Cold Lampin' with Of Montreal

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From the time he was in the sixth grade, all Kevin wanted was to have a band and perform. He’s a
really great kid, and I’m very proud of him.
— Mary Barnes, Kevin’s mother

When Barnes was in seventh grade, his parents bought him a drum set for Christmas—a black Pearl kit, perfect for the hair metal he was into at the time. “I’ve never been happier in my life,” he says. “We had this half-finished basement, and they set it up down there, and I went downstairs and it was like a miracle. I couldn’t even believe my eyes—it was that kind of moment you see in the movies. It was the most beautiful object I’d ever seen.”

After a year of getting acquainted with the drums, Barnes wanted something more melodic, so he picked up a guitar. “I never really had lessons,” he says, “but I had an uncle who taught me how to make bar chords. Then I learned every Rolling Stones song, and that was my musical education. … I would sit in my room and play the songs and imagine I was on a big stage. I guess I kind of imagined myself as Ron Wood.”

Barnes was born near Cleveland, Ohio, and after living out his early teen years in Michigan as a longhaired, punk-and-metal obsessed skater/musician, his family moved to Florida. He felt out of place at his new high school, where rebel flags and country music were hip. As hard as it was to find like-minded musicians in West Palm Beach at the time, Barnes eventually played in a few cover bands, and then began collaborating with a friend on some original material. “We wrote songs together, and I wrote my own songs on the side,” Barnes says. “He got a list of all these labels, so we made a demo.”

When it was sent out, nobody responded except Bar/None, who wrote back and said they wanted to hear more. Barnes and his buddy obliged, but the label decided it wasn’t really interested. So, in secret, Barnes sent his own tape, with his songs, and the label was impressed. “This put me in a weird position with my friend,” Barnes says. “After a couple years of trying to work it out, we started to split apart, and I realized I’d be better off working by myself, so I just signed the contract with Bar/None and put my own songs out.”

Around this time, Barnes saw 1987 music documentary Athens, GA: Inside/Out. “I was trying to find a place to move to get a band together, and Athens seemed like this fantasyland. I really romanticized it. Julian Koster [of the Music Tapes] lived in Athens at the time and was also signed to Bar/None with his band, Chocolate USA. So I called him and talked for two hours, and it was like, ‘this guy’s awesome, he’s totally on the same page.’ I ended up living in the same house with Jeff Mangum [of Neutral Milk Hotel] and Will Hart and Bill Doss [both of Olivia Tremor Control].”

This began Barnes’ lengthy association with a group of retro-obsessed Athens/Denver artists known as the Elephant 6 Collective. “All of a sudden, I realized, ‘I’m not a freak! There are people who are into the same kind of music, and four-track recording and the DIY ’60s-psych-pop thing.’ I think that was super-important for my development, to give me the support to keep going.”

But this scenario didn’t last long. Barnes was 18, and like so many kids away from home for the first time, he blew all his savings in the first few months and had to move back to his parents’ house. After regrouping, he moved from Florida to Cleveland, where his sister lived, and then to Minneapolis for a few years, but neither worked out. Eventually, he returned to Athens, which he made his home. 

For the next half decade, Barnes toured heavily and made six albums of fantastical indie-pop for the Bar/None and Kindercore labels using a revolving lineup of Elephant 6-ers (including Dottie Alexander, Jamie Huggins, Derek 
Almstead, Andy Gonzales and Bryan Poole), many of whom lived communally with Barnes in a house outside of Athens (documented in Aldhils Arboretum’s “Isn’t it Nice?”). While the arrangement worked at first, before long, the lack of privacy became stifling for Barnes, as did what he perceived as the E6 Collective’s unwritten rules. “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 really 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.”

So what snapped Barnes out of his closed-mindedness? He admits it sounds clichéd, but Sept. 11, 2001. The universal need to connect with people in the wake of a terrible, era-defining tragedy. “[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.”

Barnes started getting deep into electronic pop music and wanted to make a weird disco-hybrid record. “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’t listen to The Kinks anymore—I still like that stuff, but I’d never really think to put on a Kinks record.”

Barnes decided he wanted to make contemporary, progressive music with an unmistakable personality tied closely to a particular time and place; music that makes the most out of modern technology, that reaches toward the future rather than being locked into some anachronistic retro trip. So he finally got up the nerve to ask his bandmates if they’d be OK with him making the records on his own. They acquiesced, and thus began the sessions for Satanic Panic, and a new era for Of Montreal.

“I really want to push music into this new area it’s never been before, and I haven’t yet, but that’s definitely the motivation,” Barnes says. As evidence that modern music is making huge leaps, he cites bands like HEALTH, Gang Gang Dance, Deerhoof, Fiery Furnaces and Animal Collective. “I feel like we’re in the middle of something amazing, that people are going to look back on 20 years from now and be like, ‘Holy shit! All these classic records were being made during this period,’ like when I think about The Pretty Things and Pink Floyd and The Beatles, and all these bands making amazing records in 1967.”

Barnes met his wife (and creative confidant) Nina in Oslo in 2001, while touring Europe with E6 band Great Lakes. At the time, she played in a band called The Ethnobabes, and her label had arranged some of the shows Great Lakes was playing. The whole band and crew ended up staying at Nina’s best friend’s house. “We talked for a couple of hours and hit it off,” Nina says of her first encounter with her future husband. “There was a connection there—just telling stories and talking about music and art and life and my crazy family.”

When Barnes returned home, the two corresponded by email for six months, and then Nina made her first visit to the U.S. After three or four subsequent visits, they decided to get married. A month later, in July 2003, Barnes, his parents and his brother David—the artist behind nearly every of Montreal album cover, and much of the band’s bizarre stage antics—traveled to Oslo for the wedding.

Soon, Nina became pregnant, and the financially struggling couple ended up couch-surfing in Norway to take advantage of the country’s free healthcare. Nine months later, they had a new baby daughter, Alabee, and—after eight years in the indie trenches—Of Montreal was finally beginning to break with The Sunlandic Twins. Just before the album came out, I interviewed Barnes backstage at the 40 Watt in Athens. He told me, since he’d married Nina, he “felt really strong, emotionally,” that he was “stable and happy with the world” and “fueled by that energy.” But soon, the pressures of marriage and fatherhood would conflict with Barnes’ lifelong musical dreams. He was on the road, playing to bigger crowds than ever—surrounded by a constant party while Nina was back in Athens, in an unfamiliar country, taking care of their infant daughter by herself. Barnes couldn’t reconcile the two worlds—he felt guilty about not being home, but he was thrilled to finally experience the rewards of his years of hard work with Of Montreal. Confused, he sunk into depression (later chronicled in Hissing Fauna’s “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse”) and before long, he and Nina separated.

“There are so many anxieties that come with being a father that I wasn’t prepared for,” Barnes confesses. “I was living in this fantasy world inside my head, in this sort of bubble, and having a child roots you to the earth on such a huge level. It really slaps you in the face, like, ‘I am mortal, I am not going to last forever, I am responsible for this little thing, I have to take care of her.’ It puts you in this strange, fractured state of mind, especially when you’re so used to being self-centered and egotistical all the time. That was really difficult for me. Also, the scenario around her birth—we were in Norway ... without a home, without a country, just floating around, waiting for this child to be born and freaking out. Sunlandic Twins was done but hadn’t come out yet, and I knew I was going to have to go on tour once the record was done. … I wanted to be there to help [Nina], but this is my dream, this is what I’ve wanted to do forever. … I couldn’t satisfy everyone, and I couldn’t satisfy myself. Eventually, it came to a head and that’s why we split up. It was like, ‘well fuck this, I can’t do this anymore, it’s driving me insane. I’m not going to quit music [and I’m] not going to stay home. I can’t do both, so you have to go away.’ It was really fucking hard for her. It’s so like a man to be, ‘OK, you take the kid and go.’ And [she] takes all the pain and responsibility, and it’s so like a woman to be able to handle it. I would’ve totally lost my mind, but she’s so strong. She’s a fantastic person. And for her not to hate me after that, I think proves how strong our bond is. I couldn’t think of being with another person, and I don’t think she can either, so she just forgave me and we got back together.

“All that happened while I was touring for Sunlandic Twins and writing and recording Hissing Fauna. ‘The Past is a Grotesque Animal’ is about our breakup. And that was difficult once we got back together—here’s this record documenting our hard times but it’s only from my perspective. The world only knows my side of the story; they don’t know her side.”

“It’s true,” Nina says. “When the record was released, it was interview upon interview about our breakup, and it was a story about me and my child, and I had no say in it. I became this sort of object. … But no one really knows me. I became like a character in a book.

“But I have a double view of Hissing Fauna. I see the artistic statement. And even though listening to it can hurt, I totally respect it. … I think it’s beautiful and moving. I really, really love that record. But it’s not something I’m going to hang out and listen to and rock out. I couldn’t really do that.”

Lately, Nina and Kevin have hit their stride, creatively and as a family. (“I’m slightly more stable now because I’ve been on anti-depressants for a couple years,” Barnes says.) And with Skeletal Lamping poised to be Of Montreal’s highest-charting release yet, the band is more successful than ever.

For the current tour, Of Montreal plans to take advantage of its moment by putting on the biggest production possible. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Barnes says, “and I just want to blow it all out and not even care that much about the financial return. We sort of have the attention of the world, and now’s the time to really do something sensational.”

So now that this new album is under his belt, has Barnes finally decided what to do with all the skeletons he’s been lamping? What’s it gonna be—kill or capture?

“I just want to let ’em go,” he says. “I always want to change and evolve and reject the past and not really worry about it so much. I don’t feel the need to inspect my motivation for things I’ve done; I just want to continually move forward. But I think, when you make art, like a record or whatever, it’s sort of frozen in time, so it’s like turning the light on in a room and leaving it on forever. But you can also walk away from the room with the lights on—or keep paying the electric bill, but move into a new house.