Catching Up With... David Barnes, Of Montreal's secret weapon

Page 1 of 2

Kevin Barnes is responsible for the music of Of Montreal, but his brother, visual artist David Barnes is a major factor in the band's aesthetic concept. David has worked on everything from T-shirts and posters to the band’s mind-boggling stage show and trippy album art, including the groundbreaking packaging for Of Montreal’s latest release, Skeletal Lamping (pictured above). While working on our November cover story, Paste associate editor Steve LaBate sat down with David for some insight into his work and relationship with his brother.

Paste: Having done so many of the album covers and so much of the poster art, your work has been tied to Of Montreal for so many years. What do you feel is your creative role in Of Montreal?
David Barnes: I guess I’m just an extension of it. I always think of music and all the other arts tying in together, music being the great unifier. It’s very rare that you meet anyone who makes anything, creatively, who doesn’t listen to music while doing it. From sculptors to painters to—well, I’m not sure about writers, they might need to concentrate more, but at least when they’re not writing, I’m sure they cool down while listening to music. So, I guess I think of it as an extension of that—I’m drawing these pictures and painting these pictures that I thought of while listening to Of Montreal.

Paste: So the art you do to accompany the band’s work, you’re usually listening to a piece of music from the band while you’re doing it?
Barnes: Yeah. Usually by the time the record comes out I’m as sick of it as Kevin is because I listen to it five times in a row while I’m painting, especially when I first get it, when I’m still super excited about it, and trying to figure out all the little nuances. Sometimes when you’re painting, you stop paying attention to what you’re listening to, so if it’s a new song, you’ll listen to the first two lines and then kind of blank out and be like, “Shit, I missed the third line,” so you go back and listen to it again. But, yeah, I definitely listen to it a lot, even if what I’m painting has nothing to do with the music. But I tend to do that with all types of music while I’m working, and ruin it for myself by listening to it too much in a row.

Paste: Do you focus on the lyrics or more just the feeling you’re getting?
Barnes: I’m definitely a lyric person. I know lyrics more than I would know the nuances of the bass part. But I don’t necessarily use the lyrics specifically while working on art for an album; this artwork is more of a feeling than literally taking the lyrics and translating them.

Paste: Tell me about these cool new packaging ideas for Skeletal Lamping and how all of that came about, and what you’ve created for that.
Barnes: Originally, Kevin, Nina [Barnes, Kevin's wife] and I were talking about how the CD as an art form is dying, packaging is dying. I think there will always be people who have a fondness for the LP—collectors and stuff, but that’s so limited. Especially young people, I think, are getting their music straight from the computer and putting it right on their iPods, and so album artwork as a product is dying out. It’s running that risk, so we were thinking, “How could we save it?” When you buy a CD, it usually ends up on the floor of your car. One thing that really hit me was when I stepped on [The Beatles’] Let it Be CD in my car and cracked the case, and I love that album but I just stepped on it, and I wondered how many people are stepping on my artwork, just because they throw it down on the floor and they pick it up and put it on their computer or put it on a spindle at best, and then the CD gets thrown aside eventually, so we were like, “What if it became something else? Like a different product?” A CD case doesn’t do anything for you, really—the best-designed ones are like little books, so you think, “I want to keep this. I’ll put this on my book shelf.” But then we were thinking we could transform it into something else, so once you took the music out of it, it still had a life of its own.

Originally, we were thinking it’d turn into a lantern that you could hang from your ceiling, being literal [about the album title]. It seemed like it’d be an easy transformation, but I just spent days and days with posterboard, doing all this amateur geometry, trying to figure out how to get this big lantern to still fit into a CD. The whole idea was that it could still fit it into a CD, we wanted it to be in the CD stores, so it had to fold into that 5 x 2.4 dimension square or whatever. That was the original idea, but I kept making all these prototypes, and they didn’t seem—even with me and Nina working on the artwork at the same time, and even knowing that the artwork was gonna go on it, it still seemed like, I don’t know, just this big square/rectangle. My big break with it was when I realized that I was literally thinking inside the box, I was literally making a box. Once I realized that, I just kinda went, “Oh, God, it doesn’t have to be a square!” and in like two hours I came up with this beast kind of shape that it’s become now, and then I put in all this artwork I’d been working on, and then Nina took my artwork and put it on her computer and made her version of the exact same images and then added in all of her different stuff. So it was a really fun process. Nina and I hadn’t really collaborated, we’d done some stuff like, “You do the front cover of the 7-inch, and I’ll do the back cover,” but this was the first time that we were really passing things back and forth to each other, and that was really nice. So we ended up doing a lantern also, but it didn’t have to fit inside the CD parameters, so it’s bigger.

Paste: Kevin had mentioned the idea of this multimedia barrage to accompany the album—various happenings, a play, a book you were working on. Is the book still happening?
Barnes: Yeah. All of this stuff just took on a life of its own, and [the band’s label] Polyvinyl has been great. They’ve been working really hard to make all this stuff that we’ve been asking them to make, and we tend to be like, “Lets make this! Let’s make these wall decals!” And they’ll be like, “OK, fine.” But then they actually have to find the company to make them, and they have to crunch all the numbers. So once all this finally dies down, we’ll be able to start the second wave, which will be this book, which is this sketchbook sort of thing.

Paste: Inspired by the album?
Barnes: No, just stuff from throughout my whole life. I thought it was a funny idea for your very first book to be a retrospective on your life’s work, but it’s your first book that you’ve published, so no one has seen any of the stuff before.

Paste: How far back does it go?
Barnes: Well, if I get this box—my great aunt just died recently, and she was the one who encouraged me to draw when I was little, and she saved everything. She had a box full of drawings from when I was like 5, and so we’re trying to get a hold of that box. If I do, it could go back really far.

Paste: When would it come out? Right after the album? Or will it be a while?
Barnes: It shouldn’t take too long, I don’t think. It’s another huge project for Polyvinyl because they’ve never made a book before, but hopefully we’ve given them so many ‘we’ve never made this before’ requests that they’ll have had practice for that sort of thing.