi-fi, plus he's going to have just different ears. [Kevin] wouldn't let any of us mix the record, but for someone like that I think he's going to try to relinquish some control."

The album also features guest appearances by Janelle Monae and Beyonce's sister Solange — both of which sing on songs Barnes originally wrote for them, but were too weird, so they became Of Montreal songs.

For now, Huggins is still focused on James Husband's first album, "A Parallaxi I," which was released in October. It's Huggin's first solo album — a collection of 10 years of recording that's finally seeing the light of day.

"I looked at them as sort of like a photo-scrapbook — 'Ohh, there's me in 2001 on New Year's Eve; there's me in 2006, the summer, beach house' — musical kind of snapshots of different times," Huggins said.

Despite the breadth of material, the album's startlingly cohesive. Only Huggins himself could distinguish his 23-year-old voice from his 30-year-old voice. There's shades of Huggins' work in various Elephant 6 groups — the Athens, Ga., musical collective that spawned Of Montreal and The Apples in Stereo. The album's more stripped down and lo-fi than of Montreal's recent work, with added psychedelic flourishes and quirky guitar parts.

Huggins describes his sound best, though, via a covers EP included with the album.

"If you want to say [my album] kind of sounds like The Beatles if they had listened to Guided by Voices and maybe a little bit of Gary Numan, well, you're absolutely right," Huggins added. "It was kind of like wearing my influences on my sleeve."

Express had Huggins take us through the EP's six tracks, which yielded some interesting stories about a bad break-up, beef with Jens Lekman and Huggins literally going out of his mind.

"My Shadow in Vain" (Gary Numan)
Well, I didn't discover Tubeway Army until maybe three years ago, and the only record that I had was "Replicas," which I guess many people consider to be the classical definitive Gary Numan work — and actually, there's a lot of songs on that record that I like better then this. I attempted this version of "Are 'Friends' Electric?" and I was happy with it but I lost ... I told you we had this machine at some point of misguided recording approaches, between our super-analog devotion and, like, discovering Mac-based recording software, we had this mid/late '90s digital eight-track and it took these little MiniDiscs, so I recorded the Gary Numan cover on the MiniDisc and — I don't know, Kevin can't tell me where it went, I don't know where it went — so I lost the machine. All the years in Of Montreal, you don't understand the amount of gear we've amassed and stored. So now I have the little MiniDisc but I could never find anyone who could play it.

So I happened to be in Sweden working on some other songs and I came across "My Shadow in Vain," because it just happened to be the only one my friend had in his studio. So I went, "Well, I really wanted to do that ["Are 'Friends' Electric?"] but I didn't have access to it and for some reason I never bothered to go and download or buy it — it all happened very quickly — so I decided kind of last minute I'll do ["My Shadow in Vain"]. It's interesting because I never really thought, "Hey, that's a song I really want to do because I love it." It kind of just happened to be like what we were going to work on that afternoon and we just recorded the Guided by Voices covers the day before. So I think I was still in the Guided by Voices kind of mood so I think that the way I sing the Gary Numan song was kind of like me doing Gary Numan as if they were Bob Pollard.

"Buzzards and Dreadful Crows" (Guided by Voices)
"Indian Fables" (Guided by Voices)
Part of the reason why I did those two in particular — and why I did the whole cover thing in the first place — was a pre-emptive shield against criticism of derivative influences. To me, it's like if you listen to my record and you think, "OK, he's got all these crazy chord changes, it's kind of lo-fi, he likes the thing with doubled vocals with delay on it — obviously he listens to "Bee Thousand" a lot.

James HusbandI was kind of saying by putting these out there, "If you're trying to guess my influences — here they are." This is a road map, so if you want to say it kind of sounds like The Beatles if they had listened to Guided by Voices and maybe a little bit of Gary Numan, well, you're absolutely right. It was kind of like wearing my influences on my sleeve. Certainly I did listen to a lot of Guided by Voices and I'm sure they have influenced me but the thing I like to believe — and maybe I'm repressing it — but I really do think that it's more coincidental the way that I record. I feel like it's kind of like you know how there's that big band now that everyone's talking about because they're super Top 40? They're called Owl City and everyone says he sounds like the Postal Service and he claims he didn't even listen to Postal Service. Part of me likes to think there are such coincidences where what I do happens to be similar to what he does but I'm not going to say that I'm ignorant to it. To me it's a compliment. Nobody's said that it's a negative thing.

"What You're Doin'" (The Beatles)
"We Can Work It Out" (The Beatles)
Both of them were me trying to use Paul McCartney's words to win back an ex-girlfriend who had left me and I couldn't write any songs. So I listened to both of those and said, "That's exactly what I want to say," so I recorded them specifically for her, sent them to her, then decided to use them later, but they were never meant for anyone else's ears but her. The "We Can Work It Out," I changed the lyrics — I didn't even notice it until I mixed it. In the first line of the chorus I sing, "Life is very strange," and they say, "Life is very short." I don't know why I said it but when I realized the mistake I said, "Well, I guess that's why they call it a cover version" and kept it.

["What You're Doin'" has] an interesting kind of story, too. When I recorded it — and still to this day — it's not a well known Beatles song, and when I recorded it about seven years ago it was before the reissues, that was before the "Love" project and all that, and even back then almost no one knew it. You could call yourself a big Beatles fan and not know that track, so whenever I'd play it people would think it's mine. So much so that I played it for a Swedish friend of mine and she played it for her friend and I get this e-mail four or five years ago from what I think is this girl — this is before I'd spent any time in Sweden — from this girl Jens — I thought it was Jennifer or something — saying, "Can I use part of your song to sample for a drum beat?" And I was thinking they were going to take that little [vocalizes opening drum beat].

So it turns out I said "Yes, but just make sure you give me credit and if this recording comes out that you give me copies and let me know," thinking it was this kid that was doing home demos. Turns out it was Jens Lekman. He used it, he released it and sampled the entire first part of me playing everything — took my guitar, bass, keyboards — and he released it on that record ["You Are the Light"] and it's called ["I Saw Her in the Anti-War Demonstration"]. He took the entire first verse, sampled it and just wrote his own song on top of it thinking he stole it from this unknown American and it turns out he had no idea it was a Beatles song. When I finally confronted him in Sweden I saw him, came up to him, I was like, "Hey, man, what the fuck? You didn't call me, you didn't credit me and are you aware that you're not taking my copyright, you're taking Paul McCartney's?" And he was like "What? No." He was really awkward, almost like he didn't believe me.

Since then I've had two more confrontations with him and I just gave up. I contacted his record label, I tried to ask — it wasn't like I was going to sue him, I just wanted credit. To this day people hear my song and say, "Oh, you're ripping off Jens Lekman." It was something I was really upset about a couple years ago because I was trying to get the record released and I didn't have any momentum and it was the peak of him becoming this indie darling and I was like, "C'mon man, just do me a favor, put me on the Web site." I even asked him [if I could] open some shows or something. I don't know — he's a weird dude. Not that I'm trying to spread bad blood but that is the true story.

"Out of My Mind" (Neil Young)
I tried to make it sound like you were listening to a crackly 45 in the '60s. The thing is that was true inspired madness. I was going through a heavy-duty winter time depression in between living in Sweden and coming home for the first time for Christmas after having lived there, and I took all this recording [equipment] to my grandmother's house in south Georgia, the middle of nowhere. And when I say my grandmother's house, she's not with us, it's just the house she owned, it's in Buena Vista. So I proceeded to just get ragingly drunk and spent six or seven days holed up in this house and I mean not even leaving the house. I got groceries, I got booze, I got recording equipment — I borrowed mics and cables from the church — like, raided the church — went into the church drunk late at night and was playing the piano. I was out of my mind — literally — and I was listening to all sorts of different shit and that song came on and I was like, "That is it! That is it!" And I decided to make it sound as old and washed out as possible and when I sang it I was wasted — I mean barely standing up — and I was genuinely singing. I felt like I was in a very fucked up place and it came out with a lot of emotion, so there you go.

2010-02-03 - Brightest Young Things

BYT Interview: Of Montreal and James Husband’s Jamey Huggins
February 2, 2010 by Phelps

The coveted opening slot for Of Montreal’s recently announced tour has gone to none other than their own drummer/multi-instrumentalist Jamey Huggins and his solo project, James Husband. Night in and night out, 12 years strong, Jamey has performed amongst the absurdity of an OM show, hopping from instrument to instrument while dodging masked villains and the occasional celebrity. His own work has him skewing towards traditional pop structure albeit with more instruments than a marching band and we caught up with him at the top of the 930 Club before OM’s show last Thursday. As easygoing a guy as you’ll find, James enlightened over afternoon tea us with tales of the conception of his album, near death Bonnaroo experiences and what must be one of the coolest neighborhoods in Athens.

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BYT: So this tour was booked a couple of weeks in advance of the first date right? Were you guys scrambling to get it all together as far as each band, and the theatrics of it all?

JH: I guess we practiced about 6 days with both bands doing double rehearsals… it all came about very suddenly.

BYT: So, with your band, are there other people from Of Montreal playing as well?

JH: Yea, it’s 6 people traveling with me and 3 of us are in Of Montreal, and at various times during the show we have pretty much the whole band up there, a little help from the rest of the members. There really is no solid lineup, it’s just that I made a record and I’m lucky to have my friends that I collaborate with WANT to do it, you know? So, I had to reach out to a few other people to come along and kinda fill out the sound, like I have a cellist, and I have a singer that’s sort of being my double cause on the record I do usually 2 or 3 or 4 voices on the song. So, fortunately I got this guy who can sing very similar to me and he’s kind of being my double. But yea, for the most part it IS Of Montreal, and the two sets are very much like a family thing. The only real distinction between the two are obviously the material and there’ll be a lot more freaky costumery and stuff like that for the OM set. It’s fun for us to get to do kind of 2 sides of the coin, especially for me because on this tour, the whole tour, I’m exclusively playing drums in Of Montreal where as for the last 3 or 4 years I’ve been expanding my little arsenal of instruments to where I was up to like 6 or 7 different instruments I was running around to between 3 different stations and tonight I am just glued to the drum seat for the entire like 90 minutes or whatever. It’s physically exhausting, but it’s fun for me to get to play the songs in a different way cause all of the Georgie Fruit, over-the-top, drum programmed dance beats of the last few records are now being re-translated into just a straight up rock song. I’m still attempting to do some of those beats but most of them are inhuman so we’ve kind of distilled the songs and it’s all just guitar rock tonight. It’s gonna be a little bit different renditions of all that material.

BYT: You talked about the theatrics and the costumes which are a huge part of any OM but may not be typical of your set. Are both sets a blast for you?

JH: I mean, for the most part I’m oblivious to that because while it’s definitely going on around me I have so much to concentrate on that every once in a while, if they’re doing something really close to me I’ll kind of get distracted or if I hear the crowd react to something I’ll look up, “what was it?!” Like, the Susan Sarandon thing, I missed it! And I knew it was gonna happen, but I hadn’t met her before the show. Everyone else had been hangin out with her before the show and talking about what they were gonna do but since I was stressed out about getting my own shit together, I just wasn’t sure if it was happening or not. I was looking down, playing through a song, and I look up and see her walking past my drums to go offstage and I kinda looked at her, and it was just liked I missed the whole thing. Now I’ve only watched it on Youtube. But I have very little to do with all that, I just play the songs and they have a whole bunch of costumes and stuff, some of it I don’t even know what it is they’ve done, but, hopefully it’s entertaining.

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BYT: You guys started in Athens, are you still living there? Didn’t you live in Sweden for a while?

JH: Yea I just moved back to Athens this past summer so I’ve been there, about, I don’t know 7 months? Since like July or something? And I lived there for almost 8 or 9 years before that, and the whole Sweden time was just kind of over the course of about 3 years. Every time we were not on tour, instead of coming home I just went there because I had a girlfriend there, I had a studio there, I had an apartment there. I temporarily adopted it as, well you know, I thought I was gonna be this expatriate and had all these ideas that I was gonna BE Scandanavian but the truth is I’m too much of a Georgia boy and it didn’t last as long as I might’ve thought. I still love it there, I have a lot of Swedish connections, but now I’m firmly back in the US and living in Athens.

BYT: Is that where you’re from?

JH: No but I’m from Atlanta and it’s an hour away so I was born and raised in Georgia.

BYT: So this album was recorded some there, and some…

JH: About half and half…

BYT: Over the course of years, and geographically and time-wise, what made you decide that “OK, I have something cohesive enough for me to put out this record?”

JH: I didn’t though, that’s the thing. It was never intended to be an album of specific tracks and there’s this misconception when I hear people say ‘Oh, it took 10 years,’ it’s not that it TOOK 10 years, like it was slaved over, it’s just more that after a lot of time had passed, a certain sequence of events fell into place where it made sense to actually do something with it. I’d been spending all this time recording and not having any kind of home for it. I’d put out the random single here or there or online or something, and eventually it was Kevin (Barnes) who insisted that I take it more seriously. He was like, or I think I was playing him a new song, and he’s like “What the fuck happened to that last one that was so great?” and I was like “I don’t know” so he’s like “Why aren’t you putting this shit out?” So he went to Polyvinyl on my behalf and asked them if I took it seriously would they put it out and they, you know, he’s obviously very influential with the label. I don’t like to think that he called in a favor but in a way that’s exactly what he did, just to get the ball rolling, and then they were very excited about the songs and everything. So, yea it was just the right time plus I’d been so incredibly busy that I couldn’t really tour or focus on much more than Of Montreal for a couple of years cause we were doing like 250 shows a year and… I don’t know, it was just finally enough’s enough, it’s about time, and so here we are.

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BYT: Speaking of those shows, I don’t know if it stuck out to you guys, but, I was at your Bonnaroo (2009) show….

JH: The smashfest?

BYT: Hah, yea, that was uh… well do you like festivals, or is it just get in, play, leave?

JH: No, I love festivals but Bonnaroo was probably one of the worst days of my life. I personally had sort of a nervous breakdown, ended up having to call an ambulance, I was passing out, I think I was just dehydrated, overstressed… But I BARELY made it through the show and within 15 minutes after the show I was laying down, getting Kevin’s wife to call 911 because I thought I was gonna die. I really think I had a mild anxiety attack brought on by massive dehydration, I just wasn’t aware of it. Kevin was in the same boat, the two of us were next to each other, shaking in the ambulance getting IV fluids cause both of us…

BYT: Well it is miserably hot there each summer…

JH: Well as far as the actual performance, I don’t know why but there was this tendency towards violence the last couple of months. I mean we do something different every couple tours but for some reason this whole idea of smashing shit… I don’t know what got into us. We started anticipating how many extra guitars we might need, just in case, and then it started spreading to the drums, the keyboards, and after you smash 2 or 3 expensive keyboards then it’s like god damn it why are we doing this? So hopefully that phase is over. I guess it has to be because tonight we only brough 4 guitars (laughing.) But, you know, that was just a one-off thing. Generally we love festivals although it’s frustrating because you don’t get to have sound checks and it’s hard to just throw it all on after the last band, you know? Festival situations require bands to have a flexible, quick setup and that’s annoying but for the most part it’s a free for all because people, when they’re outside, and wasted in the middle of the day, they tend to be a more active crowd and we like to go out in the crowd and stuff. It’s got ups and downs but we do a lot of em so I guess we better enjoy it.

BYT: It was amazing, for sure… so, are you playing some of the covers from your EP in your set?

JH: Yea, well I wanted to do 3 of em, but now it’s only 1 that’s actually on the record and now we’re doing another one that’s a Swedish song. That one to me is kind of the highlight of the set, and we do it in kind of a different way than the rest of the set. It’s got a little bit more of a dance feel, we have Kevin joining us, and it’s kind of diversion from the record.

BYT: So it’s on your record but the way you do it out here…

JH: No no no, it’s no on anything it’s just…

BYT: Ah, who sings it?

JH: It’s this artist named Lykke Li, so I’m singing it half-Swedish, half-English.

BYT: Oh, yea, of course. Do you know the band The Field?

JH: Fields?

BYT: The Field, they’re Swedish, I’m friends with them, they’re kind of electronic…

JH: OH YEA, of course, Andreas, he is on my record. He played the trumpets. Sorry, I forget about that because he’s involved in so many different things. He’s a very good friend of mine. He also plays with our mutual friend Jenny Wilson and she’s on my album too. The two of them came as a package deal, and I’ve played with them, they’ve played with me.

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BYT: So, being back in Athens, are you all still living there?

JH: Yea, all of us. Including our video techs, tour manager, sound engineer.

BYT: Is it the kind of thing where you’re growing out of your group house phase, or…

JH: We definitely, yea, everyone’s got their own home. We did the whole ‘live together as a band’ thing and that didn’t go very well. But we’re all pretty close to each other, like Brian and I live on the same street, he’s about 5 houses down. Davey lives right around the corner in between the two of us, and Dottie’s less than a mile from my house. We’re all just in a similar neighborhood.

BYT: I hadn’t heard your album until about a week ago but since then I’ve listened a lot, and…

JH: I think it’s kind of a slow burn. I’ve had a lot of people say that they listened to it once, and didn’t really have an opinion or something, and then put it on in their car or went to sleep listening to it and after a couple of days they heard it differently. That to me is interesting. I guess it’s not gonna have an immediate reaction in the way that perhaps an Of Montreal record does, where everything is really immediate. It’s definitely meant to be subtle and hopefully that comes across, but, it’s exciting for me just to have anybody listen to it because I’ve been secretly going around passing out CDR’s of a lot of this shit for years, just to friends.

BYT: Did you bring any of your other albums or CDRs here?

JH: No, I wanted to, it was something I’d planned on doing but when it got down to the double-rehearsals and preparing for this thing, I would have had to have 2 days to really get it all together, burn enough CDRs, make some kind of artwork. I still intend to do that.

BYT: Do you have one of those big CD spindles to do it all?

JH: No, I was just doin em… well I had a friend of mine who had one of those who I paid to let me do that for one thing, but for the most part I was doing them one-by-one on a single disc drive. But now that I have Polyvinyl it just makes more sense to go ahead and put out another thing. I’m hoping to cut this EP thing as soon as possible, and they’re on board for that so the more real shit I can put out is probably better. I guess people sometimes like the idea of a homemade, exclusive thing, but, to be honest even making it properly manufactured through the label it’s still gonna be a limited release anyway. I’ve got a whole other record ready to go, basically everything that didn’t go on this one, but not B sides. I intentionally saved some of the best oens for the next thing, cause I only chose, what is it 12 songs? 5 on the EP? And I had about 33 recorded so I’m excited to go back and look at those I chose to leave off and see how I can put em together to make the next one. The good thing is it’ll be pretty similar since it’s from the same time and I wanna get that out of my system so I can start recording new shit.

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BYT: With the songs you do have on this album, you have a lot of different ideas, layered vocals, and instruments in a 2 minute song. It works, there are a lot of great pop songs, but is this something you strive for?

JH: I’m just a sloppy recorder and arranger I guess, and I have a tendency to just keep layering overdubs. That was part of the mixing process that was difficult for me, letting go of a lot of stuff and taking away. The guy who I worked with to do the final mixes, his whole approach was deductive editing which was a concept I was not familiar with (laughing.) It’s like, “Do you really need THREE guitars doing that?” And I’m like, “Maybe not,” so, let’s find the best one and kill the other two. So we started doing that more and more, and he’s going “You have three tracks of tambourine, why’d you do that?” and I’m like “I don’t know, maybe one was sloppy but I thought it might sound good doubled,” so we went through… the cleaning up of the mixes, to me, made them a little bit more, or slightly easier to listen to. If you hear some of the unmastered first mixes that I did myself, they have even more instrumentation. I think that’s just the way I work, I just keep putting stuff on there until I think it sounds good and now I’m learning how to take some away and that sometimes less is more. It’s fun for me because now doing it live we only have a possibility of 5 instruments. I’m hearing the songs with just the one keyboard, the one guitar line or whatever, and they seem a lot more open. I almost wish I could re-record them with the live band just for fun. They’re much more concise.

BYT: Do you guys do any recording while you’re on tour?

JH: We haven’t, because we haven’t had any, you know we’ve been…

BYT: Well I just mean from the sound board or whatever so you can listen to your shows.

JH: I wish! You know, we have in the past set up elaborate multi-track things to tape Of Montreal shows but to be honest we’re just lazy about it. There’s almost always so much other stuff goin on that our sound guy, if he has to do that, that’s another hour of work a night for him to setup, and he’s already doin a 7 hour setup. We’ve had a couple people who’ve taped some of these shows, and I’m hopefully gonna get copies of those.

BYT: What’s your taping policy exactly?

JH: We’re pretty open, because of course we want the archive, we just wanna hear it, you know? As long as no one’s selling it, that’s pretty much the only thing. We’re not very good about self-documenting so as long as someone else is willing to do it that’s fine with us. It’s just being cool about it. Don’t release it on your own indie label or whatever, (laughing,) and if it really sucks audio wise or performance wise, we’d like to know so that we can choose what gets out. I think they’re about to start making noise down there (sound check.)

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BYT: Cool, well before we get out of here, as far as DC you guys have played a lot, do you ever get to go around and do shit or are you just in the club?

JH: We haven’t, in the past, really had much time but I think we’re actually gonna come back here on Saturday or Sunday. Not to play but because there’s apparently some huge snowstorm coming to Richmond and the club is asking us to cancel it or postpone because they think it’s gonna be so bad people aren’t gonna come. If it’s canceled, the plan is to go to DC and go to the Smithsonian or something.

BYT: Yea well if you’re back there’s tons of cool places right here on U St., lots of good soul food, Ethiopian restaurants, and…

JH: Yea, we have a date at an Ethiopian restaurants in about 3 hours.

BYT: Niiice, well James thanks man, I really appreciate all your time, and good luck with the show tonight.

CHECK OUT THE LIVE SHOW REVIEW FROM IT HERE

2010-02-18 - Inside Vandy

Versus: Music
Q&A with of Montreal's James Huggins: "Nashville has always been a wild place for us"
By Alex Daly
Published Feb. 18, 2010.


Versus Magazine: How are you? You look tired …
James Huggins: Good, I woke up this afternoon and immediately was whisked away to play this Grimey’s in-store thing.

VM: And how did that go?
JH: It went really well, considering that I hadn’t even had half a cup of coffee let alone breakfast. And [one of our instruments] broke within the first five minutes, so we had to improvise ... but it’s a really cool little venue.

VM: How is the tour going so far?
JH: It’s almost over, actually. Tonight is the last night, and it’s disappointing, really, because I want to keep going. It’s been so short — it’s only been like, ten shows, and it kind of came out of nowhere. We had planned to take the whole winter off and then suddenly these dates popped up in January and we just kind of threw it together. It’s been short but it’s been really fun and super exhausting.

VM: Where were you guys before Nashville?
JH: This is honestly one of those embarrassing moments where I can’t remember.

VM: It’s probably a huge blur by now …
JH: I am totally ashamed to say that I can’t remember.

VM: Were there any gigs that come to mind as favorites so far?
JH: New York was incredible. We played the Hi-Line Ballroom. I hadn’t been there before and it’s relatively new.

VM: How is it doing two projects now [of Montreal and solo opening act James Husband]?
JH: It’s not something that I’m not comfortable with, because I’ve done it before. It’s just different this time because it’s the first real push of my new band, so I’ve had a lot of responsibility there. In addition to that, what used to be a sort of easy job for me has now been redefined, so I’m doing ten times the physical effort during the of Montreal shows, and it’s been physically exhausting me. I used to play the drums in the band for most of the songs for six of seven years, but for the last five years I’ve also been playing guitar, bass, keyboards, trumpet and only touching the drum set for like, four songs out of the set.

And on this thing I turn all of the last four albums which [consists of] electronic, dance-pop, very much drum-machine oriented music into straight up rock tunes. So the only things we have on stage are two guitarists, the bassist and a drum kit, so I’m playing for 90 minutes.

And this makes me sound like some kind of light eight, but I’m just not used to doing that ... I have an hour of cerebral, emotional performance, and then I have to switch off my brain and just bash the drums for an hour and a half, so the physical end of it is what’s really killing me. But every night we’ve done it, and I’m still kicking, so we’ll do it again tonight.

VM: What inspired you to do the solo act?
JH: Well it’s not really a new thing; it’s just newly officially billed. I’ve been doing it for, like, over ten years. I guess things are starting to finally slow down for of Montreal, because in the last few years we haven’t had more than a couple weeks off at a time in a year. We did something like 267 shows in 2007 and roughly the same in 2008, so I just haven’t had time.

But now [I] have time. I went to a couple of different studios, I was living overseas in Sweden, and I had time and I had access to a studio and [went for] it. It was just kind of long overdue, so the time came and I decided to just stick it out there.

VM: Listening to your music, it’s a very dynamic sound and ranges so much from the first song to the last. And it doesn’t sound anything like of Montreal. What inspired you?
JH: Well, it had very little to do with of Montreal. It’s more [about] the timetable and the places where the songs were recorded, because this is very much a collection of scattered recording from all over the place and from different times. So if they sound all over the place, it’s because one might have been recorded in my bedroom in 2002 and another might have been recorded in a proper studio in Stockholm in 2008. It depends on who I might have had with me to record with, or what I had written earlier in the year.

The whole point of it is that it’s not just meant to be an album. Many people have the misconception that it’s a new album and that I just went in with ten hot songs and I recorded them all in a week, but it’s much more like a collection of snapshots, like a scrapbook — like, “Here’s me at summer camp with my parents in 1983,” and “Here’s me at my college graduation” … it’s like that, but with songs.

VM: I was reading about that, about how you crafted this as just a huge collection of snapshots from different moments. And this style really brings diversity to the album.
JH: I’m all about diversity.

VM: Have you guys ever played here in Nashville before?
JH: Oh yeah, many many times.

VM: What do you think of the city?
JH: We love Nashville! Nashville has always been a wild place for us. People love to meet us up here and we tend to get whisked away. We have done probably six or seven other shows with [this promoter] both in two other small venues and twice in this venue. And I have performed once solo at the Ryman, but that was during tour when they just let me stand up there and play. It’s like a dream to play there. Nashville has a million other venues, but they don’t all cater to the kind of show we do. We have gone to very small rooms, as well, and played in Nashville at least 15 times over the last 11 years.

VM: I have personally never seen you perform before, so what are your shows like? What are they like for you?
JH: Well that’s the trouble with people who see us for the first time and people who saw us once even three, five or seven years ago, or even people who saw us once only three, five or seven months ago. We try to do a completely different show every time. And that doesn’t just mean in terms of a set list, I mean in terms of members in the band, different people on our performance crew, different video projects, different stage lighting … and for the past several years we have building our own stages to put on top of the venue’s stage.

And we have been getting bigger and bigger, and now we have these video projection things, because we have these groups of, well, I wouldn’t call them actors, I definitely don’t like to call them performance artists and I certainly wouldn’t call them dancers … but they kind of do something resembling all three. And for the last couple of years, [the show] has gotten really elaborate — we have 19 people on the road and only six in the band. We have tried to blow it out as big as we can get it for the bigger venues and festivals, but now we are doing these smaller shows and doing, like I said, rock ‘n’ roll versions of the grandeur of the past several years.

So in some ways I hope that someone like yourself wouldn’t feel gypped, because there is this legend looming out there that we are always going to put on this outrageous stage show. And we still are, to some degree, but I think it’s more interesting for us to focus on the music and do it in a different way. So if you look at the last four or five albums, what we do tonight will not sonically represent the album very well, but the songs are presented in a very live way.

We haven’t heard any complaints, but in the past it’s always been about totally recreating the record exactly. And we’d have two different computers, two different electronic brains that would control sound effects and drum patterns, and loops that go to our ears, so we’d all be playing along with the grid — it was all very robotic and complex, and it was all about blowing out as much sound and as much of the album as possible. But tonight it’s a much more minimalist approach [than] that.

It’s not some new thing we’re doing, but we decided that since we’re doing a small tour in the winter we might as well do it in a way that’s fun for us. So we’re going to try to play like we’re a live band again.

VM: Is it a collaborative thing, this creative side to the performances? Is it even the band that takes care of that or is there a side team?
JH: It’s all-inclusive — everyone in the band and on the crew has equal say and tends to get equal ideas rejected and accepted. It’s sort of compartmentalized, in a way. I mean, David Barnes, Kevin’s brother, who has always been kind of the sixth member of the band, doesn’t play any instruments, but he’s an artist and does all the artwork (well, most of the artwork — Kevin’s wife started doing some of the late stuff). But all of the imagery and artwork and videos that feature things that have to do with our band are done by David. He also kind of directs the performance bits and is responsible for most of the costumes and one-act plays that take place, so he pretty much gets free reign when it comes to that department.

But as far as the set and stage design, I have had a lot to do with that, and also our sound engineer and video engineer have hand-built everything together. Everything we use is hand-made, and those guys are the carpenters/electrical-engineers. And input for the video screens comes from Nick and also Dottie, the keyboard player’s fiance. We’ve been planning a big wedding party for them in the spring.

And then you’ve got everyone from our tour manager, who is onstage in costume every night, to various road managers and workers who are in costume doing their thing each night. But it’s like I said — I don’t think we have ever done the same show twice.

VM: Do you have any background in art or design? Or did you just figure this all out as the years went by?
JH: I grew up in a very musical but also very church-oriented, Southern Baptist family in Georgia, and my father is the musical director [of our church]. So not only did he make sing in the church choir and all that crap, but he would always put on the Christmas pageant and the school play etc. and my mom would always design the props, make backdrops and make costumes by hand and stuff. I had this very home-spun, “Waiting for Guffman”-style, tiny town theater experience, and I have always been acting in little plays. So I pretty much started out doing that stuff before we had any money.

In fact, five or six years ago, I had borrowed these huge slide projection screens from my uncle (I had used them for these church productions in the ‘80s). I set up three screens with old-school clips and slides of carousels and projected the whole slideshow behind the band. And then we started to get some money and decided to buy a bunch of new, high-tech electronics, so I turned things over to Nick. I was running this crap while playing drums in the middle of the show … Now, I have less of a hands-on approach and more just suggestions.

VM: You definitely have to come back and play at the Ryman with this theatrical aspect!
JH: We could do at least the most visually stunning show there, but certainly not the best musically, since every legend in the world has played there. Unless The Flaming Lips have played there — they are our one big competitor. It seems like everything we do, they end up doing bigger. But we’re close on their heels, and we’re doing it in a similar spirit but a different way.

VM: What do you foresee happening in the future with both James Husband? Do you see yourself continuing with your solo project?
JH: Absolutely. It’s not like it’s some kind of whim. It’s just a long overdue beginning of something that will be the focus of my attention from this point on. And that’s not to say that I’m going to stop playing with of Montreal — in fact, I think for the rest of this year [I’m] continuing to do both. I think we are going to do another leg or two this way.

But this whole temporary diversion of being a straight up rock band is not going to last very long. I think the plan for the next record, which is not going to come out until the end of the summer, is to totally revamp the whole thing, bring in additional musicians, and expand the band so the musicians are able to more closely recreate the record but without all the previous sampling technology that we were using. The idea is to have about ten or twelve [musicians] and multiple percussionists so we can do complex rhythms, because it’s just impossible for me to do as one man, especially since I’m not using any drum pads or anything. We want to bring in a couple of extra string players and horn players and make it more of a big-band sound, really a ’70s kind of band that would have that sort of instrumentation. But that all depends on us finding all of the right people — we are going to start auditioning people, talking to all of our friends in various bands and seeing their availability.

If we can pull it off it would be something of like a super group and much more focused on the music. I’m sure there will still be some sort of elaborate stage production, but the idea is to sort of scrap everything we have been doing for the last year and a half and create some new characters. We also want to get rid of the more colorful things and instead create some darker settings and lighting.

VM: Do you opt for the same kind of stage shows for James Husband?
JH: No, with that, it’s just about the music. I mean we already have all the [of Montreal stuff] set up there, so we sometimes will throw some of that on for the colors, but I think most of that would just distract you. The point of the James Husband project is for me to feel comfortable singing the songs. We tried doing it like a big rock band to make it more exciting, but the truth of the matter is, you listen to the album and it’s all pretty mellow — it’s all just about my singing. And I can’t sing very loudly or very well when a lot is going on, so I tried to make it a very soft band. I have a cellist and a clarinet player and I play mostly acoustic guitar … so it’s very, very much the opposite of a [loud rock show].

VM: You mentioned that tonight is your last show on this tour. Any idea when you’ll start up again?
JH: Well, I’m doing another run by myself, which is obviously not as easy because everything falls to my own resources. I don’t have the tour bus, I don’t have the crew of ten people … which is why it’s so nice to tour with of Montreal because, sure, I’m a member of the band, and it’s all my equipment and my money in a way (at least a fifth of it), but at the same time I’m looking at it like I’m a new artist and I got an opportunity to play with a band like of Montreal. So you remove the obvious conflict of interest, and it makes things a whole lot easier [to look at].

But, that being said, the five or six of us will jump in a van and do a small club tour in March, and then of Montreal will [start touring again] in June, so I’m doing both worlds for the next few months. Then we have Dottie’s wedding, which we are all taking a month off for, and then ... who knows. Maybe we’ll play some festivals, or something.

2008-10-01 - Spin

Of Montreal: Welcome to Normal Town

With unlimited imagination and the resources to realize his weirdest whim, Of Montreal's gender- (and genre-) bending, secretly sane visionary is learning to have his cake and eat it, too.
By Andy Battaglia 09.22.08 1:55 PM
Photographed for SPIN by Michael Schmelling
Photographed for SPIN by Michael Schmelling

For an impish sprite with a wardrobe full of starry aqua ankle boots and fishnet tights, Kevin Barnes is surprisingly intense when it comes to volleyball. It's a numbing summer night in Athens, Georgia, and we're engaged in some serious business in Normaltown, the larky boho haven that Barnes calls home. His backyard is strewn with tangles of Christmas lights, and his friends -- the tight coterie of musicians, painters, and various weirdo visionaries who help make Of Montreal more than just a band -- have split into gamely warring factions. "I've seen him rip off his shirt in anger for losing," says Of Montreal drummer and multi-instrumentalist Jamey Huggins. Keyboardist Dottie Alexander describes playing against Barnes as "a real catharsis."

The attic in the house up front is where Barnes has worked on a series of increasingly ambitious art-rock masterpieces, including Of Montreal's ninth album, Skeletal Lamping. But it's out here, in the yard past the trampoline and a kiddie pool, where Barnes, 34, and his band function like a true unit. The group just treated itself to a new piece of equipment: a shiny pink volleyball to replace a leaky old one wrapped with what bassist Davey Pierce describes as "20 pounds of duct tape." (They tried.) The grass around the net is littered with melted Cherry Garcia cones and empty beer cans. By any sporting measure, the level of play is unmistakably low. But the spirit! Bodies lurch and dive feverishly. Absurdist trash-talk zings over the net like so many feeble slams: "We need to get you finger extensions!" "What would Jackie Joyner-Kersee do?"

On the Set with Of Montreal (video hosted on Spin's website)

Barnes himself is commanding but relatively quiet. Between points, he riffs on the allure of Aerosmith and tells of a dream in which a bandmate appeared before him with a disarmingly small penis and six swinging testicles. (That would be Ahmed Gallab, a newly enlisted supplemental drummer, not yet in town to be freaked out.) But the Kevin Barnes diving after wobbly shots with an incongruously focused look is a long way from the upstart star who preens onstage amid a mess of cuddly winged monsters.

Of Montreal's practice space is in a complex of repurposed warehouses between a chicken-processing plant and a cement factory, under a rusty water tower on which hobo is graffitied in a shaky hand. A trapeze studio and a bike shop do business among art spaces and rooms made noisy by dozens of bands. They rent two large rooms: one for music and another to build props and sets for their famously elaborate stage shows. The music room boasts a guitar amp draped in pink fur and a chandelier attached to a pulley, built on a whim to raise and lower for the lighting of wax candles.

The prop room nearby houses the fixtures that make Of Montreal come alive onstage. A wooden box swathed in brightly colored paint serves as a makeshift coffin from which Barnes can spring forth as a ghostly white blob, covered with the contents of 30 cans of shaving cream.


"Over here we're building leaf-blower guns," says Nick Gould, who started designing sets and props for Of Montreal as a recovering film-school student and dates keyboardist Alexander. Components of a dazzling stage set stack up high against a wall, with luminescent risers and a catwalk suspended in between. In concert they flash in stroboscopic patterns like something from Ziggy Stardust's yard sale. In storage they're just a bunch of plywood contraptions cobbled together and crammed with standard-issue 60-watt bulbs. "Your output is going to be exponentially more creative when you make it up as you go," says Gould.

Of Montreal's growing stature -- 2006's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? sold an indie-respectable 108,000 copies worldwide -- owes a lot to the ad hoc spectacles they stage, with little budget but lots of ingenuity. When they performed "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse" on Late Night With Conan O'Brien last year, Of Montreal had so many people doing so many different things on set -- sword fighting, stumbling around in a ten-foot space-god suit -- that union rules required them to be billed as a "performance group" rather than just a band.

Live Video: Of Montreal, "Mingusings"

Such shoestring theatricality has made them heroes to a new breed of like-minded bands. "Kevin is constantly pushing the boundaries of pop, which is inspirational to slackers like us," says Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT. "He's making the Black Albums and Station to Stations of today."

This outsize ambition has been funded in part by a handful of commercial deals, including a jingle for a certain Australian-themed steak-house franchise that has been the source of much debate in indie circles. "It's all slightly embarrassing, a skeleton in the closet," Barnes says. "But we put a lot of money into the shows that we might not see again. If you want to make a living making music these days, you have to have other sources of income."

"We're always up for an incredulous moment," says guitarist Bryan Poole, who joined up with Barnes more than a decade ago. Back then, Barnes was a shy, awkward twentysomething from Florida with an ear for forgotten '60s pop and a belief that indie rock could be more than glum guys in plaid shirts. Poole remembers him confessing to not having any friends until he was ten or 11, so "he had to create his own world and all these things to entertain himself."

Barnes wasn't alone in Athens, though. When he first moved there, he shared a house with Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel and Will Hart and Bill Doss from Olivia Tremor Control -- each a prime mover in the experimental psychedelic confab known as the Elephant 6 Recording Company. "That was just about making music for yourself and your friends," Barnes remembers. "The scene didn't exist that we wanted, so we just had to make it."

2009-06-01 - Nylon

2009-04-21 - Muso's Guide

Of Montreal: on-stage battles and solo projects

By Rebecca Schiller • May 21st, 2009 •

Of Montreal

We had the chance to chat and dine with a red skinny-jean-clad Jamey Huggins from Of Montreal before the band played the first of two sold-out shows at Boston’s Paradise Rock Club. Read on to find out about on-stage battles, the bustle of being on tour, and Jamey’s new solo side project as James Husband.

Muso’s Guide: So the tour’s been going well so far?

Jamey Huggins: Um, yea, all the shows have been sold out; audiences have been enthusiastic, if not maybe a bit misbehaved. We’ve had a few ejections.

MG: What happened?

JH: You know just, them jumping on stage and getting drunk and stage diving. A couple of our people got hurt [laughs] because of our own antics on stage, fighting. Not really fighting, but choreographed fights, a couple of bumps on the head, you know. I’ve got some wretched calluses.

MG: How did that happen?

JH: Drums.

MG: So how is it being back in Boston? I saw of Montreal perform at the Orpheum earlier this year.

JH: Yea, I really liked that place.

MG: Will the show be a lot different being at a smaller venue tonight?

JH: Well that’s just it—it’s a lot smaller.

MG: So will you be able to have all your crazy scenes on stage? Is it harder to pull off?

JH: Yeah, sometimes it works better because it’s so compact. Um, it might look a little bit more effective because it’s such a smaller stage, and it’s easier to transform a smaller stage so that it looks like a different room. But yea, everything’s up there, whether or not it’s gonna function [laughs]. But a lot of stuff broke in New York and we haven’t had a chance to replace them; technical things, all kinds of things. Instruments, amps, videos, boxes, light bulbs. We haven’t had a chance because we’re playing every day and traveling every night. We’re crossing our fingers that we don’t have a technical issue tonight.

MG: Do you think you’ll get to do any sightseeing while you’re here?

JH: I mean, it’s already after six, the doors are in less than an hour, we’ll be on stage in two and a half to three hours, and during that time I just want to get this delicious Thai food down and maybe have a little time to prepare, clean up a little bit. That’s the thing— you almost never get to sightsee. We were in New York for three days I didn’t do anything that wasn’t related to the band.

MG: So I hear you’re working on a solo album now?

JH: Well I’m done with it. It’s set for end of the summer, late August.

MG: Do you know what it’s called yet?

JH: No, I’m still working on the title. I have to come up with all the artwork and stuff in the next maybe two weeks.

MG: And you’re going by James Husband for that?

JH: Yeah.

MG: How did you come up with that name?

JH: Uh, it’s not really that creative, because it’s just a really slight a variation of my real name—a syllable. I think there was this guy who was a manager for a ‘60s group, um, they were called The Pretty Things. And I was reading in their liner notes about these things involving their manager and his name was something like David Husband, and I had never heard of that as a last name but I guess it really is like a common British last name. Um, but I just liked the sound of it [laughs]. I don’t know. Something to give it a little bit of, uh, a shift of focus from reality.

MG: How is the sound of the solo stuff different from Of Montreal?

JH: I’m not trying to go somewhere different with it, because a lot of the stuff was recorded and written before Satanic even came out, and a lot of the stuff is six years old or more. Uh, and it’s definitely not danceable. I mean, I guess you could dance to it, some of it. But there’s no real electronic element to it. It’s much more rooted in like ‘60s/’70s kind of production and instrumentation. If anything, it’s a little bit more like, uh, R&B influenced, but less Motown. More like Memphis-style. And then some of it’s almost country-ish, but I can’t help that ‘cause I’m from Georgia. But I don’t know. There’s a lot of different styles in there. It’s definitely more of a headphone record, not like a Saturday night kind of record. It’s more for the car than dance floor.

MG: So did anyone else from the band work on the album with you?

JH: Dottie plays the saxophone and sings a little bit. Bryan played some ripping electric guitar solos, I guess on only really one song. But that’s the thing about doing what I do, is I can play everything, so I do. I mean, to me, that’s part of the fun—playing all of it, so I do that until I run into something I can’t handle, like a cello or a horn or something. I do play trumpet, but not nearly as good as the guy that I got on the record. And I have this cellist who did some really great stuff. So yeah, other than that it’s a one-man band. But I intend to change that because we’re gonna make it a live touring thing. Most of Of Montreal will be involved with that. I mean I’ve done shows with all these guys. In fact I’ve even done like whole opening tours with of Montreal. But, you know I’ve never fully realized it. It’s kind of like a project that the rest of the band was enthusiastic about. And finally, I guess, Kevin was the real driving force, and kind of convinced me to go and work with Polyvinyl, on the initial release. So I guess I have him to credit for kind of lighting a fire under my ass. When it does come out, we’re gonna try and do a whole tour, treat it like the real thing.

--

A continued conversation (first part here) with Jamey Huggins of the glamtastic American band, Of Montreal: this week read about the band’s almost overnight success in Europe, opening for Franz Ferdinand, and life on the Of Montreal tour bus.

MG: of Montreal just played over in Europe—how was the response different over there?

JH: Uh, well, it’s a weird thing, you know? Like, in England it’s such a hard thing to get an audience. And then suddenly, the last time we were there, or the time before this last time, we were really struggling for some press. And we played a show for like 200 people> or something, did a couple of interviews, and then the last time we were there, we sold out this like 1,500 theatre and had to turn away like 300 people who were trying to get in. It was like overnight we were suddenly like legitimate in London after we’d been playing there for years at these really small clubs. And then like, the Franz Ferdinand concert, we opened for them and did that.

MG: How did that show go?

JH: It was kind of a nightmare, actually. Nothing to do with them, you know, they’re absolutely great. They were really kind and everything, the band, but we had to go on in this really small space. And for of Montreal to do an opening set for anyone, it’s kind of tricky. So we played like six or seven songs, and we had a major technical meltdown where our in-ear monitoring died, so no one could hear what they were singing, we couldn’t hear each other. We fixed it after a couple of songs. But still, it was great. And then we went to France and had a fantastic show in Paris. For some reason Paris loves the new of Montreal stuff. We sold more copies of Hissing Fauna and Skeletal Lamping in France than all of the rest of Europe combined.

MG: Why do you think that is?

JH: Well, I don’t know, the French like electro. And those records are very much, like, beat-driven. Um, but also I think we have a really great press team there. We just happened to get lucky with some really great, super enthusiastic, super influential people. And I guess, they told us this one story about this really popular TV host who has, like, several million viewers, and does this show, and apparently she made some little statement where she held up Hissing Fauna on her show and said “This is the best record of the year, and if everyone watching the show doesn’t go out and buy this tomorrow I’m gonna stab my hand with this…” She had like a knife, and was holding up the record with this knife, and was stressing how emphatic she was that France needed to listen to this strange American band.

MG: I guess it worked, then.

JH: Well, I’m sure that’s part of it. But it’s weird, cause in France, they play us on like regular radio, you know? More of like the Clear Channel rock station or something. So it’s like weirdly somehow more legitimate or something. They don’t have the sense that we’re like an indie band.

MG: So will there be more crazy costumes tonight? Any family members making cameos again?

JH: Yeah, you know, it’s always a revolving cast, depending on who can do it. I mean, if we had our way, we’d have them all every night. People have been kind of trading off, taking legs of the tour. So like we had Nina [Barnes, Kevin’s wife] in New York, and we even had Alabee [Kevin’s daughter] on stage.

MG: What did Alabee do?

JH: She danced, and sort of rode on her mother like a horse. Um, but we have David Barnes and his little troupe of, uh, performers. So I think there’s about five of them tonight. It’s kind of been shifting from night to night. He’s gotten really good at writing sort of little scenes. They’re kind of like one-act plays and provide something like a music video. I see it as they’re like mini videos for each song. Some of it’s like pre-planned, some of it’s live stuff. But in addition to that, uh, he’s taken to writing out like actual characters that reoccur and stuff. So, the last tour, it was a lot more, kind of like, theatrics, dancing around, and choreographed fights, stuff like that. But this time around he has like names for the characters and actual like acting teams and stuff. He’s been writing them on the bus and trying them on stage. Last night, they tried something I’d never seen before, where they had like a Christmas morning. So they had all these performers dressed up like little kids in pajamas and such, and they were all opening presents, but then inside one of the presents they rigged up a smoke machine. So like, three out of the four kids open their presents and there are gas masks, and they’re all excited about their gas masks, and they put them on, and the last kid opens his present and it just shoots out gas. Strange things like that. And tonight they won’t let us use it. Apparently this stupid Great White thing [a deadly nightclub fire caused by pyrotechnics at a concert in 2003], all smoke machines are illegal in every venue in this state. Which is ridiculous, because there’s no fire involved. So there will be no smoke tonight.

MG: Think there will be an extra crazy crowd tonight, being 4/20?

JH: I don’t even know what that is. I mean I know that people smoke pot at 4:20 in the afternoon or something. I don’t know, I hadn’t given it any thought.

MG: So what’s it like on the tour bus?

JH: It’s just like any other environment. Just certain times of the day it might be really wild, and everybody is hanging out. Just sort of doing what you do. And other times it’s like a tomb and all you can hear is some snoring.

MG: What are your thoughts on Kevin stripping at shows?

JH: Well that’s only happened once, and it was like three years ago. I think he’s outgrown his exhibitionist phase a little bit. And he’s actually been dressing a lot more masculinely. But he’s still wearing like a pink woman’s Indian kind of garb. But I think he’s grown into another phase.

MG: Who does your makeup before the show?

JH: Everybody does their own. I’ve gone away from it a little bit, from the sort of glammier stuff. Now it’s more like stage makeup.

--

And now for the final piece in our interview with Jamey Huggins of American band, of Montreal: we discuss the new of Montreal album, Kevin’s gin-induced inner comedian, and the misconceptions that the band’s creativity stems from drugs.

MG: So is there a new of Montreal album in the works yet?

JH:There’s definitely a new one. It’s probably about six or seven songs right now.

MG: Any idea what it’s called yet?

JH: Well Kevin gave all the albums their titles since Hissing Fauna. This one’s called Controller Sphere. All the album titles are in that one song ['Faberge Falls For Shuggie']. Uh, Skeletal Lamping, Controller Sphere, a couple more, I forget. We’re playing two of them, two brand new ones that are going to be on that record: tonight, one of them, and the other tomorrow night.

MG: What are they called?

JH: Well Kevin’s still working on the title, but it’s temporarily called “Cokehead Cokehead.” But, it’s not at all inspired by the drug. The original lyrics are kind of based around the word coquette, and then, we were joking around at this radio performance, and I think I misheard it and said, “It sounds like you’re saying cokehead.” And he thought that was hilarious so now he’s been calling it like ‘Cokehead’.

MG: What’s your favorite song off of Skeletal Lamping?

JH: Um, I think it’s probably ‘Nubile Miscreants’. I really, really love playing it live. It’s definitely my favorite song to perform. And also I think the lyrics are really good. At first I was kind of upset by it. I couldn’t understand who [Kevin] was singing about. But then I finally realized that if anyone should know better, I should know that when he sings about ketamine-addicted teenagers and, you know, college dorms, that he just makes that shit up. There’s nobody. All those lyrics about Rachel, crystal meth, and uh, I think it’s a stroke of genius cause like a lot of our fans think it’s reality. For me, it’s just really clever story-telling. And the rhymes are really good. It’s just not his typical song. A little bit more literal, not just fancy word play. There’s an actual little story there. And that’s kind of what he used to do, in the pre-electro days. A lot of character-based stories with like names and little sub plots and stuff. Plus, it’s got a nice groove to it. A lot of the songs are so, uh, what’s a complimentary way to say this? Uh, I don’t know, it’s kind of like awkwardly arranged. The whole point of it is it’s supposed to be jarring and unexpected. But that one to me is a little breath of like, a couple of minutes of the record that it’s really like groovy. And it doesn’t have a whole lot of like erratic kinda things happening in it. I don’t know, for some reason I just really like it.

MG: Are there any of Montreal pre-show rituals?

JH:Yea, but nothing like really surprising. I mean, Kevin and I like to bathe. Not, not each other [laughs]. But a ritual of getting as clean as possible before we get really dirty. You know, we all sit around and put a little makeup on and stuff and everyone has their, like, beverage ritual: certain things they will or won’t drink before the show.

MG: What are they?

JH:Well I’ll start with the dont’s [laughs]. Dottie and I are not allowed to drink whiskey or red wine before the show but Kevin and Bryan are heavily encouraged to do so.

MG: Why is that?

JH:Well, everyone’s had their own ups and downs with alcohol, and, uh, for some reason if Dottie and I drink anything brown, like whiskey or red wine, we tend to get really aggressive with each other and fight. And so we have banned it from ourselves. It wasn’t like a band decision. We just said that we weren’t allowed to do that any more cause we were fighting with each other right before we’d go on stage. But Kevin, if he drinks whiskey, becomes like a standup comedian, and if you’re lucky enough to catch him on a rare night, or if for some reason, every one in a while he’ll do a shot of gin, which is a terrible thing to shoot, but sometimes there’s nothing to mix it with. But if Kevin drinks maybe two shots of gin, or like a really strong gin and tonic, then he’ll talk to the audience more and put on these little characters. He can be really fun if you just get the right amount, the right concoction [laughs].

It’s the same way with Bryan, you know. He’s hilarious. But he’s become kind of more distant with the crowd. It used to be that he’d talk just as much as we played, you know. Five or six years ago, there would be enough banter in a single show to release a half-hour of spoken word. And a lot of times he’ll just go into poetry or something. Uh, but, you know, there’s also something to be said about being professional. And maybe we shouldn’t be drunk, and maybe we should actually play stuff, play the songs [laughs]. But you know, every once in a while it comes out that way. But maybe for 4/20, who knows? Maybe Kevin Barnes will be stoned off his ass [laughs].

Uh, that’s a frustrating thing we were talking about last night, this sort of presumption that we all use drugs. But besides beer, a little bit of gin, and some kombucha? And some, you know, Ibuprofen, it couldn’t be farther from the truth. People have a really hard time accepting that creativity can come from imagination. And it’s really amazing how widespread that attitude is among people who are fans of music and art, but they, themselves, can only imagine that it’s created by having some kind of mind-altering chemical in your brain or whatever. But I guess if you’ve never written a song or made a painting, then it must seem to you or that type of person, maybe it does seem like they could only imagine coming up with an idea only if they were in a totally different mindset. But if you’re a songwriter, you can be more sober and normal to come up with something really entertaining. And that’s the whole thing. A lot of the songs that we do are so unconventional and so weirdly lyrical and strange arrangements and stuff, but that’s because we want to make something different. It’s like a conscious choice to make something that hasn’t been done before, to make it really interesting and colorful and unexpected as possible. And that can be done, you know, on coffee and um a good night’s sleep, you know? Or at 4 in the morning, whatever. But there’s definitely no speed involved, or like ecstasy or anything, or for God’s sake acid. Which is what we always get accused of; described as like “such and such…on acid.” I don’t know, that’s a frustrating thing, because Kevin, especially, has never done anything like that. But, um, I understand a lot of our fans do. And there’s a lot of college students who come to of Montreal shows as if it were a rave or something and all take X and coke and come in off their tiny faces, high as a kite. And then I wonder if they can even remember the show.

MG: That’s all for now—I’ll let you get back to eating your dinner. Thanks, Jamey!