2009-08-18 - Suicide Girls.

of Montreal's Kevin Barnes

By Jay Hathaway - Aug 18, 2009

of Montreal's Kevin Barnes has been experimenting with pop music for almost 20 years, all the way back to recording home demos in high school. He started of Montreal in 1997 in Athens, GA, and fell in with the Elephant 6 collective, which included bands like Elf Power, Neutral Milk Hotel, and The Apples in Stereo. Since then, of Montreal has put out nine records, including Barnes' biggest critical success, 2007's Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?

The subject matter of Hissing Fauna was darker than anything of Montreal had released before, but that gave way to the sex-soaked disco of their most recent album, Skeletal Lamping. The band's sound has changed dramatically over the years, especially with the addition of more electronic and dance elements. Although their upcoming record, False Priest, is only starting to take shape, Barnes sees it continuing in the funky, danceable direction of Skeletal Lamping.

We caught up with Barnes on the phone to chat about the adventures and eccentricities that come with being in of Montreal, and found out that whatever you assume about the guy in the eye makeup and the wild outfits is probably wrong.

Jay Hathaway: I've never seen this answered anywhere, so I have to ask: why did you name all those songs after Dustin Hoffman?

Kevin Barnes: It was just a weird spontaneous decision when my brother and I were putting together that album [The Early Four-Track Recordings], which is all songs I'd done when I was 18. At the time I released the album, I was 27 or something. It was a funny, kooky idea to pretend like it was a concept album, even though the songs had nothing to do with the titles, and nothing to do with Dustin Hoffman. It was just a spontaneous thing we created over lunch one day.

JH: Have you been saving any demos since then, that might turn into another project like that?

KB:There's a ton of unreleased stuff that I had done from that time period. All I really did when I was in high school was go home, hide in my bedroom, and just make four-track recordings all day. So there's a lot of stuff. Personally, I don't find it that interesting. I don't think about it, 'cause I'm only interested in what I'm working on at the moment. If I ever got a record label together, just a pet label, I would just release things for fans and people who are actually really into that stuff. Maybe. I haven't really given it much thought.

JH:So, about the stuff you've been working on recently ... what did you think of the critical reception for Skeletal Lamping?

KB:I try to avoid album reviews, because 99% of the time, they're totally inaccurate, and I don't really benefit from reading them. I don't really get anything out of it. No new insight that I didn't already have. I'm kind of absorbed in making the album, and then when I'm done, I just want to move on to the next thing. Unless I'm just totally bored, I'm really not that interested in hearing what people have to say about it. I don't really worry about what critics have to say about my record, but it seems like people liked it as much as they liked Hissing Fauna, just judging from attendance at shows and things like that.

I wish that rock criticism had more value. I think it could be very beneficial for an artist to have an outsider's perspective on what they're doing. It can be sort of an insular experience. I think it could be good if it were someone whose observations you actually respected. It would be good to hear what they had to say. For the most part, though, you can just tell in the first couple of lines if there's going to be a terrible review, in terms of what they're bringing to the table. Their observations are just so far off from what your inspiration was, or motivation or anything.

JH:Whose opinion do you think would be valuable?

KB: For me, it'd be someone who's an artist themselves. Someone who's produced albums I really respect. Someone like David Bowie, or David Byrne, Brian Eno, Prince. The kind of people who are my idols. If they had something to say about the record, it would definitely be extremely interesting. Ray Davies. Stevie Wonder. Sly Stone. Anybody I'm influenced by. As far as straight-up rock journalists, I don't really follow that scene, so I don't really know who's considered to be good.

JH: I was going to ask you whether you would prefer if people took you more or less seriously than they do now, but it sounds like you don't particularly care ...

KB:It's hard to make a generalization, like, "In general, do people take me seriously?" You'd never be able to quantify that. I definitely hope that people know I spend a lot of time and put a lot of emotion into every single thing I release, and it's the most important thing to me when I'm working on it. At the same time, I'm not pompous and pretentious and want everyone to pore over everything I say and dissect it or make it super-intellectual. Everything I do is more organic, it just happens. When I'm done with it, I can move on.

JH: You've talked a bit before about your performance persona. Who is this guy, and just how separate is that, to you?

KB: It's a weird thing. My brother and I talk about it sometimes before we go onstage. It's so integrated into our lives that I never go, "Shit, I've got a show coming up tonight and I've gotta prepare for it!" It's just second nature, now. It's so natural now, performing and living. It all just happens, and I don't spend much time thinking about it, making a division like, "What's the real me?"

JH: It's tempting to imagine, just from listening to your music, that you guys are very eccentric in your personal lives. Do you think that's true? What's the most eccentric thing about you?

KB: Something that people might be surprised by is that I like watching SportsCenter. I'm really into sports. I like watching baseball, basketball and football. My cousin and I play tennis and basketball all the time. My friends and I have these volleyball cocktail parties, where we make drinks and play volleyball. We get the cops called on us all the time by our neighbors. It's really conventional stuff.

JH: It's funny that the conventional stuff is what would surprise most people. That's an interesting position to be in.

KB: I think that, in general, everybody is eccentric. Aside from a small minority of people that are as one-dimensional as they appear, I think most people have a secret life. Most people are extremely interesting. Anybody that you see just walking down the street is probably a very interesting person. I don't think that artists are necessarily more interesting than non-artists. Someone like Salvador Dali, who was just performing all the time, I mean, his whole life was a performance. He probably seemed more interesting than other people. If you're not envisioning the world looking in it at you, you're not documenting all the things in your head.
You might be extremely eccentric, and you'd have no idea. In our band, everybody thinks that every other member of the band is totally crazy, that they are the only sane one. It's probably like that with all groups of friends. It's some weird aspect of the human condition that we think everyone else is crazy, except for ourselves.

JH: If your band were the cast of a sitcom, what would that show look like?

KB: I can never really draw that parallel. It's kind of too abstract. There's a guy, Jamie, who plays the keys and bass and drums. He's been in the band for 10 years or something. He's definitely got kind of a Larry David character. He's a magnet for those kind of weird interactions with people. He's the one who's always getting in a fight with the old woman behind the counter at the convenience store, being screamed at by the Indian guy who runs the liquor store, or whatever. There's always some weird story with him. So I guess maybe Curb Your Enthusiasm would be close.

JH: Have you been doing any comedy stuff over the past few years, since A Pollinaire Rave?

KB: There's definitely a comedic element to our live show. Everything my brother and I come up with - well, not everything, but at least 70% - is supposed to just be funny, and kind of absurd. It's not really this heavy statement about religion or politics or whatever. Just because there's this weird person in a McCain mask hanging this guy in gold lamé, that doesn't really mean anything. It's supposed to just be funny. There's always a sense of humor involved in the theatrics. I think it's just incorporating that into what of Montreal is now, whereas before, A Pollinaire Rave was sort of a separate thing. Now it's all together as one.

JH: Skeletal Lamping was your most overtly sexual record, both lyrically and musically. How did it turn out that way?

KB: I felt like I had been in a sexually hibernated state of mind all through my 20's. In my early 30's, I started waking up to sexuality and exploring it, thinking about it a bit more. It was kind of natural that it also came through in my art. I think I was just going through a sexual awakening.
I was listening to music that people consider more sexual, like funkier stuff, soul music and R&B. When you think about what music would seem like the most sexual music, most people would say Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" is the sexiest song. But in kind of a funny, weird way, it's almost cliche. Like the scene in a move where someone's about to have sex, and "Let's Get It On" will come on, and everyone will start laughing.

JH: Well, even with sex, it's important to have a sense of humor about it.

KB: Definitely. It has to be fun and playful. Otherwise, I don't know what the hell it is, if you're not having fun. Rape, or something. That's the line between consensual sex and rape, a sense of humor.

JH: What do you think is the most boring thing that's happening in music right now?

KB: It's hard to say. I think everyone has these filters in their head where if something's boring, it doesn't even really register. You just sort of ignore it. But I think any time people try to imitate something successful, it just becomes more watered-down. The whole vocoder R&B thing is pretty boring now. So many people have done it that it's just a dead horse at this point. Unless someone can do something with it that's still interesting. That's the cool thing about music. Everyone borrows from everyone else, and movements evolve that way. They need to evolve that way. Nothing's completely original, but everything has a trace of originality.

JH: And maybe if you can synthesize it from enough other parts, you won't even be able to recognize them anymore.

KB: Totally. Certain things, at their source, they're coming from a place that maybe even a person who's influenced by a person who's influenced by this thing doesn't even know it anymore. They don't even know they're influenced by the Beatles, because they're influenced by someone else who was influenced by the Beatles. On the family tree of music, you don't know all your cousins, aunts and uncles.

JH: What do you think about the Beatles, by the way?

KB: I was a humongous Beatles fan. At one point in my life, they were my favorite band. I had every single record, I was obsessed with reading all the biographies. I was really infatuated with them. I guess within the last 6 or 7 years, I sort of got more interested in other things. I still really love them, but I don't get the same charge out of listening to Revolver that I did at one point. I do know them better than I know any other band.

JH: What's your take on the three and a half minute pop song? Do you think it will ever die, and do you think it would be a good thing if it did?

KB: I don't think it would necessarily be a good thing. Sometimes I think that people follow the pop template too much. There's a pressure that if you want to have a commercially successful song, it has to fit into these parameters, and I think that's definitely unhealthy for the art of music. There's also a great challenge in that. It's kind of fun to fit as many ideas as you can into three and a half minutes. I've never really, with the exception of maybe two or three songs, I haven't really explored longer pieces. I've pretty much stayed within that area of 4 minute songs. On the new record, I've actually started writing longer. Everything is about six and a half minutes.

JH: What's your relationship with the Elephant 6 collective right now? I've heard you're still in it, you used to be in it, or you were never really in it at all. What's the deal there?

KB: I think Elephant 6 was always this nebulous collective anyway. It wasn't really a specific group. It started off as a bedroom project, just for fun. At that time, in the early '90's, there weren't that many indie labels anyway. It was just them trying to empower themselves and release their own records. The core group was Apples in Stereo, and what became Neutral Milk Hotel, and what became Olivia Tremor Control, and then Elf Power was a part of it, too. We were kind of a part of it, but on the fringe.
I looked up to them as big brother figures. They were a little bit older than me, and they had done all the things I wanted to do: release records, self-produce, go on tour, and do it all on your own terms. I wanted to be a part of it. I was sort of just pulling their coat from behind, like "Hey guys, can I come to the party, too?" Now we've been able to establish our own thing, so I'm not really a part of Elephant 6 although I guess it still exists to some degree. Only briefly was it ever a fully-functioning label that would sign bands and release records. It was really more like a friend collective that became a movement, in a way.

JH: Would you consider working with another producer on an of Montreal record?

KB: Every record that I've made has been home recorded, and every of Montreal record has been self-produced. I've never hired anyone to help us with it, or gone into the studio, with a few exceptions. Everything's been done with crappy equipment in some small, little bedroom. The new record that I'm working on, I've just kind of attacked it the same way I have the last three or four records, doing all the parts myself and recording everything in my house.
I think I would, in the future, like to start working with other people as an experiment, to see what might come of it. People like David Bowie, for example - he always seemed to benefit greatly from other people's influence. Brian Eno or Tony Visconti or whoever. People that could bend his mind in a way he wouldn't have known naturally, and really great things can come out of collaborations like that. I've been a bit paranoid and insular the last four or five years, but I see myself coming out of that and wanting to work with other people in the future.

JH: The EP you did with Jon Brion was really interesting. Is there a possibility he might help produce an of Montreal record?

KB: I think it could definitely be good. It could definitely be interesting. It's kind of weird, the way I work, because everything is just done in the moment. I don't do any sort of planning beforehand. I just start experimenting and something will evolve out of that. I guess if you had a producer, the two of you together would just do the same thing. It could be fun. I'd have to be in a certain state of mind where I wouldn't feel like I had to perform for them. The thing I really like about recording and creating music is the process, where you shut off the rest of the world. It's a dream state of mind. All the ideas are coming, and you're caught up in the wave of creativity. It all depends on the chemistry between me and the other producer, as far as whether I could get to that place if there was somebody else in the room.

JH: What do you know about this new album, so far?

KB: It's going to be called False Priest. It's very funky and definitely dance music, but it's kind of hard to explain the vibe of it right now. There's a lot of strange lyrical imagery and sort of funkier sounds and ... [laughs] I don't know how to explain music, ever. I've got about six or seven songs. I'm just writing and experimenting and not really worrying about what songs are going to be on the record. I'm just trying to have fun with the creative process, and edit myself later. Probably in five or six months, I'll say, "Ok, what songs do I like the best? What kind of record should this be?"

JH: Are you familiar with Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies? Do you ever use those?

KB: I actually have them on my phone. I've used them maybe once or twice. There's one that I read that says, "Don't build a wall. Make a brick." That was really good advice. It's sort eerily helpful. Every time I check it out, it's usually good advice. I think it's a fantastic tool for musicians.

JH: of Montreal are known for quirky song titles. Which comes first, the song or the title?

KB: Usually, I might have a title and I won't really think what I'm going to use it for. It's somewhat random. Usually the title doesn't really connect with the song. It's just something I thought sounded interesting. It's strange that people are so lazy with song titles. A song title is almost always a lyric from the song, and almost always a lyric from the chorus. It's such a generic way of identifying songs. I think it's more fun to just be creative with every aspect of the songwriting process. Why not be creative when you're titling the song, too?

JH: You're going to have to say the names of your songs so often that's it's probably a good idea to pick something you can live with hearing all the time.

KB: Yeah. It's hard, too, because a lot of our song titles are so strange that even the band members have a hard time remembering "which one is that again?" Especially songs that have foreign words, 'cause a lot of the songs are named after places in Norway, so they have this weird sound, like Heimsdalsgate or Gronlandic Edit. I'm really fascinated with words. It's so remarkable that we're able to express these really complex human emotions with one word. It's all about finding the right word to really articulate the feeling. You have all these words at your disposable, but you have to find the precise one.

JH: And sometimes the word you need is in another language ...

KB: There's things that, if you are very well-educated, you'll know that you can't really say this in English, but this is the term in French. I guess there's a term in French for someone who's strange-looking but beautiful at the same time. Not a conventional beauty. I don't know what that word is.

JH: So, I shouldn't capitalize the first "o" in of Montreal, right? Unless that's changed in the past few years?

KB: I don't know what we have to do to make people realize the o is always going to be lowercase. Seven out of ten times, the o is uppercase, and it's not really such a big deal. We don't have an official font or an official logo, so I guess it's just natural that when people don't know what to do, they just capitalize the o. Aesthetically, I prefer it to be lowercase in "of."

JH: Is it just because of the aesthetics? It's not like a bell hooks or e.e. cummings thing?

KB:It's sort of like that. It's just that when I see the o in uppercase, it looks like this weird pregnant monster.

2008-11-13 - Paste (part 5)

Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes: The complete Paste interview

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

Paste: There was over 30 minutes of material you said you cut from the album. Are you going to put that out as an EP?
Barnes: I’m not really sure what I want to do with it. On some levels I feel like, “Well, these are the songs that weren’t good enough to get on the record, so why would I want to put out a reject EP?” But I feel like it would be OK if it was like a fan-only sort of thing. I feel like there should be some level of quality control—you don’t just put out everything. In the past I have put out everything; [at that point] I didn’t feel like it was important to worry that much about it. Now, I don’t feel like it’s necessary to release everything for everyone. It might be cool to just put out an EP and people could just download it for free if you want people to listen to it. Or we could just use the tracks for B-sides. There’s a couple songs that I like that, for whatever reason, just didn’t work. I didn’t want to make a 74-minute CD. I wanted to keep it somewhat digestible, so you could listen in one sitting, so you could listen to the whole thing without being like, “Goddammit, is this thing still going?” I wanted to make something where people would want to listen to it again rather than get to the end and be like, “OK, I don’t need to hear this again for another month.” There’s a lot of songs that I actually like that my brother [and collaborator, David Barnes] and I went back and forth on, like, “Should we keep that on there? Should we take it off?” And I actually wanted to edit it down even more, but he was like, “No, don’t do that. You gotta keep it there.”

Paste: Are you going to play some of those songs live? Some of the ones that didn’t make it on the record?
Barnes: Maybe. We have so much work ahead of us [with the touring band], just learning the songs ’cause we have a new drummer now.

Paste: Who’s the new drummer?
Barnes: His name’s Ahmed [Gallab], and he plays in this band Sinkane. It’s funny because we’ve done a lot of press photos with him, but we haven’t done a single practice with him, so hopefully it works out. I’m sure it will. He’s an awesome drummer and an awesome guy. So what we’re trying to do now—in the past we’ve had two different kinds of performance, like we would have an aspect of the show that would have backing beats on a CD player and no live drumming, and then the other side would be all live drumming and no backing tracks. And so this time we’re trying to get rid of the CD player altogether and just have drums on everything, but still have the same sounds from the record, so we had to get this MPC player to sample so we can have the actual sounds from the record, but instead of having a little disc playing, we’d actually have a human being playing it, and that way we’ll be able to really expand upon certain ideas and it won’t be as consistent from night to night—there’s going to be room for spontaneity and experimentation, so we’re all really looking forward to that.

Paste: There’s all this really cool packaging for the new record—so many different options. What was the idea behind this? What are these different options giving people?
Barnes: It just occurred to us: “Why does it have to be,” especially with digital downloads, or just packaging ion general, “why does it have to follow the same path that is always has?” Someone established, OK, we’ll have packaging that’s basically the size of a CD, and that’s just the way it’s gonna be.” We realized it doesn’t have to be that way. If you want to do something different, you can. And the only real restrictions are for the big corporations like Borders or Target or Best Buy. For stocking, they want it to fit on the shelves, so you don’t want to have something that’s going to be a specialty item that’s going to have to be stocked inside a glass case, like when you go into an indie store and they have their window or whatever. So there are different challenges we had to work out, but we really wanted to make something very unconventional, to create an object that could stand on its own. Something that wasn’t just a CD protector, or just something you’d have to categorize and put it on your shelf. Like everything that was involved with the release of the record, we wanted to make an object that would be interesting and thought-provoking, and that would blend into your design scheme in a way. You think of lifestyle, of interior-design objects, like the lamp and the wall decals and posters—these are things everyone needs, everyone uses. We go to IKEA because we don’t want to go to Rooms To Go or whatever, we want there to be a design element in our own house. Ecko and different companies are producing interesting objects that are thought-provoking and inspiring. We felt there was a lack of these things—it’s difficult to find interesting objects for your house, so we thought it’d be cool to produce our own. And luckily, [our label] Polyvinyl has been amazing about figuring out how to make that happen. A lot of labels would be like, “Uh, that sounds expensive.”

Paste: Yeah, because you have to come up with whole new ways to manufacture this stuff, right?
Barnes: Yeah. But also, I think that the spirit of the times, like with what Radiohead did [releasing an independent album as a name-your-own-price download, and then also offering a gorgeous, high-priced special edition]—it sent ripples through the industry. All of a sudden you realize there’s a lot of potential, you can do a lot of different things. You don’t have to just follow the boring path. Everyone involved in of Montreal is very creative and we all want to do interesting, important things, so it’s cool to give people an opportunity, like [my wife] Nina and David, to design these objects, and to also give people the option, so when they download the record, they don’t have to just get this tiny little thumbnail image of the album cover. They get a T-shirt or a tote bag or a lantern or a wall decal—it’s that much more exciting to get that in the mail.

Paste: [Your publicist], Frank, told me about a book and a play and an art show related to the release of Skeletal Lamping. Is that stuff still in the works?
Barnes: Well, we’re trying. David’s working on a book of his illustrations and what we’d like to do is come out with another Skeletal Lamping collection of all new objects, probably in early spring. I love the idea of creating a whole collection of art objects that are somehow affiliated with the release of a record. It makes it so much more interesting than just a record. It becomes a lot bigger, and I love that idea of like—in fashion you get it all the time, the spring collection, like the Marc Jacobs spring collection. It’s always something that’s—it’s not just one pair of pants, it’s a lot of different items. And I really hope that, in the future, it’d be really cool if it caught on and every band did that—released four or five objects with their record. It’s always good to have options, you know? And it’s also really exciting to try to create different things. What we really wanted to do was put on an art show in every major city and coordinate that with the release of the record. I think we’re trying to do one at the MoMAs in every city, and we’re gonna try to work on that in the spring. It would be awesome to do something like that, where you get a group of really creative people in every city and give them a rough idea of what you want to do, and people could put on this performance-art piece at the same time all over the world, and it’s in some way connected to the release of the record. Art is fun in that way, when you try to think of different ways to inspire people, and different reasons to make art, and different reasons to produce things. A lot of our production comes down to inspiration. And a lot of times, you’re just sitting there, you don’t really know what to do and then something will just click. And then, you’re off. You spend the next month working on this thing. So I love that about art—that it’s sort of laying there dormant until you find the switch to turn it on and it just explodes.

Paste: What about that play? Is there something going on with that? Is it something you’re writing?
Barnes: I guess there’s other performance-art troops doing things like this already—the idea was to have a happening in every city on the day we play. So it’s sort of like the circus coming to town, it’s not just the rock show that lasts for three or four hours—the whole day is an event. It’s probably not gonna happen on this tour, but we’re going to try to do that in the future, maybe the next tour, where we get to the city a little early and set up an art installation and a performance-art piece in an art gallery. And we had this idea for this machine that would like record people’s voices, and then you use the voices from that day’s event in the performance at night so everything ties together. I think that would be really exciting for people to feel more connected, to feel a part of it. I think art should always be communal. I always want the live performance to be more of a communal experience so it’s not just us entertaining people. I want people to feel like this is a chance for them to dress up and step out of their normal reality. And this is outside of time, outside of whoever they’re expected to be in their day job. It’s an exceptional moment in time that matters, that has value, and it’s exciting, and it has potential and anything can happen.

Paste: Of Montreal’s live performances have really evolved over the years. I saw you guys at a bar in a strip mall in Mt. Pleasant, S.C., in early 2003, and [drummer] Jamie [Huggins] was in the parking lot sewing costumes before the show. How has the show changed and how has the experience of performing evolved, now that you have some money to help live out your fantasies?
Barnes: It’s really cool now because we have this group of people like Dan Korn, our sound guy, and Nick Gould, our video tech. The two of them and Davey [Pierce], our bass player, are very crafty. They understand woodworking and electronics. So we don’t have to farm out our ideas. We can do everything in house. Everything we do now, because we have a stage concept, we can still realize on a pretty small budget. Any idea we have, we figure out a way to realize it, unless it’s totally cost prohibitive, but then we just tone it down a little and find another way to realize the same vision, just maybe not as extreme as we might’ve wanted. Like Liberace, there are a lot of people who have done some really awesome things because they didn’t have a budget to worry about. Eventually we’d love to get to that point, even if we had a government grant. What I like is to focus on one show at a time—for example, when we did Pitchfork [Festival] a couple years ago, we said, “OK, let’s put everything into this one show and make it really exceptional and different from any show we’ve ever done.” It’s fun to work like that, one show at a time. We’re doing that same kind of thing with the Roseland show in New York in October and then we’re going to keep some of the ideas and use them for other shows. You can feel OK about spending a shitload of money if its only gonna be for one show. The cool thing is, the reason we have a budget is because everyone in the band wants to do this. We’re spending band money to make this happen, so it’s great that I have this group of people who care just as much about putting on a performance as I do. If they thought, “Whoa, I’d have so much more money if I was just in a straightforward rock band…” But at the same time, it wouldn’t be as much fun, it wouldn’t be as fulfilling for anyone. I think we all get off on that. The production planning is just as exciting as the production itself.

Paste: Last year a big deal was made about you taking all your clothes off at a show. What is it like to be naked on stage in front of so many people and how did you feel?
Barnes: I feel really relaxed with my body. I could easily be naked right now and not feel insecure. It wasn’t a big stretch for me. I wasn’t putting myself in this really awkward, vulnerable place because I was totally fine with it. It’s amazing, though: You do something and it’s stamped in time forever. Twenty years from now, it’ll be one of those stories—the way I heard about Iggy Pop rolling around in broken glass. If you wanted to, you could very easily make yourself this huge, iconic figure just by doing wild things and sacrificing your body. A lot of people don’t realize the potential there. But at the same time, you’re walking a line where it’s like, “Is it for shock value?” It might take away from the music if everyone thinks the singer is just trying to get attention because he’s really insecure.

Paste: How important do you think it is for an artist to let go?
Barnes: I think it’s very important that you allow yourself to be vulnerable in your art. It’s important that you don’t put up a wall between you and the rest of the world. I did that for a while. Early on, I had gotten some really negative reviews and they had really hurt me and made me hesitant to share my personal feelings with the rest of the world.

Paste: After Cherry Peel [Of Montreal's 1997 debut album]?
Barnes: Yes. And then, eventually, I realized that there’s always going to be bad reviews no matter what you do. And it’s more important, from a production standpoint to present things that are full of genuine emotion and represent where you’re at personally, and I don’t think I’ll ever feel embarrassed of those things. I think the only time I might feel embarrassed is if I’m doing something I’m not touched by. I’d never do that, but if I did… I think it’s important that people wear their heart on their sleeve as artists. I think that’s something that really resonates with the audience; its something people can identify with, and also it’s very brave. People like bravery.

Paste: So after Cherry Peel you got away from writing personal stuff, and more into characters. At what point did you come back to writing personal stuff?
Barnes: I guess around Satanic Panic in the Attic. I got married to Nina and moved out of the house with the band, and me and Nina and my brother got a place together. It was a supportive environment being with the band, but it was also more challenging as far as accommodating everyone, being in a communal household, being reliant on each other for so many things, and then you’re in a band together, and you spend so much time together. Every artist I know is totally crazy and neurotic, so it’s kind of a dangerous situation to be in. It was really liberating for me to get out of that and move in with Nina and David. They didn’t really have any demands, it was just do what you want, just create something we find interesting and fun. Their life wasn’t really—I mean, it was connected to mine on an emotional level, but not a financial level. And they had their own creative outputs, so it wasn’t the same situation. Like when [the band and I] were living out in the country, if I wanted to do something like on Satanic Panic or Sunlandic Twins—where I recorded every part—then feelings would be hurt. [Former bassist] Derek [Almstead] would be like, “Why are you writing the bass lines? I want to write the bass lines,” which is totally understandable. I was depriving them of their creative outlet that was fulfilling and exciting. So that was a difficult transition for the band, when I took it over again and started doing everything by myself. [Barnes had briefly taken that approach on the band’s sophomore album, 1998’s The Bedside Drama: A Petite Tragedy.]

Paste: Do you feel like your friendships with all these former bandmates have endured that transition, or has it been difficult?
Barnes: It’s definitely been difficult with some people more than others, but I can totally understand any sort of problem that arose from that. And I love everyone that plays with me, and I really support them and everyone is so talented, and they all have their own projects and I totally want to encourage them—like, Jamie is an amazing songwriter and an amazing singer and performer. And Bryan [Poole], and Davey, and Dottie [Alexander] are all fantastic composers as well as performers, and it’s pretty amazing that they’ve been with me all this time and have gone through all these different phases with me, musically, and every time have been able to adapt and get excited about it, and encourage me and basically stay connected through all of it. It’s been pretty amazing. We’re like a family, and you can’t divorce your family. I think we’re like that—we’re like brothers and sisters.

Paste: I read an interview where you talked about the trappings of the Elephant 6 Collective and some of its unwritten rules. Tell me what those rules were, and about breaking free from them.
Barnes: All of it was just my perception of what the rules were; there was no manifesto we all had to sign or anything like that, but there was a spirit of that time, and I started to go this other direction. I had these weird hang-ups that maybe I created myself—this idea that nothing had any value unless it was recorded on an analog tape machine. I couldn’t stand any contemporary bands—I never listened to any of them, really, except for the Elephant 6 bands. I was living in a self-imposed fascist state. I had all these rules about what was good and what was bad, and I was really critical of other bands, and just really stupid. And I know it sounds clichéd, but I can’t help but think that [getting away from that mindset] was influenced by 9/11. After 9/11, it was a universal thing in the United States where everyone felt like they need to connect with other people more. It really influenced me in that way. [Suddenly], I wanted to listen to and support contemporary bands. I wanted to feel a part of my time, my generation, and not be so obsessed with ’60s music, and music made by dead people. I’d always loved dance music, but it was kind of taboo to use a drum machine in the Elephant 6 world. Obviously studio trickery was encouraged, but you probably shouldn’t do anything you couldn’t pull off live. Somehow it felt like disco or electro-pop or attitude music wasn’t that cool. [There were] just all these really weird rules I thought existed and that probably don’t exist at all. I started getting into electronic pop music and really wanted to make this weird disco hybrid—you know, pulling from all these different influences. I started getting turned on to ’70s Afrobeat and soul and dub and Jamaican music, and I got all these Soul Jazz and Trojan reissues, and rediscovered my love for Prince and Stevie Wonder, Sly & the Family Stone and Curtis Mayfield, and that’s what brought me to where I am now. I don’tlisten to The Kinks anymore—I still like that stuff, but I’d never really think to put on a Kinks record.

2008-10-21 - Ragged Words

In the ragged words of Padraic Halpin

ARTIST:

Of Montreal

It’s slightly hard to comprehend that the Kevin Barnes being smothered in red paint on Camden’s Koko stage on a Thursday night is the same mild, almost gregarious Kevin Barnes who attentively answered our questions on a park bench four days earlier. The Of Montreal supreme leader is as interesting, as fascinating and as thoughtful as you would imagine, and perhaps normal is an unfair word to choose, but for someone who creates music so extraordinary and live spectacle so wildly eccentric it makes Ziggy Stardust look like an aging, parochial drag queen, he appears remarkably grounded.

Skeletal Lamping, Of Montreal’s ninth album in just 12 years and the follow up to last year’s soul-bearing, glammed up breakthrough Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, is a bold, startling, uncompromising and frankly remarkable record. Initially conceived as one long composition broken into different movements, the eventual 15-track funky as fuck beast goes form making sense one minute to baffling the next, an awkwardness intentionally conceived to challenge the perception of how an album is both constructed and consumed.

"That was kind of the point for it not to make sense,“ Barnes says. “I wanted to make something that was really unpredictable and had a lot of surprises because I think that so much pop music is predictable and doesn't have a lot of value for that reason. So I wanted to make something that was, for better or worse, an exceptional record that was different and kind of went places that I'd never gone before and a lot of indie music hadn't either.

"I like the idea of awkwardness because it stands out when it's awkward. If everything is linear and it makes sense, it doesn't prick up your ears so much, you think 'oh that's natural, everything kind of resolves, it's pleasing' but that's boring."

Skeletal Lamping is by no means an uncomplicated barrel of laughs but is a marked change from its predecessor which was informed by alienation, depression and subsequent temporary marriage break up. Barnes recently described himself as being at piece with the chaos in his life, adding today simply that this time around he “allowed anything to happen that wanted to happen and didn't really censor or edit myself that much, to allow the freaky voice come out and have its way."

That freaky voice would belong to the alter-ego of Georgie Fruit, introduced briefly last time out, who, being a black shemale funk singer of a 70’s heyday, tends to dominate proceedings on Skeletal Lamping . Having first retreated behind the persona of Claude Robert in 1999’s The Gay Parade after being affected by criticism of the band’s debut Cherry Peel, Barnes insists that, despite Georgie’s presence, he has long since stopped hiding behind shields. The characters and their creators are one in the same. Is he more comfortable then, 12 albums on, with the criticism that comes with being a musician?

"Yeah, definitely. I still don't like negative criticism, no one does but it doesn't hurt me as much. It used to put me in a bad mood for a really long time but now I'm just disappointed that a person would think that way.

“Everyone's entitled to their opinion but for some reason a lot of people who spend their time blogging - half are super positive and just want to turn people onto things they love and the other half are really bitter and want to put people down. So it's just weird when someone marginalizes something you’ve put so much time and heart into.

"It's a little bit easier but not really - I don't even touch the computer in that way.”

Barnes felt the wrath of the blogging community when he allowed Outback Steakhouse to use his 2005 song ‘Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games’ in its an ad which changed lyrics from "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." Having believed it was going to be used as a radio jingle, he has already defended himself in an essay entitled Selling Out Isn’t Easy", but the fiasco nevertheless acted as inspiration for the new record.

"For whatever reason I was in that particular state of mind and followed that spirit into that place that helped me create the record but a lot of it was having to prove myself or wanting to prove myself. It gave me that motivation to create something that was really far out and interesting and to show the world that I wasn't a sell out."

Skeletal Lamping is so far out that you wonder if Barnes shows any sign of slowing down. Of Montreal’s prolific catalogue is littered with highlights (The Gay Parade, Satanic Panic In The Attic as well as these last two) but it’s inconceivable to consider the band’s peaked. Having stated his aim of wanting to get as much art out into the world before he no longer can, does he ever worry about the well drying up?

"I really have it in the back of my mind and it's something I worry about - becoming older and becoming more boring and safe. There's so many artists, as they get older, especially in music, they just put out worse and worse records. They start when they're young and hungry and everything's exciting and then they get comfortable and that's super depressing. I don't like to see that. So in my head, I'm always like, man, it sounds cliched, but you have to stay excited and freaked out by the world. I don't really feel any different than I did when i was 24. The same confusion, paranoia, anxiety and confusion drives me."

We say we hope it's the same in ten years time when he’s 44 to which he agrees "I hope so too." What then of the premise of this record’s title - lamping being the brutal hunting technique involving the flooding of an area and shooting or capture of animals in powerful light - something Barnes proposed he was attempting to do to his proverbial skeletons but hadn’t yet decided whether to "shoot or just capture them." Shoot or capture then?

"I definitely would let it go, I wouldn't kill it."

2009-02-04 - Drowned In Sound

DiS meets Of Montreal - part #2

by John Brainlove, pictures by Gary Wolstenholme

In the second part of our in depth interview, Brainlove & Alcxxk met with Kevin Barnes on the eve of the inauguration to talk Barack Obama, lampshade vs CD vs vinyl, 70s funk, dancing buddhas, and what comes next for Of Montreal.

DiS: Are you feeling positive about the new presidency, like there'll be real change, or do you think a lot of it's hype?

KB: "Well it's definitely good superficially, the symbolism of a black man in power, politics has been dominated by wealthy white men and that's not healthy. It might seem superficial, I mean Condoleeza Rice was black but she was as white as anyone in her thinking. Just because you're black doesn't mean you're going to be progressive. But I think Barack... there's a lot of rhetoric and his rhetoric is very positive, so I'm hoping there's something more behind it."

DiS: Do you have a suggested to-do list for Barack Obama?

KB: "I think setting up more accountability in the government and in corporations. Republicans feel like the government should stay out of the private sector, and I'm not sure that's such a healthy thing, because we've proven ourselves to be not the most moral characters. You can do a lot of things if you're protected by it being business. Business ethics is almost like a contradiction in terms, people seem to think they can get away with things that are inhumane because it's the business that's doing it not them personally. I feel like we need watchdogs that are gonna make corporations protect their employees and regulate products so we don't get products that hurt people. We have a lot of crap from China that makes people sick... I'm suspicious of the food and drug administration, and their ability to control quality.

But there's a number of things... obviously it'd be difficult for one man and one administration to change things, but obviously there's ecology and more green policies, that's essential."

DiS: You guys have been around for a long time now and built up slowly. What do you think about the rapid turnover of bands getting signed and dropped earlier and earlier in their career?

KB: "Well we've been around since 1997, and we've never ever really had that much support from labels or from the press or the industry in general, but we kept trucking along because we just love making music. What I get from music doesn't come from the outside world, I get it internally. It doesn't matter that much to me if it sells and if it gets good reviews and people come to the shows. That's not the motivating factor. For me the creative process keeps me going. A label couldn't keep me from making music. I mean, if I wasn't getting support from my label, I'd just say 'fuck you' and go figure out a way to make it work. Forever we weren't selling shit, you know, we had day jobs. I had one operating a spotlight at a circus, but that was an interesting one - we've had miserable stuff. Video stores, telemarketing, soul-sucking non-committal jobs that we could leave and come back in a month from a tour, reapply and just get it again. They need people because nobody can stand to work there for more than a couple of weeks.

If you think about it realistically and you're on a major label, you're an investment. You're like any other product. These people are investing money in it, and if they're not seeing a return on that they don't have a reason to keep you. There's no big artistic ideas about what they're doing. You don't get people thinking "I'm so proud of working at Universal because we get to give the world Christina Aguilera" or whatever, you know? But if you're on an indie and they don't expect you to sell more than five or ten thousand records, and their overheads are so low that you can't really fail as long as you have a good relationship with the label, and they're into it it and you want to keep doing it, you don't have a problem. It's a problem if you really want to strike it rich, that scene is superficial and unhealthy. It's better to be on a label that doesn't really expect you to sell a certain amount and they believe in what you're doing and they wanna be part of it, and it becomes more like a family."

DiS: How's your side-project (Blikk Fang) with MGMT going?

KB: "It's slow going right now, we've both been traveling and touring. I've been building a studio, I haven't had a studio for a while, and he's been out of pocket and doing different things, so hopefully it'll happen this year. It's one of my new year's resolutions to make that happen."

DiS: You've said your inspiration comes from older pop music - how do you think 'hit factories' like Motown, which came out of the soul, gospel and blues tradition, compares with similar things today?

KB: "Not very inspired and not very exciting. But then every once in a while there's something great. There are actually a lot of songs that come out of the major label system that are really cool, like Britney Spears' Toxic, but there's a lot of crap. But there's just as many crap indie bands. Well, I say crappy, but I mean it just doesn't appeal to me, and I don't think it's good. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't put out records or whatever. I think it's easy to romanticise a period that you're not involved in, to fall into that trap of thinking something that happened a long time ago is more interesting, but there were probably kids born in 1968 who hated The Beatles for being so commercial and just were like 'John Lennon, just go away' or whatever.

Production has a lot to with it too I think. I love the sound of the 60s and 70s. You can't ever really duplicate the sound of those old records because technology moves on. You can try but it'll just end up like a retro sounding record. And that can make older records more interesting because nobody's making things that sound like that any more. That's one thing I love is that when you record music it's like a time capsule, it's put down and it can never be replicated.

A lot of what I listen to is because I like the sound of it. I'm listening to Sly and The Family Stone, their record 'There's a Riot Going On' is one of my favourites. And I love Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield's 'Curtis' is one of my faves by him. I listen to Mingus, 60s and 70s. For a long time that was the only stuff I listened to and I didn't wanna listen to anything contemporary, it had no charm. No mystery.

But I'm more in touch with my contemporaries now. I'm really, really excited about what people are doing now - Animal Collective's new record is fantastic, and I love Gang Gang Dance. Now I really wanna make music that's progressive so I'm listening to my contemporaries and drawing from what they do more than I ever have in the past. I mean, The Kinks, Ray Davies' songwriting, John Lennon and Pete Townsend, those are my idols. But I am looking more to my contemporaries now."

DiS: I've seen you play with a couple of different setups, with backing tracks, and with two drummers, which I thought added a lot...

"Yeah? We've actually gone back to one drummer. It was great to have Ahmed, but we're so used to playing to playing to the backing track, and it's so hard to play to the backing track and have a live drummer. So we had a click track in our ears, and it was so demoralizing, you know? It was so hard to get into with this "clack, clack, clack" in the background through every single song. So it's almost better on a personal level to play to the backing tracks just to not have to have the click. But we'd like to eventually have another full time drummer, having someone actually play the drums is so much more visually interesting than just a CD player or an iPod. But a lot of bands do it, I mean I could just do it by myself and put everything on the backing track, some people don't have any musicians. But I think it's a better experience for the audience to have as many people onstage playing instruments as possible."

DiS: Is the theatrical show with extras and costumes something that you always wanted to do, or did it grow alongside the stages sizes and possibilities?

"It's all kind of learning as we go. Well we always wanted to do something visually interesting and create these almost photographic moments, cinematic moments that'll just look good. A lot of stuff you have to process so quickly in the audience, we wanted it to be over-stimulating, so that people will talk about later over coffee and be like 'do you remember that part, and what about that part'."

DiS: Do you have a frame of reference laid out for the visual iconography, or is it more free form than that?

KB: "Yeah it's more like the series of wild ideas. We tried to do all kinds of visual things like the golden buddhas, we're like 'can it be done?' and then we take it as a challenge and try to make it happen. A lot of the people in the band are also artistic and crafty, like our sound guy helped build the set, our bass player does electronic and built the fog machines. It's an exciting thing, having an idea and making it happen. It's the same spirit with the collection of objects that go with the records, like the Chinese lantern with my wife's artwork. Polyvinyl helped out and got their interns involved and all these different people involved to make it a reality. It's so awesome to have an idea and then figure out a way to make it real."

DiS: Did the thinking for the equally flamboyant formats of Skeletal Lamping come from the band, or was that from the label?

"Well we were thinking that now that the industry is in a difficult position and needs to rethink everything, artists actually have more power - we can say, let's try this idea or this idea, and they might so okay, whereas before a label might have said the cost was prohibitive or whatever. But now they need to create value in objects again... Polyvinyl were really supportive, another label might have said no. I hope it catches on, it would be really cool if you went in not knowing what the record you wanted was going to be..."

DiS: That would be great! Choosing between the formats of boiler suit or kitchenware...

KB: "Yeah, then there'd be another function, if you're going to download it anyway you might as well get a piece of silverware that you're gonna use every day."

DiS: Do you collect any formats or are you an MP3 person?

KB: "Well, I don't collect anything really. I like vinyl but not an extreme enthusiast, for me it's all about listening. I only have a crappy turntable so I don't even have good stereo. I listen to more on my computer. But I do like the physical weight of the vinyl, it's an impressive physical object. CD I hate, I can't stand the plastic, it drives me crazy. Polyvinyl are great, they release everything on big heavy quality vinyl, it's always gatefold, they spend a lot of time on the packaging."

DiS: How did you feel about the slightly cooler critical reception Skeletal Lamping has had compared to Hissing Fauna?

"Well, I'm a fan of Drowned In Sound, it was one of the few places that really got Skeletal Lamping. Drowned In Sound gave us the review that I kinda hoped Pitchfork would give, it really got the record."

DiS: I've found Skeletal Lamping to be a record I love more and more after struggling with it at first, but then Hissing Fauna was like that too...

KB: "Yeah? I think, some music you don't really get straight away, like Fiery Furnaces or Animal Collective, it's not as easily classifiable and some people get frustrated because they don't get much time or whatever, and they have deadlines to review. I sometimes get people say 'I gave this a really crappy review and now I really like it'. I remember Neutral Milk Hotel In the Airplane Over The Sea got really crappy reviews, but now it's considered a masterpiece. A lot of times people jump too quickly but I guess they come around to it later. I mean, I spend a whole year working on a record, and sometimes a journalist will get like only a few listens or days to create a whole synopsis or description of the record that people can use as a reference."

DiS: You played the Hissing Fauna live show for a really long time, are you planning to do the same with Skeletal Lamping?

KB: "Yeah, we've already done a lot of Skeletal Lamping shows, this is our second time here on this record, we have Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Singapore in March and then th US again in April. We're hoping to come back over here for the summer festivals."

DiS: And are you working on new stuff?

KB: "Yeah I am. It's probably gonna be even less accessible... I wanna make something progressive, maybe not pulling as much from my outside influences, but something more personal, something only I could make, not like genre-hopping pieces where I'm channelling Prince or channelling Sly Stone... a lot of the stuff I've been doing has clear reference points like Arthur Russell or Brian Eno or whoever, you know. And that was the fun thing, doing collage work, pulling from other people and putting into this blend. But what I wanna do now is really create something a bit more esoteric, that's the direction I'm going in, that's what I'm excited about. More textural, more atmospheric, still with lyrics, for me at least it's good to have lyrics, that's interesting, and then musically what has developed so far is like a controlled chaos, things rising up for a moment and taking your attention then being overtaken by something else. In abstract terms I see it like an oceanic storm, but it wasn't water it was all these different kinds of substances, all intermingling or fighting each other, then a wave comes up and breaks, and you see it and get a bit of it's personality, and then it sinks back down into the chaos, and it's gone again."

2009-01-20 - Clash Music

Barnes spills his brightly coloured beans...

Interview Posted by Mike Diver Tue, 20/01/2009

Click To View the Fullsize Image/s

Kevin Barnes is a softly spoken gentleman, a red wine drinker rather than a lager lout. He will not be badmouthing peers and providing sensational soundbites this afternoon; he will, instead, answer with consideration and genuine enthusiasm, dissecting his stand-alone art in a fashion most singular.

The man when removed from his music is unlike so many other artists when sat in the interview hot seat: not for him the massaging of an ego precariously close to bursting, or self-mythologizing psychobabble glaringly misplaced, despite the depths evident for exploration. It’s quite the contrast, given his music as the lifeblood and lynchpin of of Montreal is so colourful, psychedelic cacophonies laced with erudite lyrical turns and peppered with sparkling pop micro-passages. It’s one of the few 100 per cent exclusive sounds of modern pop.

of Montreal’s most recent album, their ninth, is ‘Skeletal Lamping’, released late last year via Polyvinyl. Charting higher than any of Barnes’ previous releases, it’s the group’s most commercially successful yet. Yet it’s also their most ambitious – conceptually the songs are acted out by Barnes’ character Georgie Fruit (think Bowie doing Ziggy, only superbly sexually charged rather than purely loving the alien), and compositionally it’s a patchwork of myriad styles, stitched together to form a whole that’s served to split opinion.

Album eight, 2007’s ‘Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer’, raised Athens, Georgia-based of Montreal’s profile significantly, earning unanimous positive feedback. Barnes’ latest, for all its highlights, hasn’t proved as universally admired, and this is one of many things he talks about when we meet in a central London pub.

- - -
of Montreal – ‘Id Engager’ (from ‘Skeletal Lamping’)

- - -

You’re in town to play Heaven, with Franz Ferdinand, before playing further shows in the UK and Europe. Are the crowds good to you here?

Yeah, definitely. It’s a step down from what we’re doing in the United States, as we’re bigger in the US, ut we intend to come back here again and again to build it up. It’s definitely building – we had a great show at Koko the last time we played London.

There’s a feeling here that Koko’s not so great from a sound point of view, despite it being a decent venue otherwise. Did you have any problems?

It’s hard to tell from our perspective, but there was a lot of slap-back. Some venues really aren’t designed for a band like ours.

Because you are a band that sets out to really bring your records to life live, right?

Yes, we try to reproduce the arrangements on the records as closely as we can, and we’ve always done that. I’m schooled like that. Some people think that a record is one thing, and you can reinterpret it live, but I’ve never done that. Even when we do cover songs, we cover them very close to the original. We try to reproduce them. I never worry about how a song will translate live when I record it – the record is the document, and will be around a lot longer than the show.

Talking about documents, it’s interesting what you’ve done with ‘Skeletal Lamping’, releasing it on formats including a t-shirt and a paper lantern, with a digital download, alongside the regular CD and vinyl. It seems you’re highlighting both the disposability of traditional formats, but also working to preserve the album as an artefact…

Yeah, that’s something we were talking about earlier today – nobody’s really taken the approach on, to release items like these. Well, not many people. I think it will, eventually, become the norm, because music right now has little value in CD form. If you want someone to buy your record, you should want to give them a physical object that has value, and that is exceptional in some way. We’re going to put out another collection in a couple of months, and when the next album is done we’ll do the same thing. That’s how we’re going to roll from now – putting out a collection with each record.

It almost sounds like the band is becoming a brand – perhaps with a ‘collect them all’ mentality?

Maybe, but perhaps that’s inevitable, to ensure continuity. For us we’re doing it as it’s an opportunity to create objects that we want, for ourselves. So even if nobody buys the Chinese lantern, I’ll have one. I have one of everything.

I think you’re right to observe that few people actually want a CD nowadays – they buy it and burn it onto their laptop, or whatever, and then the CD sits there collecting dust.

CDs, I mean… I guess physical formats are not so practical now. It’s easier to have everything on a portable MP3 player, or whatever. The real tragedy is that you have to deal with such compressed audio in that format.

But people – those who perhaps don’t listen as closely as you, as a musician – would rather get something quickly than have something of quality. At least that’s the way the market seems to suggest things are going, with downloads up and physical sales down.

I guess now everyone wants the immediacy of the download, so what we’re trying to do is bring back the album, both in terms of format and design. Not every song I write is a radio-friendly song, and I mean to do that deliberately. I rarely listen to just one or two songs on an album; I want to listen to the whole album and then decide if the band’s worth me being excited about or not. I can’t come to that conclusion after just a couple of songs.

But it’s easy to assume an album’s great based on a handful of hits. Look at MGMT – much-revered last year, but their album doesn’t stand up to too much scrutiny.

I’d kind of disagree – the songs that are not everywhere are my favourite ones on that album, the ones that aren’t so easy to digest. Some of the criticism that ‘Skeletal Lamping’ has received is for that reason. The Pitchfork review mentioned hits and misses, like you as an artist are trying to make a hit every time. I don’t feel that way. I don’t feel that a song needs to be a dancefloor burner for it to have value, and often it’s those songs that prove to have the most value.

Sounds like you’re the kind of artist who likes to keep track of how his albums are being received.

Well, that review was a really touchy thing for me. I have the sense that there’s a clique at that site, and I’m not sure how to identify with it. What they do well is support bands that are not getting into the mainstream, and I read it for that, but that review stung. It’s almost like your brother or someone saying it to you. I know this album is very polarising, but I think that those who love music as an art form will appreciate it. You might not want to put every track from it on a tape for your girlfriend, but if you are a true fan of music, you have to recognise it’s an exceptional record, regarding how it’s constructed.

It’s not like reviewers didn’t know what to expect – you said yourself that the album would be made up of loads of short passages, hopping all over the place style wise. You said it wouldn’t have much of an air of continuity.

Yeah, the reasons that they (Pitchfork) give for not liking it are the things that were announced before the album was released.
- - -
of Montreal – ‘Gronlandic Edit’ (from ‘Hissing Fauna…’)

- - -

But it’s also your highest-charting album so far, breaking into the top 40 stateside.

That was a good thing – all our shows are selling really well, too. Because ‘Hissing Fauna…’ did so well we did think that maybe people wouldn’t go for ‘Skeletal Lamping’, but they have. We’re enjoying the most success we ever have at a commercial level.

And you’ve done it without repeating yourself. The new album follows on from ‘Hissing Fauna…’ conceptually, but it’s no retread.

I think a lot of bands get conservative if they’ve found a degree of success – they look to keep the momentum going by writing the same record as before. But I think that’s the unhealthiest thing you can do. It’s important to not listen to what people are saying, because it can go both ways – you can be influenced to write a certain way, like it’s affected your subconscious, and it’s counter productive. That happened early on with me, when I was very sensitive to negative reviews. I still am, but not as much as I was back then. But I’d change the trajectory of a song I was writing, a song that was very personal, because of some very nasty reviews. I thought that I didn’t want to make myself vulnerable in that way, but I soon realised that I had to make a stand and write how I felt, how I wanted to.

You seem to have guarded yourself against lyrical criticism by playing a character on this new album, Georgie Fruit…

Yeah, and initially I thought it’d be a good vehicle for writing in a certain way – it’s not me talking, it’s this character. But, of course, anything that’s put down is coming from me, whatever the device; it’s my personality in there.

I note it’s something that even Beyoncé has done on her latest album, write from a character’s perspective…

I mean, there’s nothing new in adopting a character. David Bowie is someone I really admire, and I’ve sort of patterned my career based on his. He went through so many different phases, and commerciality was never the most important thing to him. I think a lot of the Berlin-era records, like ‘Lodger’ and ‘Scary Monsters’ which came afterwards, those feature non-hits on them, but it’s those songs I like the most. Like, he wrote radio hits, but the albums featured a lot more. That’s when I realised that an album doesn’t need to be full of hits to have value. Some of Bowie’s albums are only now finding their place, years after their release – it took me ages to get into ‘Lodger’, but now I just adore it. Sometimes when people create something that’s an instant hit, it doesn’t evolve – you can’t live with it, and it becomes very superficial. Great records are those where you have a breakthrough moment: “Wow, I never got this before, but now I do”. All of a sudden those albums become your favourite things.

Do you think your albums are ones that reveal themselves slowly, so perhaps they’ll be appreciated differently ten years from now?

Maybe, I mean hopefully. There’s lots of music from the ‘60s and ‘70s that I listen to now, which I love. When I found the ‘…Village Green Preservation Society’ by The Kinks, it seemed a bit weird – I was living in south Florida, had just gradated from high school, but I found this album and it changed my life. And that was 25 years or whatever after it came out.

I’ve often thought The Kinks are rather left out of the Great Influential British Bands equation, you know? But perhaps that’s changing.

I think when things aren’t that commercial – when songs are not on the radio every day – they have a greater personal dimension to them. When I was listening to The Kinks at that time, nobody else liked them. So that felt like discovering something really special – music can be romanticised in a great way. To me the trick is to be slightly commercial so you can continue to create art. You have to make a living, but there’s a fine line. Cross that line and you lose that value. I think our records can go into the part of your brain that doesn’t classify it as it would Kleenex, or hot dogs – it recognises it’s not part of the everyday.

And it’s never the same as what’s come before it.

I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of watering down what’s come before, even in the context of one band’s career. You produce a great album, and people really like it, but the second is a tamer take on the first.

I look at how major labels handle bands now, often ostensibly with pressure on the first album release, and wonder if acts like Radiohead would have ever made it if they’d released their debut today.

Well, they probably had that pressure at that time. I don’t think things have changed all that much since when pop music started and its commercial potential was realised – there’s always pressure, because investors are involved, and they need to see a return on particular products. Plus there are so many overheads at a major label. Working on Polyvinyl is great because they only have about six staff.

Would you not consider a self-release strategy then?

That’s definitely too much for most people to take on by themselves. If we were running our own label and handling all the promotional duties, and everything else, it’d be overwhelming. But we’re in complete control at Polyvinyl – if they suggest that maybe a song shouldn’t be on a record, but I think it should be, it goes on the record. Now we’re in a position where we have more leverage, and I can make the album I want to make. The new stuff I am working on is accessible but excitable – it might not be the record of the year, but for me the important thing is that I get what I need out of creating, otherwise there’s no point. Otherwise it’s cheap. I’m not trying to crack any codes. There are people making pop music that’s fun and exciting, but not everyone’s ambition is to do that. Some people want to make weird albums. I want to be the weird uncle, you know what I mean?

- - -
of Montreal – ‘Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse’ (from ‘Hissing Fauna…’)

- - -

Yes, I get what you’re saying. Barnes sticks around for further off-record conversing, before disappearing into Soho in search of nourishment. Well, two glasses of not-so-quaffable red will last you only so long.

2008-11-14 - Denver Post (Get Real Denver)

Of Montreal and critics

Checking in with the indie act's leader, Kevin Barnes, and what he thinks about the negative reviews of his new CD

By John Wenzel

The Village People never did this much acid, did they? Photo courtesy of Of Montreal.

Music critics, and often, the publicity machine that throws the meat into their cages, tend to push overt narratives for each artist’s new album. Phrases like “a stunning debut, “a return to form” or “their best album since (fill in the blank)” get tossed around rather liberally. But occasionally that narrative really does describe an artist’s creative trajectory.

Take the long-running indie rock act Of Montreal, an Athens, Ga.-based band that ran away with many critics’ hearts in 2007 with the stunning “Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?” Leader Kevin Barnes’ jittery laptop meditation on depression and busted relationships traded Brian Wilson’s melodies for ’80s synth-pop, making it the year’s most danceable headphone masterpiece.
His personal demons exorcised, now Barnes is questioning his own identity via R&B collage and indie-funk rhythms on the new album “Skeletal Lamping.” We talked to Barnes about narratives, “idiot” critics and more in advance of the band’s Sunday show at the Ogden Theatre.

Your stage show has gotten more grandiose lately, and a recent New York show even featured a horse on stage. I’m guessing you’ve scaled it back for your road dates.

Actually, the only difference is there’s probably not going to be a horse. But everything we did in New York we’ve been doing every night. It’s a really crazy show. We’ve never done anything like it.

How would you describe it?

It probably has more in common with the ambitious artists of the ’70s like Alice Cooper, Bowie and Zappa — people who really wanted to spend a lot of time and money to put on these over-the-top performances. What we’re doing is more than just costume changes. There’s so many different layers. We have five performance artists and completely different theatrical things happening from song to song, three giant video screens, all kinds of things.

Sounds pretty intense — and bigger than the last time you guys played Denver.

From song to song it’ll be a completely different theatrical thing happening. With the performance artists, sometimes the band is interacting with them, sometimes we’re not. There’s really sort of complex things that are happening. Something goes away, something new thing pops up, then that goes away. It’s an over-stimulation of the senses.

It sure sounds like it.

I, like, never stop moving. I’m always changing costumes. I go through I don’t know how many. It’s been really good for me — really good exercise.

Is it all pretty choreographed or is there some improvisation to it?

We have loose boundaries we sort of work within. So we know, “OK, this is a scene where these weird skeleton cowboys are going to come out and do this thing.” A lot of things start out as this rough idea, but if you get another idea while you’re on tour, you can just inject that into the show. So it’s not set in stone. The performance artists can do whatever they want. My brother’s had a number of different ideas, like after our fifth show we injected some different elements into it. It’s kind of fun because it adds spontaneity to the performance.

You’ve got some really unique packaging and extras with this album, too. Tell me about that.

We realized that we didn’t have any limitations with the industry changing the way it has and downloading being so popular. So if people are going to download the record, you can create any sort of packaging you want, because it doesn’t have to fit into a sales rack. You can just create any number of objects. You can choose between all these options — you get a download code with a T-shirt, or a Chinese lantern, or a handbag. We realized we had the opportunity to bring all these objects to life, and luckily our record label was cool enough to front the money and do all the legwork.

How has the stuff been selling?

The response has been great, we’ve been selling all these items like crazy. It’s definitely been a success, and we’ve put out so many records, like ten or something, and we’ve gone in a conventional way as far as the packaging pretty much every time. It’s (usually) a booklet in a jewel case, but with (”Skeletal Lamping”), there’s never been a CD package like this that wasn’t just like a specialty or limited edition.

So it’s like this everywhere?

Right, this is the way that we put this out. It’s like this everywhere all over the world. I’m really excited about it, because if we’re going to keep producing these physical objects they should have value beyond what you put on the shelf. It protects the CD from getting scratched, sure, but we realized we could make this crazy sculpture, too. It’s a conversation piece. You put next to your bed on your nightstand.

A lot of personal trauma went into making “Hissing Fauna…” What, if any, theme has emerged for “Skeletal Lamping”?

I guess it would be investigating identity, and the fluid nature of people’s individual identity and self-perception. It’s also playing with gender roles and examining sexual politics.

The new album has been getting some really polarized reviews. Do the negative ones from websites like Pitchfork ever get under your skin?

I wasn’t bummed out necessarily that they gave it a bad review. I was bummed that they gave it such a thoughtless review. My attitude about this record is that you don’t have to like it or enjoy listening to it, but you have to acknowledge that it’s an exceptional record. If you can’t, then you’re an idiot. You’re just small-minded and you should feel ashamed.

That’s a pretty strong statement.

Well, I don’t think it’s necessarily a great record, but it’s at least an interesting record. Anyone that gives it a throwaway review just pisses me off. I’ve read some reviews where people clearly didn’t have the musical background or the intelligence to understand and appreciate it, and I’ve read reviews where they did. But whenever I read a negative review, the reasons that they give are just absurd. People say it’s too fragmented, too schizophrenic. ‘He knows how to write pop songs. Why doesn’t he just do it?’ I wanted to make it that way.

Do you feel constrained by expectations?

Sometimes… It’s like, why does every album have to be just like the one before it? Personally, when a band comes out with a record that’s different than their contemporaries’, it’s exciting to me. It’s something to appreciate. But a lot of people are so lazy and they just want something to make sense and have an immediate connection — and in a way, be disposable. The consumer mentality is destroying the album as an art form.

– John Wenzel

2007-03-?? - Nerve

From Nerve.



Not so long ago, Kevin Barnes had a nervous breakdown. He was nine albums into a career as the frontman for Of Montreal, a pop band from Athens, Georgia, that was veering increasingly toward dark and dancey glam-rock. But his life, and his sanity, were unraveling. It didn't help that he split from his wife around the time she had his first child. It didn't help that he was in Norway . But it did, perhaps, help him to write a mind-blowing album. Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? channels David Bowie and Prince without sounding like a rehash of either. The band, long known for its theatrical, over-the-top stage performances, has raised the bar, with Barnes recently going naked at a show in Las Vegas. Believe it or not, he's actually not insane anymore. And he and his wife have reconciled. So we talked to him recently about stripping onstage, coming back from the edge and the album that may just be one of the year's best. — Sarah Hepola

You recently went full-frontal at a concert. Why did you do that?
I'd been thinking about it for a couple shows, but I'd heard that if I did it in a venue that wasn't twenty-one-and-over, I might have to sign up as a sex offender in every city we travel to. It just turned out that, around that time, we were going to do a twenty-one-and-over show in Las Vegas. And what better place to go naked than Vegas? The stars were aligned. So we made it a kind of sex show. We had straight and gay porn projected during the show.
It wasn't just like, "Now I'm gonna take off my clothes." I warned everyone in my band. They weren't sure I was gonna do it, though. I guess it's still a bit taboo, but there's some history of people doing similar things. People like Jim Morrison. I'm sure Iggy Pop has done it. GG Allin did way worse than that. I mean, it's not like it's the 1950s, and it's Elvis Presley naked onstage.

Yeah, but it's still shocking. People have nightmares about being onstage naked. Why did you want to do it?
It's just like the ultimate exhibition as far as performance goes. You're always putting yourself in a vulnerable position as a performer. And our band definitely has a flair for the theatrical, so it's not a big stretch for me. I'm always wearing these ridiculous clothes — stripper wear, fishnets, camping it up at bit. Actually, I think before I went naked that night, it was more obscene. I was wearing a gold miniskirt with no underwear. Sometimes when you're flirting with nudity, it has more impact. It can be more shocking if your cock is hanging out of a miniskirt.

But I'm totally relaxed about nudity. It's probably easier for me, because I feel so comfortable with my body. I think it's insane how uptight people are about nudity. Your clothes are your armor, I guess, on many levels. But I'm probably secretly a nudist at heart. I'm gonna be one of those horrible old men on a beach, running around naked.
I wasn't drunk. I wasn't nervous. For some people, I guess it could be dreadful. But I get into this persona that has no inhibitions. If I were naked in a grocery store, it might be a different story.

Even though you were pretty much fully exposed that night, you did have had on makeup and fishnets.
And a sash.

That's right. Can't forget about the sash. What does it do for you to wear fishnets and eyeliner?
Well, I don't think of it as cross-dressing or a perversion. It's more because of this new stage persona, who is a she-male. Psychologically speaking, people might be listening to me and thinking, "This kid has problems." But it helps, as an artist, to have a persona. You are given so many liberties as a performer. You can get away with whatever you want. And cross-dressing has a history, the extremely androgynous music of the '70s and punk rock during the New Romantic period. So I don't feel freaky at all. I mean, no matter what I do, I'm not going to be as freaky as Prince.

Let's talk more about your persona. Does he-she have a name?
This character's name is Georgie Fruit. I don't really know where that name came from. It's a songwriting persona for me, so it kind of goes beyond what I wear and do onstage. It gives me an outlet to explore different aspects of myself. I don't feel like I have a split personality or anything. It's this exaggerated view of my personality. So it's fun to be able to take certain aspects of my personality and blow them up, put them on the screen for overyone to see. Because I'm a performer. And like all performers, I'm slightly insecure and need constant affirmation. Otherwise I wouldn't go onstage.

When did you develop this persona?
When I was making the last record. I had gone through this heavy chemical depression, and it was a reaction to that. I was like, enough of that. I was sick of writing about my life. I was bored with myself. And I wanted to write about something fantastic, and bizarre, and otherworldy.

That's interesting. Because this album is more autobiographical than most of your earlier albums. Am I wrong?
It's all autobiographical. But I'm talking more about the second part of the album, when this songwriting persona pops up. Instead of my natural reaction to things, I was pretending to be a different person, coming from a different background, and seeing how they would view these experiences in my life.

So about those experiences. There's a line in which you say: "I spent the winter on the edge of a total breakdown while living in Norway." That pretty much strips away metaphor. What happened?
Basically just all these life-changing events were going on. I'd gotten married, and we were expecting our first child, and we were living in Norway, and I didn't know how to deal with those things, because as an artist you live in your own fantasy world. So when reality hits, it hits hard. It was hard to adapt. I had a very difficult time with things. I went through a chemical depression I couldn't get out of. It affected me on all levels. Affected everything, affected songwriting. It was so bad I had to get on medication. And once I got on medication, it became easier to handle. These things that felt unresolvable seemed easier. My wife and I split up, and then we got back to together. All of that probably helped me create this new character. You get sick of self-analysis. I wanted to explore other things, disconnect.

Depression can either spark your creativity or snuff it out. Which was it for you?
Fortunately, mine wasn't the kind of depression where I couldn't do anything, where I just sat in a room and did nothing. It was actually an inspiring period for me. My sanity was crumbling. It was a period of losing my grip. It wasn't so much like, "I'm sad." It was way more violent.

Do you hear that reflected on the album?
Mainly in "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal" [a seven-minute song that comes at the album's midway point]. But I didn't really want to reflect my reality so much. I was trying to change my reality. I felt miserable and insane. Instead of making fragmented, cacophonous music, I was trying to make something that was upbeat and happy. And use music as therapy. Instead of just revelling in something that was ugly and depressing.

That reminds me of track five, "Gronlandic Edit," which is amazing. The dance song of the year for me. But it took me a while to realize that, as great as its groove is, the lyrics are a downer.
There's a pretty strong contrast between songs and subject matter, yeah. And part of that is because musically, I have enough experience that I know what's a happy sound and what's a sad sound and I can produce something that's in chorus with what I feel or don't feel. But in a lyric, I can't fake that. I mean, if you're depressed, it's hard to write about how it's a sunny day and everyone's really happy.

But you could hide personal information — for instance, you used to bury it in these character sketches. I was reading an old interview where you talked about not wanting to write about yourself, because it made you feel vulnerable. What changed your mind?
Early on, I was very impressionable, and it was hard for me to handle negative criticism. I got some nasty reviews from people, and it made me want to withdraw and not write anything personal. So I started writing, as you say, these kind of whimsical character sketches. And I slowly started to incorporate more personal stuff over the last few albums — Satanic Panic in the Attic, The Sunlandic Twins. On this record it was more out of necessity, because it was such an overpowering part of my existence. I couldn't make something trivial out of it. My life was sort of hanging by a thread.

But how do you protect yourself from criticism now?
Luckily I'm not as vulnerable as I used to be. I have thicker skin, because of the experience I've had, and also just being a performer for a while now. I used to think that a bad review was the world's response to the music. Now it doesn't matter much. Now I realize it's just one person's opinion. It doesn't really mean anything.

I wanted to ask you about a couple lyrics. On "Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider," you sing: "Eva, I'm sorry, but you will never have me. To me you're just some faggy girl, and I need a lover with soul power." I assume this is a song about getting hit on by groupies.
No, not really. It's just more about going out to the club. When [my wife] Nina and I were split up, I went through an exploratory phrase, because I didn't know if we were going to get back together again. And sometimes when you're single, you don't necessarily want to be single. You want to find someone you can connect with. So I would go to clubs and meet people, but nothing would ever come of it. And that's the story of one of those experiences. Obviously I would never say anything like that. I was trying to be cruel, almost to the point of absurdity.

But did you ever go out with groupies?
No. There's just such an imbalance there. Someone's going to mythologize you in this totally unnatural way. You obviously aren't that person. You don't feel like you're this iconic figure. Most people feel kind of pathetic and retarded most of the time. It's difficult to feel relaxed around a fan, because you're not really you.

In the song, "She's a Rejecter," you say, "I'm forever going celibate." What does that mean?
Actually, it's "I'm forever going celibate tomorrow."

Ohhh. That's a big difference.
Yeah. It's just the idea of, like, being a drug addict. This is the last time. This is the last day. I'm always saying tomorrow's going to be different. I'm going to change everything tomorrow.

The album begins with the sound of a little baby. Is that your daughter?
It is. It's actually her singing. She's just singing her own song. It's just like, la-la-la. n°