Interrogation

Of Montreal’s current tour has to be the biggest production you’ve
ever put on. How has it been holding up on the road?

It’s great. I mean, at first it was a bit of a headache because
there were so many little details that we had to iron out and make sure
everybody was on the same page. That took some time. We had to rent
this gigantic warehouse space where we could set everything up and run
through a couple rehearsals. But it was totally down to the wire, down
to the last second. We brought a sewing machine to the first couple
days of rehearsals because we had to finish some of the costumes and
make some totally last-second changes. Now we’ve kind of got it down
because we’ve done it so many times, and now it’s working really
efficiently and it’s cool.

No big surprises or malfunctions so far?

Oh yeah, there’ve been a lot of slight, little glitches here and
there, but probably nothing that anybody would really notice. The
audience is just so overstimulated anyways.

Overstimulated is a perfect word for the show. Do you worry some
people—older fans, DIY purists—might be put off by the
spectacle?

Well, it’s still totally the same [DIY] thing, it’s just bigger.
Nina [Barnes, Kevin’s wife] makes the masks, David [Barnes, Kevin’s
brother] spray-paints the costumes or whatever. It’s still the same
group of people. If people are expecting a conventional rock show then
maybe they’re going to be disappointed, but I don’t think Of Montreal
are ever really been about that. We’ve always tried to put a little
theatrics into the show. We’ve always tried to fight the kind of static
image you get at rock shows, where it might be exciting for the first
four or five songs, but then it just becomes static because nothing’s
really happening. Or maybe we all just have really short attention
spans, and we want things to change constantly, but I don’t think it
detracts from the music. I’m always surprised when I hear someone
complain about the theatrics. It’s like, if you just want to hear the
music, then just listen to the CD. ‘Cause, I mean, we are playing the
music, but in addition to that, we’re doing all these other things,
too. I can’t really see how it takes away from the experience, but…
some people are weird.

Speaking of short attention spans, the new album, Skeletal Lamping,
is full of odd transitions—tracks that seem to contain two or
three separate songs stitched together, other songs that seem split in
half by arbitrary track divisions. How did this structure come
about?

Well, it’s definitely not coming out of left field. It’s similar to
stuff I’ve done before with Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies and The
Gay Parade. It’s something that’s been influenced by the Beach Boys’
Smile and Os Mutantes and Frank Zappa’s We’re Only in It for the Money.
There’ve been a lot of records that are sort of fragmented like that.
In the ’60s a lot of bands were doing that, it was like the trendy
thing to do—really experimenting with song arrangements and
orchestrations and not feeling like a song has to follow a linear path
for it to be valid.

For me as a songwriter, it’s very exciting to work like that, where
you don’t have to worry about fitting into the pop template, the sort
of prescribed arrangements that everyone uses. You can still do
exciting things within that, but I find it more liberating to not have
any rules and just basically take an idea as far as you want to go with
it, and when you feel like changing or doing something different, you
can—just change the tempo, change the key, change the vocal
style, change everything. That’s the most exciting music for me to
make—at least, right now. I go through different phases.
Sometimes I want to write the perfect pop song, I want to make
something that’s really catchy and immediate or whatever, but as of
late, I’ve been thinking more about these fragmented little
compositions and then piecing them together in a way that’s
unpredictable and exciting.

So how do you piece all the parts together?

A lot of times, I would work on a section of music, and when I was
finished with it I would listen to it and think, “What would be an
interesting place for this little thing to go; what would be an
interesting direction?” and use that as inspiration for the next piece.
Then sometimes, I would work on a piece and get bored with it, then
work on something else, and not even think about putting them together.
Then I have all these pieces—let’s see what they sound like when
they’re up next to each other. That’s kind of a fun aspect of computer
recording—you can look at everything like a god looking down on
this world you’ve created and say, “Okay, I want to put a black man’s
head on the Chinese man’s body, and I want to put the Filipino vagina
on the cat,” or whatever. You can have these crazy Frankenstein
experiments.

That’s as good a time as any to ask about your black, transsexual
alter ego Georgie Fruit. Where does that come from?

I can’t really say. It was just this weird, organic thing. All these
ideas were coming to me that seemed different from all the ideas I’d
done before, and just for fun I gave that voice a name, but now I kind
of feel like it’s gone. The Georgie Fruit character or whatever is just
gone; I don’t know where he is anymore. So it’s almost this weird
possession of a part of my brain, and now it’s released it and it’s
gone.

So recording Skeletal Lamping was a kind of exorcism?

Yeah, definitely. A really skilled psychiatrist might be able to
say, “Oh, well, you know, you went through this horrible depression
period, and you were sick of being yourself, so you wanted to be
something else, and this gave you an escape from reality.” And I think
to some extent that’s probably true. Maybe I did get sick of being
myself and this shitty situation that I found myself in and wanted to
be something new, and that gave me an opportunity to sort of get
outside of myself.

Have you gotten any criticism of the character in terms of the
identity politics of adopting a black, transsexual persona? Any
accusations of gender tourism or racial exploitation?

No one’s really given me a hard time, but then I don’t really sit
there and Google my name and see what people are talking about. But I
think it would be kind of ridiculous. The whole concept of the record
is that identity is fluid and that you can be any character that you
want, you can be whatever person you want—it doesn’t matter what
your human vessel says to the rest of the world. The message that your
human vessel is sending doesn’t have to completely define you. Like you
can be anything you want internally, so you can accept that as reality.
It doesn’t have to be like, “Oh, I’m a man trapped in a woman’s body”
or “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” or “I’m a Creole trapped in an
alligator’s body.” I sort of accepted the chaos of my reality, and
inside that chaos, anything goes.

It’s kind of funny. I know that music is very important to people,
and some people are very uptight about things, but art shouldn’t be
uptight. There shouldn’t be any restrictions put on artists.

So you don’t sit around Googling yourself, which is probably
healthy, but there’s that first line on the album, “My lover/I’ve been
donating time to review/All the misinterpretations that define/Me and
you,” which to me always sounded like a response to the critical
dissection of your personal life following Hissing Fauna.

Oh, that’s not a reference to Of Montreal or anything like that.
That’s a reference to the way we misinterpret the things that we say to
each other, especially when you’re traveling a bit, and you’re relying
on things like text messages or e-mails, and everything kind of gets
muddled and confused, and people’s intent is lost, the nuances of
language are lost. It’s definitely not a reference to Hissing Fauna
reviews.

The line, though, “I’m thinking about you in my secret language,”
reads like a mission statement for the album. Where Hissing Fauna was
direct and confessional and pretty easy to dissect, Skeletal Lamping
seems a lot more oblique.

Yeah, the feedback I’ve gotten so far is some people don’t think
it’s as genuine as Hissing Fauna because it’s—to me, it’s not as
melodramatic. It’s not as obvious. Certain people feel like singing
about heartbreak or depression or psychological problems seems more
genuine than talking about sex or identity deconstruction or things
that are a bit headier. But I think that Skeletal Lamping is probably
the most confessional and most personal record that I’ve ever made;
it’s just more abstract.

Between the abstract lyrics and the weirdly disjointed song
structure, the whole album has kind of a dreamlike quality.

Yeah, it definitely is closer to my general state of mind. I think
it’s a pretty universal thing: You’ll be thinking about one thing, and
you’ll be distracted or stimulated by something else and your mind will
go there, and then the other thing will kind of come back and regain
the power over you, and then this other layer will happen. There are so
many different layers of consciousness going on at the same time, and
that’s why on the record there will be a song where I might be singing
about something, and then this other voice will come in and it will
seem completely out of left field, like it has nothing to do with what
I was just singing about. But it’s like you’re in a conversation with
someone, and then you look at their eyebrow, and then all of a sudden
you’re thinking about eyebrows, but you’re still continuing the
conversation, and then a fly goes by, and then you’re thinking about
fly legs and eyebrows and fly legs and the conversation you’re having
and all this stuff.

Skeletal Lamping also has all these characters and scenes, it seems
like a much more social record than Hissing Fauna.

Yeah, it’s definitely less insular. When I was making Hissing Fauna
I was kind of trapped inside of myself and stuck in this vicious circle
that I couldn’t get out of. Skeletal Lamping is definitely more
communal; it’s reacting and exchanging ideas with the rest of the world
more. So it’s not just me in this little bubble freaking out.

How are you going to top this album and tour? Have you even thought
about what you might do next?

Yeah, I started recording a new record, and I’m excited because it’s
really different from anything I’ve ever done before. It’s going to be
heavier and more chaotic and more expressionistic. I think it’s going
to have less lyrics and be almost more cinematic. Right now it’s all
these vague ideas that I have, but that’s how the records normally
start. I have these reference points in my head, and I start
experimenting and see where it goes. I want to make something that
feels very progressive and exciting and different and otherworldly and
not like Kevin Barnes, not like Of Montreal. But I always try to do
that, and it always sounds like Kevin Barnes. It always sounds like Of
Montreal. I don’t know if I can get beyond myself, but I always
try.

egrandy@thestranger.com