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.

2009-01-23 - Bang Bang on RTBF

Belgium's LGBT radio show Bang Bang interviewed Kevin some time before the Botanique show on January 22nd. The podcast (dubbed in French) is downloadable from their website but folks at the Townhall get antsy when the Booty Patrol speaks French, or champions French (or whatever), so I transcribed what I managed to hear in English.

Q : I don't know if you're aware of the fact that tonight in Brussels there is the gay & lesbian film festival... Is it a coincidence?
K : Well, maybe not... God works in mysterious ways...

Q: Are you often shocked by questions?
K : No, never. I've no idea what it would take to shock me... Something physical would have to happen.

Q: So I won't hurt you...
K : Unless you start to choke me, I think I'll be fine.

Q: I know it's a phony question, but do you feel like a gay icon?
K: That would be weird because I'm not gay. But I really champion the gay cause, because I feel like so many people are so uptight and feel like they have to identify with their gender. They think they have to have a fixed identity, it is so important to them. Being caught making out with a person of the same sex would be a nightmare for a lot of people, which is absurd. I think people should be free to explore and less uptight.

Q: Do you think that what we call in French “la fluidité des genres” is an important thing and do you think that there will be a time when people are more comfortable with gender fluidity?
K: It's hard to say. Humanity has always been like that. We carry this burden and we pass it on to our children, who will in turn pass it on to their children... It clearly doesn't seem to be getting any better. But maybe, eventually, yeah... maybe it'll be a whole new epoch and everyone will be free... I don't know... At the same time, as long as people are not violent and don't fight you for being who you are, and don't hinder your self expression, I don't care if someone's uptight. Really, they have their own reality and it's their thing... I have my own reality and it's my thing. I'd be as much of a fascist if I tried to turn them into someone like me and threaten them with punishment... Obviously the first step is for everyone to be cool and care about their own business. I wouldn't want everyone to be like me. I'll do my thing, you'll do your thing and as long as we can live together peacefully, that's fine to me.

Q: Do you hide behind a character or can someone listening to your songs guess who you truly are?
K: You can definitely get to know me personally. Nothing's ever purely fictional. Everything I sing about is something that occurred to me, that comes from my mind... I can't fake it. I couldn't write something that's completely alien to who I truly am, how I truly feel... At least on some level, there is honesty in everything I do.

Q: So who's Tim?
K: Tim was a very good friend of mine when I was growing up in a small town. There wasn't any cool people around, people like us... Tim is the only person I had – I wasn't sexually attracted to him, but to me, it would have been perfect if it had been the case. We had great moments together, and I was really fond of him... It's kind of a tragedy of sexual preference.

Q: Would it have been a problem for you to be sexually attracted to a man?
K: No, not at all. I look forward to it. I love it when something unexpected happens, something I'd never thought about, things I'd never thought I'd do. I try to stay open to new experiences, and not have any strict rules for myself : “this is who you are – this is how you should act.” I want my identity to be as fluid as possible, and I really like it when I find myself obsessed with something I never thought I'd even like. That's the exciting part of life. Something new comes up and it adds value to your life.
So if I ever feel some kind of chemistry with a guy, I wouldn't hesitate and I'd go for it. But that's still kind of tricky, because I'm married and I love my wife, so we'd have to have a threesome or something.

Q:?
K: When I was growing up, I was always making up stories and daydreaming and acting out scenarios. We did theatrical stuff with my brother and my cousins and we would put on shows at family gatherings. Then I really got into sports. I was very butch back then, and somehow as a teenager I grew more feminine again, because I realized that my sports friends were very uptight, not very open-minded, and you had to be very tough and very stiff all the time and I just wasn't like that.
But that's funny, because I still really like sports. I like the idea of being this kind of fruity guy who's still very athletic and good at sports, and maybe even better than the other straight guys...

Q: But with purple nail varnish...
K: Exactly, I'd do like a jumpshot with sparkly nails and freak their minds.

2008-11-13 - Paste (part 2)

Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes: The complete Paste interview

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

Paste: One thing that comes up a lot in this record is—there’s this sexual directness, you know? In the past, the lyrics have kind of played with androgyny, and the performances, with all the costumes. But I really think this one pushes the envelope with its sexual directness. Why is this a theme you keep coming back to, and how does it play into the album, conceptually?
Barnes: This character just sort of evolved on our last tour, the Hissing Fauna tour [in support of the band 2007's album, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?]. Not even to give him a name, but just internally sort of evolving in this new way, and it was definitely more sexual. I don’t know, I feel like that person I sort of became or that stage persona or whatever—like, part of me, my artistic mind—evolved in this way that influenced the songs on the new record. And I hadn’t really thought about it that much because I don’t really second-guess the creative process. You know, when I’m doing something, I don’t think, “Well, what is this all about?” I just do it. But then, when the record’s done, then you think about it. But it is different for me [now]—I’m definitely exploring topics I’ve touched upon, but never really in depth like this. So I think I was influenced by the spirit of that tour, the last couple tours we’ve done for Hissing Fauna, and the outfits I was wearing and the sort of character I had become.

Paste: Living in Athens from 1998 to 2003 and following Of Montreal as it developed, it’s been really interesting to watch your public transformation—from being this quiet, eccentric D.I.Y. indie pop artist, who was not so in-your-face, to being this David Bowie-esque performance artist. In the post you wrote for Stereogum, about selling your song [“Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games”] to Outback Steakhouse, you talked about making yourself into a cartoon. How much did that idea have to do with your gradual transformation, and what was the transformation like for you? How did this stage persona develop?
Barnes: I can’t really say. It all happened in a very organic way. I think I realized at one point a couple years ago—in the indie-rock world, there’s a lot of pressure to be modest. And a lot of people [in that world] are very shy, and feel if someone’s going to be legitimate or genuine, it can’t be pretentious. But I realized it’s fun to be pretentious. Pretentiousness offers freedom. My concept of pretentiousness isn’t phoniness; it’s just role-playing and not having a fixed identity. Because I think that’s really destructive when people, especially in the indie community—it hearkens back to the punk-rock mentality where, to be real, you shouldn’t have a stage persona, you have to just be this person on stage all the time, and you have to have accountability for what you said yesterday. But I feel like it’s cool to not put those restrictions on your character because you’re gonna be different people from day to day. And there’s no reason why you have to put yourself in this prison, like, “This is my identity and this is who I am, and if I stray from that then I’m being phony.” I don’t believe it’s possible to be phony. You’re always gonna be who you are. And even if you contradicted who you were yesterday, it doesn’t matter ’cause yesterday’s irrelevant. Today’s the only thing that matters. Once I accepted that, and allowed myself to not have a fixed identity, I realized, “I want to be something fantastic. If I’m gonna create who I am, I don’t want to be this shy, meaningless creature that hasn’t made a splash in the world. I want to be something outrageous and fantastic and inspiring and bizarre.” In my normal life, I’m very down to earth. I watch ESPN and do a lot of like boring things nobody would get excited about.

Paste: You were saying you play baseball.
Barnes: Yeah, yeah. But I realized, “OK, if I’m gonna be a performer, I need to perform, you know—I need to do something fantastic.” There’s no point in going on stage in your street clothes ’cause that’s not that exceptional. If you’re gonna go on stage and you’re gonna have people watch you, look at you, and you want to entertain them, you should do something exceptional.

Paste: Yeah, it’s like, every choice you make, you can make it be interesting and add to the experience or not.
Barnes: You’re only limited by your imagination. I think the spirit that’s happening right now [in music]—people are adopting that. There’s a lot of bands right now that are like, “Yeah, fuck it, let’s do something really crazy. Let’s do something visually interesting!” I think that’s my major gripe with [most] live bands—no matter how much you love the songs, after like the seventh song it just becomes static, you know?

Paste: It’s like, “are you trying to entertain the people that are there to see you and help them have an amazing experience, or are you there to indulge only yourself?”
Barnes: Yeah, and even beyond that—when I think about the visual dynamic and emotional dynamic, most performers aren’t really that ambitious as far as what they want to do for the audience. Now, I’m kind of viewing it like concept art, more on a theatrical level, something that has more dynamic and more depth so it’s not just like, party all the time, you know? For this new tour we’re going to try to play more with tension and try to create anxiety in the audience, so it’s not just always happiness, it’s also like moments of fear and tension and confusion, which comes closer to the emotional depth we all have within ourselves. I don’t think it has to be all one dimensional for it to be worthwhile. In a way, you’re sort of limited. I mean, when you go into a club, there’s only so much you can do to transform the environment. But that’s the major challenge—”OK, what tools do we have that we can use to completely transform this venue that people have maybe been to like 20 times already and seen any number of different kinds of bands perform there?” We want to try to transform it, so it’s an otherworldly experience—something so exceptional, so out of the ordinary, that people will have that special moment, like when you see a movie or a painting or read a book that really touches you. The reason it touches you is because it’s jumping out from this other world, and it burns in your memory as something exceptional. And I think that’s the motivation behind Of Montreal’s recordings, as well. I don’t want to do anything that’s dismissible. I’m sure that’s why there’s a lot of people who hate us, and there’s a lot of people that love us, and I think that’s a great thing. I feel that it’s a positive. I’d rather make something that people despise with all their heart, you know, than were completely indifferent about.

2008-10-01 - Spin

Of Montreal: Welcome to Normal Town

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Live Video: Of Montreal, "Mingusings"

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

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

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

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

2008-11-21 - Drowned In Sound

Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes loves...

by Andrzej Lukowski

Surprisingly, horses and unsavoury sexual accessories are off the menu as Of Montreal’s pervert-in-chief shares five things he loves with DiS.

And - ahem - speaking of that, one thing DiS loves is Of Montreal’s new, X-rated kaleidoscope of an album Skeletal Lamping, which you can currently vote for alongside 49 inferior records (I may be biased) in Rough Trade and DiS’s People’s Voice Prize.


The Wurdle ap for my iPhone

This game is crazy addictive! I don't even know why, since I'm not that into Scrabble or Boggle or other word games. I am weird about games though. I can go years without playing any, and then discover one that I freak on for a month straight. I was like that for Metroid and the first Legend of Zelda too. Wurdle is basically a game where you try to find words within a jumble of letters. It sounds boring but, for some reason, the whole band is hooked on it right now.

iPhone

While I'm on the subject, my iPhone is probably my favourite possession at the moment. It's really the coolest phone ever. I mean, I've got a four-track recorder, a guitar tuner, a satellite map of the world, a GPS device, loads of games/songs/films/photos... all in my pocket. I feel sort of embarrassed by my own enthusiasm for this, but I can't lie, this device is the bitch.

'Sex Shooter'

This is a fantastic song, sung by Apollonia and written by Prince. I love her voice on this. It's just the right combination of slutty and playful. Purple Rain is one of my all time fave films, and the scene of Apollonia 6 performing this song is so hottt! I was only like 14 when I first heard/saw it, but some erections, it would seem, last a lifetime.

Jimmy Stewart films

I love JS. Whenever shit gets too crazy, I can always watch one of his films and come down a bit. My faves are You Can't Take It With You, The Philadelphia Story, Rope, Harvey, Bell, Book And Candle, Anatomy Of A Murder and Rear Window. He looks so handsome and seems so charming and cool. English-language cinema, in the 1930s through the 50s, was quite rad. Some of my other favourite actors from that time period are Cary Grant, Clark Gable and John Barrymore. My favourite film from that era is either All About Eve, The Great Dictator or The Sweet Smell Of Success... or The Magnificent Ambersons or The Maltese Falcon... I don't know, there are far too many to choose from!

The Cleveland Browns

The Browns are my all time favourite sports team. I've loved them since I was a kid, and my obsession/enthusiasm hasn't waned at all over the years. I can rattle off (pretty much) the starting offense and defensive squads without much deliberation. My fanhood for a major sports team makes me a bit of an oddity in the indie-rock world but I don't care. It's not something I choose to foster, I just can't help myself. The thing about the Browns is that they're the sort of team that finds a way to lose more often than win. They might be leading the opposition by a seemingly unapproachable margin, only to completely choke and somehow manage to lose in the end. It's been that way ever since I was a child. All the same, every year I nervously watch every game possible and scream and cheer (mostly scream) at the TV as the Browns march back and forth across the field. Then at night I lie in bed and replay each moment of the game in my head and anguish over each mistake. It's kind of a curse actually.

2005-04-13 - WERS.org

WERS.org - Artist Interview: Of Montreal - April 13, 2005

(no longer hosted on the web)

Waiting to record his band’s live mix at WERS, Of Montreal mastermind Kevin Barnes confesses that he was disappointed, touring England for the first time a few years back. He says he romanticized the nation in his head; he imagined a land full of knights and castles and the Beatles.
Instead, he found jet lag, cheap cuisine, and rude taxi drivers. All of these things later found their way into a song on 2004’s Satanic Panic in the Attic, Of Montreal’s eighth album and their first for Polyvinyl. A critical success, the album heralded an evolution of the band’s sound from the lush, sprawling psychedelia typical of Athens’ Elephant 6 collective, to a new, more streamlined avant-pop. This transition was no doubt made possible partly through a new unity of vision: both Satanic Panic and Of Montreal’s new album, The Sunlandic Twins, were played, written, and recorded by Barnes alone, with merely occasional recourse to other musicians.
In other bands, such a dynamic could be limiting. Not so with Of Montreal. On tour, the band imbues Barnes’ ambitious arrangements with perfect theatrical verve; they perform daubed in glitter, with Nabokov-ian butterflies pinned to their guitars. The Sunlandic Twins continues the tradition of glimmering, propulsive hooks established in Satanic Panic, expanding the sonic palette to encompass influences as diverse as IDM and afrobeat. The songs drive, pull over, and at times meander, through landscapes at once gorgeous and nonsensical, like a canyon lined with daisies. And this, surely, is the key to Of Montreal’s music: it’s an alternative to reality, a place where all romantic expectations are gleefully exceeded.

Where do you get the inspiration for the titles of your records?
Kevin Barnes: That, I can’t really answer. It just sort of happens. This recent one, for a long time, the working title was The Voice of the Vanishing Twin. Because I heard that a lot of women, when their egg is fertilized, they actually have twins for a brief period, and then the one… I don’t know if it eats it necessarily, but it could I guess eat it, but then sometimes it just disappears.

The band name – I’m told it came from being obsessed with a girl from Montreal?
KB: Actually it has more to do with gymnastics. David has to tell the story though.
David Barnes: Do you want me to tell the truth about it?
KB: Tell the truth.
DB: I just don’t want to emasculate you. When Kevin was younger, he was like really into gymnastics. You know, like, boys’ gymnastics. He was actually really good at it; he traveled and competed in out of state meets and stuff. So he went to this competition in Montreal, which was a big deal, and then at the competition, he kind of choked. He was doing the pommel horse, and he fell off of the thing and actually was knocked unconscious for a couple of minutes. Just totally, out of it. And then after that... Kevin what happened?
KB: It was like, too much pressure. I was young.

You claim Montreal in your band name – do you ever get hostility from Canadians who think you’re just repping Canada to be cool?
KB: Yeah. A lot, actually.
DB: It’s just really confusing when we play in Montreal because there are these flyers and it’s like, Of Montreal tonight, in Montreal. And most Montreal people see the word Montreal probably so many times during the day that they just ignore it. Yeah so when we play in Montreal it’s really hard to publicize the gig.
KB: It sucks because a lot of people don’t like local music, so, they won’t go see us play.
DB: They think, Oh, it’s just a bunch of local jokers.

How would you compare the songwriting process when writing an instrumental track as opposed to a vocal track?
KB: I guess, maybe I spend more time on the music, because there’s nothing to distract me from it. Because a lot of time when you’re writing songs with lyrics you want to give the words their own place in the mix, so you probably tend to make things a little bit less busy, but when you’re thinking instrumentally there’s nothing like that.

So your wife’s in the band and I hear your brother does the artwork.
KB: That’s sort of true. Well, she played in the band two tours ago, but we just had a baby recently, so she’s at home. She sings a song on the new record and such. Her spirit can be felt.

Satanic Panic was very well received, from what I gather. What specifically were you trying to achieve with The Sunlandic Twins? Was it a conscious departure in any way?
KB: No, it’s just, I had fun making the electronic stuff on Satanic Panic, and I wanted to push that a little bit further, and experiment more with that genre. Because it seems like there’s this new wave of people just having fun again, and we kinda just want to be a part of it. It’s really fun music to play, and you can see a lot of weird stuff. So I kinda wanted to make an intelligent dance record, you know, that wasn’t just like [sings] “Everybody on the dance floor / Shake your ass for the deejay” or whatever.

-Aaron Ayscough

2005-01 - Thrasher Magazine

Thrasher Magazine, Jan, 2005 by Dan Whiteley

Kevin Barnes, the front man behind Of Montreal, is one of the most dedicated and inspiring people I've ever met. He mentioned in passing that his first 600 songs were atrocious. Six hundred? This guy's paid some serious dues en route to the band's seventh album, Satanic Panic in the Attic, on which he more or less recorded everything himself. And not just guitar, bass, and drums either--there's layers and layers of instruments and interesting sounds. But rather than trying to describe these sounds, I'll just plug the Thraser Rocket Science DVD and say: watch the Arizona section. Life is fun.

Do you believe in Satan?

Sure. Well, it's hard to say. I vacillate between believing in good and evil. It's kind of silly to think about this actual creature that sits there and tries to corrupt human brains.

What's a poppet?

A poppet is this term of endearment that I heard when we were in England. I was at a convenient store, and this woman was like, "Cheers, poppet!"

I was like, "Poppet? Weird ... I'm going to use that in a song." I just try to have fun with lyrics, do some stream-of-consciousness type stuff. It can be so boring when people use generic rhyme schemes or just think about girls when they write. I avoid love songs unless they're really genuine. I try to go beyond that.

Like "butterflies melting on the wall"? Are you on drugs?

A lot of things seem like they could be psychedelic visions or somehow inspired by a drug experience. "Spike the Senses" seems like it could have some overt drug connotation, but I really don't even know where it came from. I wasn't doing heroin or anything. I guess a lot of people get to that state eventually through doing drugs, like, if you smoke a lot of dope and don't get brain dead, you can actually have ideas and think of stuff like that. But I try to get there naturally, because whenever I do drugs, it seems to just dull me. It dulls my brain, and I can't think; I just sort of stare. I think the most important thing about existence is to just be productive and creative.

Do you watch TV?

Not really. I find TV really frustrating. It's a strange drug. So many people just sit in front of it for hours and become zombies. They go to bed, wake up, and go to work. That kind of existence is horrifying. It's just so wrong, and so many people fall into that trap. And it's scary the way it's set up; it's all about manipulation, a neverending cycle of creating these consumers, these insanely insecure people, who need television to tell them what to do and think, to feel sane. It takes the human out of the human's brain. You can't smell, you can't look strange, you can't have pimples, you can't have yellow teeth ... you have to be this perfect plastic human. But I think most people are smart enough not to fall for it.

Any hobbies?

I basically have just been making music every waking moment. That's my greatest joy, sitting there with the headphones on--it's just wonderful. But I like to play basketball a lot, and I really want to get back into skating. I've been thinking about it, but I'm kind of insecure, because I'll suck so bad, and I'll be too old to suck.

You'll get over it. What's a good skate memory?

Trying to do Japan airs off our launch ramp. Except my friend kept breaking his arm, and his morn made us destroy it. That was great, though. We used to spend hours and hours on it before I got into music.

How did you get into music?

Through skateboarding and friends, of course.