2008-10-01 - Rolling Stone

The Surreal Life

– Rolling Stone, 2008-10-01

Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes is obsessed with Prince, suicide, and borrowing his wife's tights. Meet rock's newest damaged genius.

There are many things that Kevin Barnes' wife might prefer he not talk about. For instance, when she became pregnant a few years ago, the idea of becoming a father so terrified Barnes that he considered committing suicide. Or that after his daughter was born, his misbehavior on the road nearly destroyed their marriage. Or that he suffers from chronic depression, which he treats with the powerful antidepressant Cymbalta in a haphazard regimen. "I take it every three days or so," says the 34-year-old leader of the cult-fave psychedelic pop group Of Montreal. "I should probably take it more, but I kind of like that it messes up my mind. Every day is like a roller coaster — sometimes I feel really good, and sometimes I feel all tingly." Today is a Cymbalta day, which makes Barnes feel "introspective and weird." In the Athens, Georgia, band's industrial rehearsal space, downwind from a chicken-processing plant, Barnes stands quietly among his cheerful, PBR-drinking bandmates, with a purple Vitaminwater at his feet and a glossy Rickenbacker strapped to his slight frame. Dressed like Ziggy Stardust on a casual Friday — skintight red jeans, octagonal clear-frame sunglasses, a jaunty blue scarf adorned with tiny white stars — he absently noodles on "Day Tripper" before calling the song "Triphallus, to Punctuate!" from the band's new album, Skeletal Lamping (out October 21st). Three of his bandmates grab basses and pick out complex, strangely melodic lines as Barnes lets loose with an effects-heavy series of "ooh-ooh-oohs" that sound like Freddie Mercury on helium.

As with the last two Of Montreal records, Barnes recorded Skeletal Lamping (the title came to him after reading a Dylan Thomas poem) at home on his computer. An idea-packed pastiche inspired by Brian Wilson's SMiLE and Prince's Sign o' the Times, Lamping boosts the group's oddball pop with its polyperverse, sexed-up lyrics and kitchen-sink range — from hip-hop and disco to freaked-out soul and Stones-y blues. It arrives just a year after Barnes inadvertently introduced himself to the masses by allowing Outback Steakhouse to use his 2005 song "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games" in its ads. (The Australian-themed chain added didgeridoo and changed the lyric "Let's pretend we don't exist/Let's pretend we're in Antarctica" to "Let's go Outback tonight/Life will still be here tomorrow.") "They told me it was just going to be a radio jingle," he says. "And of course it wasn't — it became the anthem of Outback Steakhouse. The reality is it's definitely not good to sell a song to a commercial, as far as allowing people to have their own memories of a song." Barnes posted an anguished essay, "Selling Out Isn't Possible," online, writing, "The pseudo-Nihilistic punk rockers of the '70s created an impossible code that no one can actually live by."

But looking back, Barnes says the fear that he'd damaged his credibility fueled Lamping's adventurous spirit. "I was like, 'If you're going to call me a phony, I'm going to prove that there's nothing about me motivated by record sales,'" he says. Take Georgie Fruit, a character Barnes introduced on Of Montreal's 2007 album Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, and in whose voice he sings much of the new record. "He's an African-American man who was in an R&B band called Arousal in the Seventies," Barnes says. "They didn't go very far, and he ended up in prison, where he had a lot of weird experiences and decided to be a woman. So he had a sex change. He's very free — I think of him as a genderless superhuman, untouched by taboos or the boring parts of our culture." (Barnes is considering an Arousal "reissue" as a side project: "It would be totally fun." He's also working on an album with MGMT's Andrew VanWyngarden under the name Blikk Fang.)

Of Montreal's live shows have evolved into over-the-top glam spectacles involving surreal props, whimsical sets and multiple costume changes — and, on one occasion, a fully nude Barnes performing against projected clips of Seventies gay porn. As the tours have grown increasingly baroque, Of Montreal have developed a reputation as kind of a Grateful Dead for arty, sexually ambiguous kids (plus David Byrne and Bono, who have both been spotted at gigs) who use the shows as an opportunity to dress up in hypercolorful garb, apply liberal amounts of makeup and glitter, and get supremely elevated on booze and drugs. In a few weeks, the band is heading off on its biggest tour yet, a theatrical production complete with elaborate costumes (drag, mythological creatures, giant kimonos), Madonna-size video screens and a cadre of "performance artists" who will act out choreographed scenes, including a brawl in a Deadwood-style saloon. "The inspiration is very Michel Gondry," Barnes says. "Or the kid in Rushmore that puts on those productions."

At rehearsal, Barnes' five bandmates appear to have been sent over from Indie-Rock Central Casting. Guitarist Bryan Poole has a Neil Young look involving bushy sideburns and an awesome tricked-out art project of a car (with a complicated back story about an artist friend's attempt to assemble a militia to capture a mysterious local known as the 8-Track Gorilla); bassist Davey Pierce lives in a garage next door among at least a dozen vintage mopeds in various states of operability; synth player Dottie Alexander sports a pink cheerleaderish skirt and polka-dot tights; and multi-instrumentalist Jamey Husband has an ascotlike scarf that recalls Fred's from Scooby-Doo. Rocking a cool straw hat and an unbuttoned cardigan without a shirt is drummer Ahmed Gallab, the latest addition. Gallab (who's been in town for less than a month and lives in the loft above the rehearsal space) emigrated from Sudan when he was a kid, and is eagerly waiting for rehearsal to stop so he can break his Ramadan fast. "There's two sides of Of Montreal," Barnes explains the next day. "There's the recorded music, which I've been predominantly doing myself. But the performing band is collaborative, and everyone is deeply invested emotionally and financially."

Barnes grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a well-off suburb of Detroit. "I listened to a lot of poodle rock," he says. "Mötley Crüe and Ratt were my favorite bands, and I covered my bedroom with pictures I cut out of Hit Parade and Circus." When he was 13, his parents — an accountant father (with dreams of becoming a stand-up comic) and teacher mother — bought him a black Pearl drum kit like Tommy Lee's. He formed his first band, Wit's End, singing and playing drums with a local kid named Mark Tremonti, who went on to become the guitarist in Creed. "Kevin was always a real talented guy," Tremonti recalls (the two haven't spoken since high school). "And he had a really cool voice and an artistic edge to him. Just to be able to write songs at that age was amazing. Our best song was 'Pull My Trigger.' It was pretty much a sex, drugs and rock & roll type of tune. You know, that Mötley Crüe thing. Dangerous lyrics. For a group of eighth-graders it was pretty edgy."

A year later, Barnes' father lost his job and moved to West Palm Beach, Florida, to look for work, leaving Barnes with a profound feeling of uncertainty. He fell into his first major depression. "Things were fucked up, and I was getting into trouble at school," he says. "Even though I wanted to be a rebel, there was a part of me that was sweet and wanted to be accepted." (Tremonti remembers, "He didn't really adhere to authority — he was a guy who probably got in trouble more than the average kid.")

Barnes began suffering increasingly debilitating anxiety attacks, culminating in what he refers to as "a weird drug experience." "It was my birthday and my friends bought me all this pot," he says. "Maybe because I was still developing, I had this bizarre reaction where I totally lost my mind. I really thought I was dying. After that I became conscious of how vulnerable we are psychologically. I still feel touched by that experience, which used to bother me. Like, what the fuck is wrong with me — I still feel as crazy as I did when I was a teenager. But now I feel like it's good, like it fuels my creativity."

In Florida, Barnes made a crucial discovery — British Invasion rock, particularly the Beatles, the Kinks and the Rolling Stones. "I was delivering pizzas, and I got The Kink Kronikles on vinyl," he says. "I put it on a cassette and listened until I wore it out." Playing along to an early Stones comp on guitar, Barnes taught himself chords, and by the time he finished school, he had released a collection of tunes on the influential indie label Bar/None. In search of a band, he headed to Athens after seeing the classic documentary Athens, GA. Inside/Out. "I was just dying to find like-minded people to play with," he says. "But I never thought in a million years that I would ever have a career in music — I was just a kid with a four-track recorder with no friends and no prospects."

Athens has two abiding passions: University of Georgia football and off-kilter art rock. Best known as the birthplace of R.E.M., Athens also nurtured freaked-out proto-alt bands such as the B-52s and Pylon, who exploded from acid-fueled UGA parties in the early Eighties. A decade later, when Barnes arrived fresh out of high school, a new scene was starting to take off — centered around a tight group of Beatles-and-analog-recording-obsessed indie bands that referred to themselves as the Elephant Six Collective. "It was just a great explosion of talent," Barnes says of his early years there. "Very bohemian, everyone living together, three or four people sleeping on the floor, everyone playing on each other's records. And there was the excitement of seeing Michael Stipe at a house party, wearing a straw hat, looking really cool. I'd be like, 'Oh, my God.'"

Until 2004's awesomely titled Satanic Panic in the Attic, the first Of Montreal record Barnes made by himself, the band was mainly inspired by the Elephant Six groups (Neutral Milk Hotel, Olivia Tremor Control, the Apples in Stereo among them), whom Barnes befriended shortly after moving to town. "They were kind of like big brothers to me," he says. "I sort of worshipped them — like, God, they're making records and going on tour, they have a publicist, a booking agent, all these things." Living together in a series of communal houses, including a $400-a-month brick bungalow he shared with Neutral Milk leader Jeff Mangum ("It was a total party house — we had a skateboard quarter pipe in the living room and no heat"), Of Montreal cut several low-fi albums between day jobs. "We all wanted to sound like the Beatles," Barnes says. "And everyone was turning each other on to lost psychedelic classics — like someone would go on tour and discover, like, Os Mutantes or the Pretty Things' S.F. Sorrow and bring it back to the circle. Everyone would be really influenced by them."

Of Montreal's breakthrough, 2007's Hissing Fauna, veers from synthy electro pop to sun-splashed R&B inspired by psychedelic-soul great Shuggie Otis (name-checked on the standout "Faberge Falls for Shuggie"). On about half the songs, Barnes' vocals shift into a life-affirming falsetto — but the lyrics are more harrowing than groovy. Hissing Fauna's emotional center, "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse," finds Barnes singing, "I'm in a crisis/I need help/C'mon mood, shift back to good again . . . chemicals don't make me sick again."

Barnes met Nina Twin — a talented visual artist and musician — at a gig in Oslo in 2001. After a long-distance courtship, she moved to Athens and joined the band on bass. When she became pregnant in 2004, the couple moved to Nina's native Norway to take advantage of the Scandinavian nation's free health care. "The government actually pays you when you have a child," Barnes says. "So we said, 'Fuck it, let's put everything in storage, go to Norway and see what happens from there.'"

Barnes suffered the deepest depression of his adult life, becoming mired in anxiety, paranoia and persistent thoughts of suicide. (Heimdalsgate is the name of the street where they settled in Oslo.) "I was totally isolated, totally broke, we were couch surfing, and I had never imagined myself a father. I found the concept of having a child terrifying, and it is terrifying. There was so much terror in my mind. It was so much easier to live in a dream state where all I had to worry about was myself." And as scary as the pressures of fatherhood were, the fear that he'd have to give up music was worse. "We had been a band for seven years, but never had any commercial success," Barnes says. "But the thing that motivated me wasn't praise or acclaim — it was the process of creation. So there was no reason for me to stop making music, until there was the idea that, fuck, if I have a kid . . . I'll have to stop fuckin' around and take care of my kid."

Encouraged by their booking agent, the couple returned to the U.S. to launch a tour behind the surprisingly popular Satanic Panic. After an attempt to bring their daughter, Alabee, on the road failed, the tour continued without Nina — who became increasingly resentful of being left behind. "Understandably so," Barnes says. "Taking care of a baby is nowhere near as much fun as going on tour."

With Nina at home, and fueled by champagne and antidepressants, Barnes began bringing his glam superqueen live-show persona to the afterparties. "I think the medication allowed him to function, but it also caused his psyche to become more disassociated from feelings like empathy — especially when alcohol is involved," says guitarist Poole, who records his own psychedelic side project as the Late BP Helium. "He'd do stuff like come up to you and stick his hand down your pants and start jerking off your dick. Or, like, try to make out with you, or take all his clothes off and just start walking around at parties."

Nina and Alabee moved back to Norway, and for half a year Barnes went on without them. But then something clicked inside. "I was looking for another Nina, in a way," he says. "But I realized what I had with her was so special. And I was missing Alabee a lot. My whole life I've been sort of detached emotionally, but with Alabee I understand true love. When I'd go visit them in Norway, Alabee would stand at the windowsill and cry because she wanted to see me. That's when you realize you need to be there for your child, because she needs you, she loves you. And you can't take that lightly."

For now, Barnes and Nina seem happy. They just bought a chic, modern, three-bedroom house in the leafy Athens neighborhood of Five Points, separated from the neighbors by tall, shady trees and a long driveway. The sun-soaked rooms feel homey and somehow Scandinavian, accessorized with high-end kitchen gear, an upright piano, framed expanses of cheery Marimekko fabric, Nina's artwork and shelves full of tasteful books (spotted: Portnoy's Complaint, Gravity's Rainbow, Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Dave Eggers' What Is the What).

Barnes' mom lives in a house next door and helps out with Alabee. When he's not making music, Barnes spends a lot of time in front of his new flatscreen TV, watching NFL games. "When I was a kid, like in high school and stuff, I felt very feminine," he says. "But I'm also very athletic, very into sports. I read ESPN magazine. I watch SportsCenter all the time. I'm a big Cleveland Browns and Indians fan."

Sitting on his big new patio as the sun sets, with Nina puttering around in an embroidered housedress, Barnes seems relaxed. His sunglasses are off, revealing sleepy, vulnerable eyes. But the couple's hard-won contentment could be shaken in a couple of weeks, when Of Montreal hit the road again for a yearlong tour. "I'm not always a very attentive husband," Barnes admits. "And there's no way I could be with Alabee all the time and never do anything in the adult world. Nina's a lot like me — it's hard for her to have a three-year-old as her only companion. But she's going to be performing the first four or five shows, and I'm excited. Hope springs eternal."

2008-11-13 - Paste (part 4)

Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes: The complete Paste interview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2007-02-27 - Seattle Music

Chemical Creation

Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes: Inside/Out.

Aja Pecknold

Published on February 12, 2007 at 5:45pm

Born in the Southern university town of Athens, Ga., in 1997, by way of frontman Kevin Barnes, Of Montreal have proven themselves to be one of the hardest-working art-pop, disco, glam indie bands around. In an era where myspace saturation, and a stamp of approval from Pitchfork, can send new bands from zero to 9.0 in a matter of months, it's a rare occurrence to see a band that's been steadily releasing records and wearing van tires bald with tour after tour for nearly a decade (they've played Seattle close to 20 times) finally make a blip on the pop culture radar. Their latest, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, has been raved about in such high-minded publications as The New York Times.

Barnes' music has gone places most people only dream about . . . while tripping on acid . . . in Alice's wonderland. From concept records where each song incorporates Dustin Hoffman to albums whose titles—like Horse and Elephant Eatery (No Elephants Allowed)—are reflective of the bizarre, colorful content within, it's clear there's no shortage of imagination at the source. Even while he was wallowing in the depths of depression on foreign soil during the making of Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, Barnes' well of weird, hook-drenched psychedelia seemed to spring eternal. And with sold-out shows and three costume changes a night, Barnes and his band just might need to get ready for their close-up.

Seattle Weekly: Your material is so full of imagination that it makes me wonder what you were like as a kid growing up.

Kevin Barnes: Well, I was a really shy kid, very introverted. I didn't have a lot of friends when I was really young. I don't know why. I guess where we lived there weren't a lot of kids around. So I think that kind of helped me establish an internal dialogue that benefited me later in my creative life.

What brought you to Athens?

I moved there because I really wanted to get a band together. I heard there was a pretty cool scene in Athens. You know, it had the sort of . . . the romantic dream of the early '80s—REM and the B-52's starting out. It's a cool city, very artsy, and people are pretty open-minded. It's a strange little oasis in a way because, y'know, it's in the South.

You spent a good portion of time while you were working on Hissing Fauna in Norway. What was that experience like?

It was cool to be in a European city and spend a long period of time there—learn where everything is, get acclimated—just because it's a different lifestyle in a lot of ways, especially during the Bush regime. It feels kind of weird to be an American.

Did you get that vibe from the people there?

To some degree, but I was pretty much like a ghost. No one was really like, "Oh my God, you're an American, let's talk politics!" I mean, most people were really cool, and understood that just because you are American doesn't mean you are a right-wing conservative. It was definitely a challenge, going through it all. At the time, I was like, "Oh my God, I'm freakin' out. I'm having a kid, and I have all these anxieties, and I'm in a foreign environment, and this is so crazy and I can't handle it!" I sort of broke down in a way. But now that I've kind of gotten through it, it's sort of made me a little bit, not necessarily stronger, but I think when you have experiences that don't totally traumatize you too incredibly and you are able to get past them, they give you an interesting perspective on things.

In one of the songs that you wrote while you were there, "Gronlandic Edit," you talk about the desire to pray to some kind of higher power, praying to a saint that nobody has heard of. Can you expound a bit on that?

Well, I was in this horrible downward spiral of chemical depression, and I didn't understand what was going on because I'd never experienced anything like that before, and so I felt totally under attack by these invisible forces, trying desperately to keep my head together. But I had so many problems. Anxiety issues, paranoia issues, and all these things. So I started thinking about God, or the saints, or religion, some type of spirituality, because I don't have any whatsoever. So I tried to think: "Should I be Buddhist, Mormon, Muslim?" None of them really appealed to me. But I felt like I wanted, like I needed, help—some sort of guidance. And so the saint that nobody has heard of is my uncle who died 10 years ago. For some reason—I don't do it as much anymore—but when I was in the really low period, I would try to pray to him and connect with him to have him help me, like picking him as a sort of celestial, benevolent force to contact. Because it's kind of my thought that when you die, sometimes, if you want to, you can help people who are living.

How much of the record was written in Norway?

I wrote the first half of it, from "Suffer for Fashion" to "A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger"—all of those songs were written and recorded in Oslo. Then we rented a house in Athens, and I put together kind of a makeshift studio in the attic. That's where the second half of the record was recorded.

In a song on the second half of the record, "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider," you tell a girl named Eva that she will never have you because you need a lover with soul power. ("Eva, I said I'm sorry/But you can never have me/Cuz you're just some faggy girl/And I need a lover with soul power/And you ain't got no soul power.") Can you talk about how you'd define soul power?

Well, it's kind of like my concept of emotional depth, and there's something beyond that, too, like when I imagine a person with soul power, it's like they're super comfortable with themselves and with the world around them. They just feel at peace in a way, and they can project that onto other people as well.

You've been putting out records and touring for nearly 10 years, and it seems like this release has been garnering quite a bit of attention. Do you feel that it may be a tipping point of sorts?

I think that maybe it's just—things have just sort of aligned in the right way, right now: the music that I'm writing, the sound of the recordings, the sound of the recordings of my contemporaries, and what the record-buying public is interested in. [The music is] sort of in line with whatever's fashionable right now. That's the thing you realize: Selling records has nothing to do with the quality of your record.

You used to be a gymnast.

Uh-huh—yes, I used to be totally into it.

Your suit in the video for "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse"—is that something you would have worn as a gymnast?

That's more speedskating. I have two different leotards, though—one of them is kind of obscene. It's a gold G-string, but I only wear it on special occasions.

Do you wear tights with it?

Yeah, I've been wearing tights. Not because I'm modest, but because I think it looks better when you don't have to see all this hair.

No waxing, then?

No. I thought about waxing, but then that's kind of like a commitment. You can't just wax once.

2007-02-00- Stomp & Stammer

Feb.07 Cover - Of Montreal =

Written by Glen Sarvady

Well Done: Of Montreal Leader (and Outback Pitchman) Kevin Barnes Mines Art From Some Not-So-G'Days With His Mate Kevin Barnes is hunkered down in one of his favorite places in the world - the attic of the rented Athens house he shares with his wife Nina and young daughter Alabee. "I don't like living out of a suitcase - I like having a home base where I can have my stuff set up. When it comes to writing and recording I like to be in Athens because there's this attic where I have everything set up, it's like a separate world," he explains on a chilly evening. "I get enough of the transient lifestyle when we're on tour." It's a surprising admission, given the guy's history. For the past few years Barnes has alternated stretches in Athens with periods in his wife's native Norway, most critically in late 2004 when the uninsured couple relocated to leverage that country's universal health care system for the birth of their child. And before he retreated to the attic, Barnes' band Of Montreal was one of those all-consuming experiences, to the point that its members shared a house in full-time musical immersion. Without these experiences Of Montreal would hardly sound like the 2007 edition that dropped the sprawling synth-glam opus Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?. Few bands can lay claim to an evolution as dramatic as the one from their beginnings ten years ago as a Kinks-influenced cabaret act on the outer ring of the burgeoning Elephant 6 scene to the proto-disco/synth-pop of 2005's breakthrough The Sunlandic Twins. Fewer still have made the journey with the same core personnel - there are plenty of examples of musicians asserting full control over a "brand" and turning it into a one-man recording process, but rarely does that transition occur without running off other members. "We were kind of at an impasse," Barnes says of 2002's Aldhils Arboretum, Of Montreal's most collaborative release and also its least satisfying. "Things were sort of fizzling within the band. We had been living together in a house on the outskirts of Athens - that sort of ended badly, not so badly that it was unrecoverable, but we reached a point where we all needed our own space. I had just gotten married, so my wife and I moved out to our own house and set up a studio. Rather than being a taskmaster and telling everyone how to play their parts on the next record, I just decided to do it all myself and take the band in a direction I had wanted to for awhile." That new direction found Of Montreal disassociating with much of the Elephant 6 doctrine. "We had this hang-up about electronic music, thinking that using MIDI instruments and electronic drums was almost like cheating," Barnes recalls. "I started realizing how narrow-minded that was and how liberating it was to open yourself up to all kinds of music, which led me to listen to more electronic and dance music and realize how complex it was." Barnes acknowledges that he initially faced a tough sell, to his community more so than his bandmates. "I was very much influenced by bands like Neutral Milk Hotel and Music Tapes, but it's kind of a weird clique, and it was difficult to incorporate anything outside this little bubble. And beyond the music there's kind of an ethos attached too - you don't go to McDonald's, you don't shop at Wal-Mart, you've got to be a vegetarian, you shouldn't care about fashion, follow the earth. And after a while it was like, ‘Fuck it -- I like glam, I like thinking about imagery.' I don't mind pretentiousness anymore - it's kind of fun to be false, because you're experimenting with different characters within yourself. I think it's better to take the David Bowie approach, working the nebulous concept and following whatever inspires you - even if it contradicts the thing you were doing before." Still, Barnes doesn't dismiss the role commercial acceptance played in smoothing the transition. "I think what helped a lot was that we started reaching a larger audience with Satanic Panic in the Attic, the first Of Montreal release recorded as a one-man band. One of the reasons we were having problems was that we had been struggling for so long without seeing results - if the goal is to support yourself with your music and that's not happening, then you have to pick up some sort of job you hate and you sort of lose focus. But when the band is doing well not only is it fun, but you're more focused because it is your job, and a dream come true." Particularly since The Sunlandic Twins bumped Of Montreal from the smaller clubs into the mid-size halls, the financial aspect has clicked. As the sole writer and recorder Barnes reaps the benefit of the CDs, but the band shares equally in all tour and merch proceeds. "It's supporting everyone - it's not like we're buying yachts or anything, but we're so used to scraping by on small budgets that it works." Barnes' next financial decision certainly tried the patience of the earthy Athens crowd. If you're familiar with The Sunlandic Twins and watch network television, by now you've likely noticed the prominent use of "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games" in an ad for Outback Steakhouse. "It happened very, very fast," Barnes explains with a hint of sheepishness. "I had been approached by a couple of different ad agencies before asking to use songs for commercials and it never panned out, so when they called about Outback I was very cynical and said, ‘Sure, pitch away.' Then they asked if I'd be OK with this much money, and I really in my heart didn't think it was going to happen so I said, ‘Yeah, sure, whatever, just leave me alone I'm working right now.' So when the deal actually came through I was like, ‘Fuck, do I really wanna do this?' I mean, Outback is so far outside the spectrum of what I care about, or what people who listen to this kind of music care about. It put me in a difficult position because I knew that if I did it then from an economic standpoint I'd be totally set for about a year, and I could focus on music without having to worry about anything. But I also knew it would turn people off and potentially ruin the song for people. I think it has ruined the song for a lot of people and it really messes with my credibility." Don't listen for Barnes' voice (or his original "Let's pretend we don't exist" chorus), in the spot, though. "That was the weirdest part -- they didn't want me involved at all. It was like, ‘What are you guys really paying me for? You're basically taking my melody line and the bassline, and that's it' - they didn't want the performance, they didn't want my lyrics. Why couldn't they just write their own melody line? They could have come up with something almost exactly like it, and I probably wouldn't have been able to sue them." Don't expect to see the tour van pulling into the Outback lot for freebies, either - bassist Bryan (The Late B.P.) Helium is a vegetarian. Continues Barnes, "I definitely have leanings toward vegetarianism but I'm not going to say I am one because I don't want to be that militant about it. We're not those people like, ‘You have to be exactly like us or you're an asshole.' I think about this like every day, because we get people writing us constantly - most say we know you're not Donald Trump, you need the money, good for you, but others - mostly the younger ones - are really uptight about it. You try not to think about being accessible but it's always in the back of your mind - is this going to sell well enough to support me, the band, my family? And that's been taken off my mind. But then you get this money and it's like I can just go back to making art and being as freaky and weird as I want to be. It's not apparent on Hissing Fauna because the record was basically done, but on the newer stuff it's almost like I'm proving to the world I'm not a sellout." Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? both builds on the sound of The Sunlandic Twins and takes that disc's success as license to move further onto the fringe. Its chipper moments are even more ebullient, its interludes more obtuse, and Barnes ventures deeper into '80s funk territory (Sunlandic's credits jokingly include Prince's crossed-out name as an all-purpose mastermind; the gag's even more relevant now). It also harbors a decidedly dark undercurrent. Barnes pooh-poohs my hypothesis that Sunlandic represents the giddy early throes of romance, whereas Hissing Fauna reflects everyday realities setting in. The thematic thread can even be traced to "Eros' Entropic Tundra" from Satanic Panic (one of that disc's few tracks, he explains, dating to pre-Nina days), on which Barnes dejectedly doubts he'll ever meet Ms. Right. "I'm not a super consistent person, so every day I don't know how I'm gong to feel," he counters. "Nina is really my first relationship - I had always been living in a fantasy world, looking for someone who didn't exist." Barnes claims he wasn't much of an autobiographical writer pre-Fauna. "This is the first record that really mirrors what was going on in my life. It's sequenced very chronologically." And unfortunately for him, the disc chronicles a pretty heavy time. "Nina Twin is trying to help/And I really hope that she succeeds," he sings on "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse" (Barnes hardly tries to disguise his sources - "I really view her as my twin, someone that you totally connect with on all levels"). The move to a foreign Nordic environment in the dead of winter (Barnes may want to research Seasonal Affective Disorder before scheduling his next Nordic stint) with few social contacts and a host of top-shelf stress factors (new home, new spouse, new kid) triggered a severe depression. "I was freaking out - we had no home base, we were staying at a friend's place in Norway, we're having a baby - all this stuff is totally on my shoulders and I have to deal with this craziness. And then I've got this new baby that I'm not spending any time with because of touring around Sunlandic. And there's so much stress on your relationship with a new kid. I was mainly making music on my laptop as therapy, to lift me out of this horrible darkness, because I was going crazy." Barnes matched his perkiest hooks with the direst topics. The bouncy "A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger" opens with the singsongy admission "I spent the winter on the verge of a total breakdown while living in Norway" and best of all, he tries to summon a moodswing by repeatedly pleading "Come on, chemicals!," turning "chemicals" into a ten-syllable word. "I think being in a foreign environment and being forced to grow is really healthy, because you can get knocked out of this position of feeling comfortable in the world," Barnes postulates in hindsight. "I think the government should pay for all Americans to go live somewhere else for six months, just to see what it's like to be a stranger, to get a new perspective and not feel so cocky." Initially, Nina Twin's help didn't appear to be enough. After migrating back to Athens in 2005 the couple broke up, Nina returning to Oslo with Alabee. "It was a really heavy scene - we had actually filed separation papers." Although Hissing Fauna's arc isn't purely narrative, the couple's romantic nadir fuels the disc's centerpiece. On "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal" Barnes recites a 12-minute synopsis of the twins' courtship set to a discordant motorik churn. "I fell in love with the first cute girl I met..." Barnes relates in a seemingly standard-issue recrimination, then continues "...who could appreciate Georges Bataille," and you realize this isn't typical boy-girl angst. "‘Grotesque Animal' kind of lets the tension out. Once that was off my chest, the record lightens up," he concurs. "After I recorded that there was a break in the Sunlandic tour, Nina and I got back to try to patch it together, and the record gets a little more fun again." To wit, the criminally infectious "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider" follows with hints of Barnes pulling back from the brink of an after-hours dalliance, and from there it's clear he's cast his lot with his Twin. How does his wife feel about such public airing of their travails? "She's an artist herself, she's awesome about this," Kevin gushes of Nina, a veteran of the Norway music scene who briefly doubled as Of Montreal's bassist before deciding pregnancy and nightclub smoke made for bad bedfellows. The two met at an Oslo Of Montreal show, continued their courtship at the Swedish festival called out in "Grotesque Animal," and married fairly quickly when she agreed to move stateside. Hopefully the family has now mastered their logistics, as 2007 shapes up as another touring year. The band, now scattered cross-country and cross-continent (longtime keyboardist Dottie Alexander resides in Santa Cruz, drummer Jamey Huggins followed his girlfriend to Stockholm, where he's doing production work, and newest addition Matt Dawson recently left Athens for Portland) convened in Athens for two weeks of rehearsals before the holidays, and planned for two more before hitting the road in late January. "We've got it worked out now after three albums doing it this way - I just send them each a special mix CD with their part on it and they learn it on their own. The big change is getting programmed drums into the live set. We were very much into the sixties scene and took pride in pulling off these complex arrangements without using backing tracks, but now that we're more dance-oriented it seems more acceptable." "I'm already pretty happy with how we sound musically, but there's a lot of work to go on the theatric side," reports Barnes, who visualizes the new live set as "a photo shoot where each song has its own frame, rather than a static image throughout the show." The opening screen at Of Montreal's website, a montage of Barnes applying copious makeup, reinforces the importance the latter-day Of Montreal places on fashion. "I've been playing less musical instruments live, trying to get the point where I can focus entirely on the theatrical aspects. I still love playing guitar, but it's nice to have the freedom not to play it on all songs." Furthering the Prince comparisons are a pair of tracks ("Faberge Falls for Shuggie" and "Labyrinthian Pomp"- whatever Barnes' aspirations to accessibility, he certainly doesn't advance them with his song titles) on which Kevin launches into an ill-advised falsetto channeling Sly Stone-by-way-of-The Purple One. These vocal acrobatics seem hard enough to replicate live, not to mention doing so without blushing. But Barnes voices little concern. "I've always been lucky to be able to just get into the character. I never feel self-conscious or nervous - I'm actually more nervous the smaller the crowd since then they seem more, um, human." Despite issuing no new "proper" material in 2006, Of Montreal did a yeoman's job staying in the spotlight. In addition to continuing accolades for Sunlandic and the Outback hubbub there was The Satanic Twins, a remix album of tracks from The Sunlandic Twins and Satanic Panic. It was an odd experience for Barnes, who's used to having a hand in every note of the finished product but in this case did little more than assembling and shipping off the basic tracks. He's particularly fond of Grizzly Bear's and Mixel Pixel's takes on his material. Current label Polyvinyl also brought the bulk of the band's back catalog (which had been snared in the Kindercore debacle) back into print. Don't look for those chestnuts to be added to the set list, though. "I don't like playing the older stuff - it's not that I don't like them, but I'm just not there anymore," he explains. "I'm not a very nostalgic or sentimental person, I don't romanticize the past, so doing them just feels unnatural. It's like the closing of a chapter - that period is done, I feel like Satanic Panic is the beginning of the new period." That new period is proving to have plenty of sauce and sizzle.

2006-02-16 - Miami Music

Solar Power

Of Montreal's intricate pop revels in the dark side of the sun

By MICHELE LAUDIG
Published on February 16, 2006

Where:
Polish American Club, 1250 NW 22nd Ave, Miami
Details:
performs Saturday, February 18. For more information, call 305-635-2240.


Rock critics can't resist calling Of Montreal "sunny," and there's plenty of truth to that description. Since 1997, the Athens, Georgia-based band has put out seven albums of whimsical pop psychedelia that play with shimmering, sophisticated layers of guitar and keyboard melody, over-the-top vocal harmonies, surreal lyrics, and unpredictable arrangements, piquing the attention of indie rock fans, college radio DJs, and yes, music scribes ready with the easy adjectives. Even on the newest release, The Sunlandic Twins — which welcomes Seventies prog and Afro-beat, as well as Eighties electro, into a sonic laboratory that was once the exclusive domain of Sixties influences — there's an irresistibly danceable, upbeat current running throughout.

But if you squint hard enough and look beyond the glare, Of Montreal has a dark side too. Singer/guitarist Kevin Barnes, the creative force behind the group, admits as much himself.

"To a lot of people, at least maybe on the surface, Of Montreal seems extremely happy, and really sweet and gentle music," he says from his cell phone, stuck in a traffic jam in Athens. "But I always thought, You guys are missing the subtleties, because even on The Gay Parade [the band's critically acclaimed 1999 concept album], a couple of songs have this underlying sadness. It was funny from a personal standpoint, because if people had a sense of my personality through my music, it was always way off base. People would assume, 'You must be the happiest person in the world,' and it's like, 'No, I'm actually miserable.'"

Barnes says making art is a way of creating a perfect reality, of making things better than they really are. So listen for the darkness in his music, and he'll reveal glimpses of autobiographical truth — fear, insecurity, romantic obsession — that resonate long after the songs' immediate pop sugar rush wears off. "Far away from all the violence, safely flying in our own orbit," he sings on "Forecast Fascist Future," which kicks off with a Stonesy guitar strum à la "Jumpin' Jack Flash," morphs into a harmony-driven chorus, and concludes with a funky refrain: "May we never go-go mental, may we always stay-stay gentle."

Although Of Montreal began as a collaboration between Barnes and other musicians from the Elephant 6 collective (which includes members of Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power, and Apples in Stereo), who used to live together in one big house in the countryside, it has evolved into somewhat of a solo project, except on tour. Along with 2004's Satanic Panic in the Attic, The Sunlandic Twins was single-handedly made by Barnes, who wrote all the songs, played all the instruments, and did all the engineering and mixing. The bonus EP that accompanies the full-length has one song with guest credits.

"I enjoy working that way because I can get immersed in that world — there's no outside distractions. Not like I'm calling my bandmates distractions, but you're creating a really personal piece if you're just working on it by yourself. So it's really rewarding to work that way, but you also lose spontaneity by doing it by yourself because it's all coming from one head. And I almost never re-record. When I start a song, it's kind of like having a kid. You just go with it, and as it develops, it's kind of organic — when it's done, it's done."

Finished in October 2004 after six months of studio experimentation in both Athens and in Oslo, Norway (where Barnes's wife/bandmate Nina is from), the resulting album is dense and complex, and sounds great on headphones. From the ominous, crowlike "Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-baaaa" chorus on "Oslo in the Summertime," to the crisp, Devo-does-Modern English synth of "So Begins Our Alabee," Barnes has balanced his passion as a musician with his precision as a producer.

He's just as detail-oriented about playing the songs live, and that's where he finds his biggest challenge. "I always wanted the live experience to be pretty close to the way the album sounds, but sometimes we just can't do it," Barnes says. "But at the same time, I feel bad when some people approach the recording process like that, like, 'Oh, if we can't do it live, then we shouldn't do it in the studio,' because the live thing is a fleeting moment in time, and the album has more of a shelf life."

On recent tours, Of Montreal has periodically used programmed drums as the backing track. "Jamey [Huggins], who plays drums for us, is also playing bass on half the songs now. We have two bass players. Some of our set is no live drumming at all. There's live percussion, but it's two bass players, a synth player, and two guitarists," Barnes explains. The lineup change was made to accommodate Nina, who tends to their one-year-old daughter Alabee.

Around the time Alabee was born, the couple was living in Norway for a few months, to be close to Nina's family. And along with the natural nerve-racking experience of becoming a father, Barnes was on unfamiliar emotional ground as not only a tourist but also an expatriate. On top of it all, the Norwegian winter was incredibly gloomy.

"Norway affected me deeply — like a profound, devastating effect on me. I was totally messed up emotionally."

*

Not one to waste this uncomfortable source of creative inspiration, Barnes wrote another album's worth of songs, which he is eager to record. He says his time in Europe messed him up but gave him lots of new ideas.

"Now I can laugh about it, but at the time it was really difficult. But it was kind of good too, because it shook me up emotionally. You know how you get sort of stagnant if you're comfortable in your environment — I said comfortable as if it was this negative thing — but you're so comfortable in your environment and things get dull and you stop paying attention?" he asks. "I was like, 'Oh my God, I'm feeling things that I'm not used to feeling!' I'm just used to sort of being kind of like a bland man. Like, nothing attracts me, nothing hurts me, nothing brings me joy — I'm just on this steady level of mediocrity or something. So being out there was like, 'This is insane! People are insane! This is a crazy world!'"

Chances are, the next Of Montreal album will be anything but sunny.

2008-07-14 - You Ain't No Picasso

An Interview with Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes

July 14th, 2008

Of Montreal’s new record Skeletal Lamping, like the band’s live show, is a take-it-or-leave-it showing of craziness. Songs not only have schizophrenic changes in melody, but are also lyrically at war with themselves from minute to minute. And as you might expect from a group who often perform in dresses, once in the nude and always with makeup, Kevin doesn’t really care what you think. He’s not writing for the fans, he’s not writing to please his label and he surely isn’t writing to please us armchair music critics.

For the first time in over ten years, Kevin Barnes is writing for himself.

This past June I was lucky enough to be invited down to Athens, GA to hear Skeletal Lamping shortly after it was finished. After sitting in silence for about an hour to listen to the record — all the while wishing I’d brought a pen and paper to jot down notes about album (Sparks, Funkadelic and Prince produced by the Dust Brothers?) — Kevin was nice enough talk for a while about a great many things. He shared a lot about his motivation for the new album (the Outback Steakhouse commercial), how his wife gave him the courage to start writing personally again and what it was like to cover his three-year-old daughter’s favorite song.

An Interview with Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes

YANP: Obviously this record is very different from anything you’ve done prior. Was it a conscious decision to move away from the old sound or is that just where your writing took you?
Kevin: For some reason I’ve been gravitating more towards… I mean there’s always going to be more pop sensibilities there because I love pop music, but I try to incorporate different things. Obviously some funk influences and even some hip hop influences.. I feel like I have more in common with contemporary hip hop artists than I do contemporary indie pop artists.

Do you follow any producers?
I always like the stuff that Danger Mouse does, I think he’s awesome. Even like Timbaland’s stuff I think is really cool usually. Pharell, a lot.

Did your time in Norway influence you musically?
Disco is pretty hot over there still. Not like 70s disco, but like club music. Electronic music is big there too. I didn’t really meet anybody or see any bands, but that probably did have an effect on me. You know, that sort of sophisticated electronic music. That definitely played a part. A lot of this record I actually did write and record when I was in Norway last summer, though.

So Skeletal Lamping is a very sexual record. Were those themes in your mind at the time or a part of Georgie Fruit?
It was definitely, for whatever reasons, one of those natural, organic things that just happen. I just was compelled to do that and sing about those things. Those were the things that I’d be singing in the shower and go upstairs and start working on. It wasn’t anything premeditated (laughs).

Is the full album supposed to be taken as fully from Georgie Fruit’s point of view or just occasional bits?
I don’t even separate them in my mind. the Georgie Fruit character is not separate from Kevin Barnes. I can’t really say “oh that was just this role I was playing,” because it’s just a part of my personality. All of it is just a part of me anyways.
Have you seen the documentary This Film Not Yet Rated? No.
It’s about the MPAA and how they focus more on sex rather than violence in movies...
It’s a weird thing. A lot of people think about that: why is sex so dangerous? Why is it a frightening concept.
Well it seems handled differently in this record. All your characters seem comfortable with sex.
Definitely. You should be comfortable.
When I make a record, I try not to let the world in. It’s kind of me in my own little island in my head. The only reason you’d ever feel insecure is from worrying how other people would perceive you; and if you’re the only person in the world, you’ll be totally secure.
Do you still do most of the instruments on the record?
I did basically everything on this record myself. There’s some cello and one song where basically everyone in the band plays something.
I picked up on a couple songs you’ve been playing live for a while. Did anything change in “Softcore” or “Our Last Summer as Independents?”
Some lyrics changed and some new melodic parts were added to Last Summer, but Softcore was basically done when we performed it last summer. We didn’t really change anything.

Was creating this album more about linking melodic sections together or about seeing where the song goes?
Some of the things that seemed to flow better were probably ones where I would make one section and then use that as inpiration for the next section and then use that. And then some of the stuff I just tried to piece together in a collagey sort of way. It’s a very collagey sort of record.
A lot of stuff is me intentionally putting two things together that weren’t written with each other in mind, so it’s kind of awkward when they’re next to each other. But I liked that when I stared doing that. It’s cool because you don’t expect that. Like I said in the blog, a lot of the time you can finish the artists’ sentences. That’s obvious. That’s obvious. It’s always obvious. At times it can be great, but I didn’t want to make anything obvious. I wanted to surprise the listener.

Listening to the album for the first time was so strange. There were parts that would sound really good, and I’d be thinking “yeah, keep that going,” but it always switches before you’re ready. It’s like musical denial.
I think that’s why it has a lot in common with Coquelicot, because nothing is really extended. Even though something might be really cool and you’re like “oh, I wish that would go on longer,” it never goes on longer. It’s always replaced by something new. That could be potentially be frustrating for some people if they like something, but hopefully they’ll go back and listen to it again.

The record kind of feels like … when it starts, the first maybe fifteen minutes are kind of conventional and makes sense but then when you get in the heart of it, that’s when it becomes more dense and more complicated.
Yeah. It’s one of the more forward songs on the record, but ends in that great whirl of layers. It’s a great first song for the record.
Actually, it was intended to be the last song and then everyone was like “man, you should put that first” because it’s the most different as far as coming out of Hissing Fauna into that song. The second half is sort of abrasive…
Yeah… [Laughs] Sorry, I’m still trying to process the record.
I understand. It’s like seeing this complicated movie just one time and then you’re like “God… and then that one part!” You can’t photograph music in your mind like you can with movies. With movies you have all these other things that are being recorded in your mind like dialogue, images and emotional memories and things like that. With music, you don’t have any sort of visual photographs.

Does doing music for movies interest you at all?
It would, if I could get into the movie. It’s weird, because with that stuff — unless the movie’s already done and you’re making music to it — it seems difficult if someone was like “well here’s what I want, make music to it.”

I remember reading how Leone extended the opening scene in Once Upon a Time in the West because he didn’t want to edit down the song Morricone had written for it.
Oh, nice.

What will you remember when you look back at this album?
I think that… I think it really was inspired by the commercial backlash when I was getting a lot of backlash from the Outback Steakhouse commercial. I think it did influence me as far as like “I’ll show them I’m not a sell-out. I’ll show them how talented I am…. I can’t be marginalized. I have a lot of value”
I’d never had to deal with that before because we were always so underground. It was a weird thing to face. You can only have backlash if you have success and we’d never really had success, so I’d never had to deal with backlash. So I definitely think that played a part psychologically in the making of the record.

Who confuses who more: you or your fans?
I definitely am not confused by my fans. It’s hard to tell if people are fans.. because a fan is a temporary thing in a lot of cases. People will enjoy a thing and then get bored with it and move on to something else. So does that make them less of a fan when they were a fan? It’s kind of like love in a weird way: when you break up with someone, does that completely undermine what you experienced together and the good times you had just because you’re not together now?
Dealing with criticism is confusing when you put out records. It can be really distracting and weird. I remember when I put out my very first record, Cherry Peel, I was so excited and so full of the joy of making music and sharing it with the world. It got so many bad reviews that I read that I was like Oh man, the world is a bitch, you know?

Were the escapism and fictional characters in the Gay Parade and Coquelicot reactions to that?
Definitely. In a way, it was to protect myself. I’m not going to make myself vulnerable. …But then those records got bad reviews too (laughs)

When did you make the switch to being comfortable writing about yourself again?
I guess when I got married. I’d always been single. I was basically celibate all through my mid-20s, I never dated anyone and kind of lived in this fantasy world. When I met Nina, she somehow gave me this great sense of empowerment. I have this great person at my side and that’s all I need. I don’t need the rest of the world’s approval as long as I have this one person who believe in me and supports me. It’s funny how that works. Having my brother, having Nina — that’s all I need. If they say “man, you’re doing some good stuff” then I know my work has value.

I caught the “I wish David was here” lyric in new record. That’s really great. I love how you summed all that up in Du Og Meg: “his thoughts were not just rubbish.”
It seemed like that was almost what I needed. Because I had gone through this period of being disconnected emotionally. My emotional world was not really finding itself within my artistic production.
Was that frustrating?
I had become really cynical. In the back of my mind — even though it sounds dreadful — trying to figure out a way to reach people and to have a song that actually mattered to people and wasn’t just throwaway bullshit. I felt like a lot of stuff I had done, just because I wasn’t selling records, I thought “well these songs must not be very good because nobody’s into them and they’re not resonating with people.” But then once I gave up on that, organically it all just worked out and people started caring about us and we started reaching a larger audience.
Was it a coincidence that stylistic chances match up for the ability to be more personal?
There was a weird, almost fascist state of mind in the Elephant 6 collective, at least from my perspective. There were sort of these rules to keep it analog, keep it 60s and 70s. There are sort of unspoken rules in a weird way and I was so influenced by those guys. They weren’t dictating these things, but that’s what they were into and I was so smitten.
But I wanted to branch out. I wanted to do different things. I felt a bit nervous, you know, about drum programming and using midi instruments because those were definitely off limits within that clique. Or at least no one did it and it was not respected. You had to actually be able to physically be able to do it.
Then I realized that was holding me back and I really wanted to explore this other kind of music. We all lived in a house together and I moved out of that house and into a house with Nina and my brother. Then I didn’t have anyone in my immediate space who could influence me. Everyone in my immediate surroundings was very positive and very supportive and everyone wanted me to try something new.
Who all did you live with before moving in with your brother and Nina?
The whole band was living in like a big house together out in the country for a couple years. it sort of became an entropic sort of thing: fighting over stupid things, living in this insular environment that was far enough from Athens that you didn’t really want to leave the house. Even though it was positive at times and we definitely had good times together, I felt smothered by it. If I was going to make a recording by myself where I’d play the bass, Derek would be like “what’re you doing, man?” and if I did drums, Jamie would be like “when am I going to play?” So it was good for me to get out of that and into my own world. Because before I met those guys I used to do everything myself. In high school, that was my great escape from the harsh realities of life: just put on the headphones and lose yourself in the creative process. And when you’re collaborating with a lot of people, you can’t really do that as easily. There’s a lot of compromising that goes on and a lot of political stuff you have to deal with. When you get alone and do it by yourself, I get a great surge of energy that I’d been holding inside for so long. And finally when there was no one to tell me no or to tell me “do it this way” or whatever, it was like an explosion of creativity and I still feel like I’m kind of riding that wave.

Are you writing more songs because of it?
When you’re working with a bunch of people, there are a lot of schedules that you have to deal with. But when you’re doing it by yourself, then it’s whenever you feel like it — which for me is all the time — I just go and work, I don’t have to say “oh, I have to wait for Derek to get off his shift at the coffee shop” to do the bass line, I just do the bass line … I do six bass lines! (laughs)

Has music ever felt like work?
For me, the process is what’s exciting. Listening to the record when it’s done is exciting for a little bit, but I never listen to my old records and I don’t really like playing most of the old songs. So this record is new and it’s kind of exciting to listen to but in a couple months I’m not going to want to listen to it and I’m going to want to do something new.

Is that why you like to debut new material live?
It takes so long for a record to come out — it takes five or six months usually — that I have half a new album recorded.
So I wanted to ask you about Arlene… [Kevin's guitar has "Arlene" scratched into it]
I was living in Minneapolis. When I got out of high school, I moved around a lot trying to find people to play with and I’d heard Minneapolis had a scene. I just happened upon this used guitar shop and I got Arlene there really cheap. And it’s a great guitar.

I don’t know the story behind the etching. It was there when I got it and the guy at the store didn’t know either. I mean, imagine just some weird dude, maybe some metalhead dude just like “this is for you, babe…” No one has ever come up to me and been like “man, that was my old guitar!” but maybe one day. [Laughs]
One day… So what happened to “Feminine Effects?” That’s one of my favorite new songs of yours and it’s noticeably absent from the record.
We’re trying to figure out if I want to do an EP or what. There’s a lot of songs that I cut from this record — about 35 minutes worth of material. So I could do an EP or just have extra songs for bsides or bonus tracks and things like that. I like that song. We’ve only recorded it once. We’re recorded it a couple times, but only once that I liked. I never recorded it in my studio, but we did it live a few times.

Like the MPR recording you used for the Green Owl compilation? That’s one of my favorite recordings you’ve ever done.
Yeah. My brother was like “man, that’s the only version … you can’t do another version. You’ve got to use that version if you’re going to do it.”
Wow. I’d never thought of it that way, but he’s kind of right. Speaking of which, I’ve got to say that I love the return of the piano on the new album. Did I hear some horns on the record as well?
Yeah. Originally we had these kind of electronic sampled horns. Every time I’d listen to it, I’d think “man, we’ve got to get some real horns on this.” So eventually we got the guys from Dark Meat to come in and do some real horns for us.
Oh, fantastic! I love those guys. So when you were thinking of the sequence and flow of the record, what were some albums you had in mind as good examples?
In the Aereoplane over the Sea is one of the best sequence records ever. Everything flows so perfectly through the whole record — it never gets boring. And OTC did that with their two records. That was definitely the spirit that I was using and sort of pulling from. And the Fiery Furnaces stuff kind of hurts the brain a little bit more because the songs are bit more dense and the lyrics are some times impenetrable. That’s what I love about them, lyrically they’re so far ahead of everyone else.
I loved when you all covered their song “Tropical Iceland.”
That was my daughter Alabee’s favorite song for a long time. That was the first song she really connected with. At that time she called ice cream “icey” and she was a big fan of ice cream. So when she heard that song she was like “oh! icey land!”
[Laughs] A land made of ice cream!
[Laughs] Exactly.