Interview: Kevin Barnes (of Montreal)

“If I were to do karaoke in a bar with a bunch of people, I would feel really self-conscious and nervous.” 

This statement was not one I was expecting to hear from of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes, whose over-the-top live performances have long evoked a level of spectacle reminiscent of the ’70s glam era. From riding a horse onto stage to performing fully nude, Barnes has long exhibited an admirably uninhibited stage presence that’s equally unnerving and inspiring to timid fans like myself. 

The term “prolific” gets tossed around a bit too much these days, but it’s wholly applicable to Barnes. Since its inception in 1996, of Montreal is closing on its 20th studio album, as well as a multitude of compilations and EPs. Over that extensive discography, the project has ceaselessly evolved from its initial form as a lo-fi psych pop band along the lines of fellow Athens, Ga.-based Elephant Six Collective members Olivia Tremor Control and Elf Power to a wildly adventurous mix of electro-funk, prog, glam, psychedelia, and more. 

Released in early 2020, just as the world was on the brink of shutting down to contend with COVID-19, of Montreal’s 16th studio album, UR Fun, provided an uplifting electro-pop fantasia that cultivated an ‘80s-retro aesthetic while serving as a celebration of Barnes’ fresh romance with partner Christina Schneider of art pop group Locate, S1.  

Unable to tour, Barnes remained productive, releasing the expansive 2021 follow-up I Feel Safe With You, Trash, which presented a pretty stark mood shift. Although the surreal funky electronic pop of prior albums endured, the tone was considerably darker, and the rather unpredictable batch of songs found Barnes pushing of Montreal into new and exciting directions.

The band’s latest, Freewave Lucifer f<ck f^ck f>ck, which was released in July, doesn’t have the extensive runtime of its predecessor but it’s no less chock full of ideas. Playing more like a collection of abstract sound collages than a traditional song set, of Montreal’s 18th studio album may not be the most easily approachable of the band’s extensive discography, but it reinforces the presence of Barnes as one of the most relentlessly inventive musicians of the past few decades. And, perhaps more than ever in the band’s career, the sudden stylistic shifts and fragmented impressionistic lyrical themes reflect the state of the world, in which social media endlessly feeds us an incessant barrage of unconnected glimpses into the lives of everyone around us.  

Taking a week off between tour stints — of Montreal returns to The Grey Eagle on Sunday, Oct. 16, with support from Locate, S1 — Barnes was kind enough to speak with Asheville Stages about feeling comfortable and remaining inspired on stage, as well as of Montreal’s recent output.

Jonny Leather: So, you just wrapped up the first half of the tour on Saturday, and you've got a little break before you're back on the road. What's a week off look like? Is it just pretty relaxed as you get your energy back for the next leg?

Kevin Barnes: Yeah, it's good because it's hard to sing every night. So, it's mainly just good to give my voice a rest.

JL: And you move around a lot, too. 

KB: Yeah, that part of it is actually great for me. I get way more exercise on tour than I do in my normal life. I realized that I don't really take good care of my voice, and I tend to sort of rag it out. So, it's nice to reset that. I kind of noticed, as the tour goes on, certain notes are harder for me to hit — like high notes. Sometimes I just have to drop it down an octave, because that part of my register is just too shredded. That's the main thing. But also, I have a daughter that I don't get to see when I'm on tour, obviously, so family stuff like that is nice.

JL: You had a pretty productive pandemic, in terms of your output, releasing Ur Fun right before COVID hit, and then I Feel Safe with You, Trash and Freewave Lucifer f<ck f^ck f>ck over the last couple of years. Did it feel like it was a particularly productive period for you? 

KB: Yeah, I think it was my way of staying sane, and staying engaged with reality and the human race — to keep working. With music, especially recording, it's always been a very therapeutic part of my life and a central part of my life. So, it was just cool to just go in the studio and just kind of forget the world, and just get lost in the creative process. It was so helpful for me to be able to do that. Also, there's a lot of songs that I had started and just kind of put on the shelf for a while. When the pandemic hit, I went back and checked out all these things that I had just started but didn't finish for whatever reason, and a lot of those were things that became I Feel Safe with You, Trash.

When I put out that record, originally it was going to be on Polyvinyl [Records], but I was like, "Well, we're not gonna be able to tour behind it anyways, so let me just put it out ourselves." I was kind of just curious because I hadn't self-released a record in a really long time. So why not just do that, and just do that digitally, just as a kind of an experiment? And then they were like, "Well, OK, so you did that record. Let's do a Polyvinyl record." At that point, the vaccines had been released, and it was like a light at the end of the tunnel. "So maybe you'll be able to tour again within the next year or something." So, that's when I started working on Freewave Lucifer. That's kind of how we got to where we are right now.

JL: Back to the point of the therapeutic nature of writing and recording — with your writing and recording process, is it very compulsive? Do you have to schedule out, or is it more of a compulsive need?

KB: I guess it's somewhere in between. Sometimes, if I'm not feeling very inspired, it's easy to just do other things. I don't really have a really strict work schedule or routine where I force myself to be productive. Typically, I just sort of allow myself to work when I'm feeling inspired. If too much time has passed without doing anything, then I kick myself in the butt: "Alright, let's go start making some stuff."

Usually, once I get into the studio, turn everything on, and start messing around with drum loops, keyboard sounds or whatever, I pretty quickly start feeling excited about trying to create something. I guess, typically, if I have a two-month period where there's not much going on, it'd be great if I could start working on some stuff, and then I just kind of force myself to go in there and start working. Or, if I'm feeling really excited to work, then I'll just work. So, I guess it kind of varies.

JL: Do you think that your records are sort of a reflection of the mood you're in at the time? For example, I felt like Ur Fun was very celebratory of your new relationship with Christina [Schneider], and then the last two have been a bit darker, and more claustrophobic?

KB: Yeah, I would definitely say that very much they're connected to what's going on in my personal life. I always thought that that was an important element of it — that there's no real reason to feel like you need to create a false world with your music or art. It's good for it to be directly connected to your personal life. And so, in that way, I think it does also help for it to be a therapeutic process. If you are struggling, if you've gone through some difficult times, you can take those darker parts of what's going on in your life and transform them into something more positive. 

JL: Do you have a lot of fans reaching out about their own mental health issues and struggles — people relating to your songs?

KB: Yeah, definitely. I think that the last couple of albums have maybe been a little bit more abstract. So, it's harder, maybe, for people to connect the lyrics to their personal lives in the same way that Hissing Fauna [Are You The Destroyer] did, because it was a little bit more direct. A lot of people come up to me saying things like, “It's cool that someone's singing about depression, anxiety, neurosis, mental illness, and all these things."

As a society, it's almost like a taboo or hush-hush. Growing up, my mom suffered from depression, but she never really got help for it and my family was never the kind of family that would go to therapists, get on medicines or anything like that. It was like, "Oh, that's stupid. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps." So, that was the environment I grew up in. It took me a while before I realized mental health issues are extremely important for people to be open about. And, you know, everybody experiences it, so it's not like some shameful thing.

JL: Yeah. At the time that you were first really writing about it, I don't think it was as prevalent in art. In more recent times, people are being a lot more open.

KB: Yeah, definitely. And that's so healthy. I think it's important for society to move in that direction, where there's no shame. Also, "Come on man. You're fucking depressed." When you're obviously depressed, and you're pretending that you’re not, it impacts every level of a person's life and all their relationships as well. I think people are getting better also at self diagnosing and figuring that stuff out so they can find the treatment more directly.

JL: I imagine that a lot of that's linked to having far more people to identify with, finally. We kind of grew up with a completely different way of portraying people with mental health issues — normal people.

KB: Yeah, we sort of realize that nobody is immune to it. Everybody, at some point in their lives is going to experience mental illness, to varying degrees. There's so many layers to it. And like you said, the more people that are upfront about it, especially publicly, the better it is for everyone.

JL: I'm an anxious person, and it's hard to even imagine performing on stage. But you've performed nude. How were you able to build up to that level of comfort?

KB: Weirdly, the two worlds don't really seem to share much in common for me — the performance part of my life and what you would call “normal life.” It's not just like I'm wearing black and gray clothes all the time because I don't want anyone to look at me. So, I do a little bit of peacocking in my normal life, wearing colorful things just because I like them. But in general, I'm not trying to get a lot of attention. If I go to the grocery store, I don't want people looking at me. I just want to go about my day. 

But, of course, on stage, I started realizing that it's cooler to be a spectacle. Spectacles are fun. They're fun to watch — and especially if it's a safe space where you can also participate. I always think it's really great when I see people in the audience that are wearing really outrageous clothes and have done some really cool creative stuff with their wardrobe. I’ve always wanted an of Montreal concert to be sort of like Halloween or New Year's Eve, a special moment in time that's out of the ordinary, where you can do something that you wouldn't normally do — wear an outfit that you wouldn't normally wear and just kind of freak out in a fun way or whatever. 

As you know, we were touring for maybe six years before we had any sort of commercial success. I paid my dues or whatever, and I got used to being on stage and hearing my voice come out of the monitors, hearing how things sound, and just how different it is night to night. But also how similar it is from night to night, and just feeling comfortable being on a stage and feeling empowered by it all with my fellow bandmates.

I feel pretty empowered when I'm on stage, and it feels like it is our hour and a half where we're on a platform and people are looking at us. We've rehearsed and we know our songs very well, so I feel very confident that we can put on a good show. So basically, we're just doing our thing. I don't have this ego attached to it as far as being nervous, or wanting to shove something in people's faces. It's a communal thing, but we're also the stars of the next hour and a half. It's exciting to be able to do that, and to have that be a part of my life. 

I think that, for whatever reason, it does come naturally to me on a certain level, but the weird thing is if I were to do karaoke in a bar with a bunch of people, I would feel really self conscious and nervous. But doing my own songs with my band, I never feel self-conscious or nervous. I just feel excited. Don't really know what the differences are there, but for whatever reason, it's my comfort zone knowing, "OK, Clayton's [Rychlik] on the drums behind me, Jojo's [Glidewell] to my right, and Ross [Brand] is on bass to the left of me." So it just feels like we've got this.

JL: Coming up in the Athens scene, were you able to catch the B-52s? Were they a big influence on your idea of what a performance should be like?

KB: It was definitely more of the Elephant Six groups: Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Music Tapes, The Gerbils, and all the bands that were happening when I first moved to Athens  — the scene that I was a part of. It was a very DIY, underground indie thing. I never really saw the bigger Athens bands like The B-52s or R.E.M. I've actually never seen either of those bands play live. But I think knowing that they came from Athens was inspiring and kind of made me feel like I could do it as well. 

But then also, hanging out with the Olympic Tremor Control people — collaborating with them and having them play on my records and playing on their records — and just creating that little community that we had in the late ’90s, felt like this protective little zone where we could experiment. There were low stakes, basically. Whatever we wanted to try, we could try, and it didn't matter. It's not like we were gonna get some crappy, scathing review in some magazine or blog that was gonna ruin us. Nobody was writing about it. Nobody cared. So it didn't matter. We could kind of just do what we wanted to do.

JL: Yeah, I think what I loved about that scene so much is how playful everything was. Like with Julian [Koster of The Music Tapes], he's just so genuine and everything about his performances felt really genuine and pure, with a fun, childlike energy. Everything from that collective had that quality.

KB: Yeah, definitely. It's just like people draining out these ideas. Julian especially has an incredible imagination. And there was no limit really. It's like, "I have this idea for this giant metronome. So either I'm gonna build it myself or I'm gonna find someone to help me build it" — just having these cool ideas and realizing them as well.

And I think that's what I found very inspiring, that it wasn't just people talking about stuff or theorizing about stuff. They're actually physically doing them, and just seeing how much fulfillment that they were getting out of that — chasing these dreams, chasing these ideas that they had — inspired me, and made me realize, if you're gonna do a concert, you're gonna be in front of people — it doesn't have to be this slacker thing where you're just wearing your street clothes, and you just play songs, you get off stage. The fanfare’s really exciting. It's fun to have fanfare. So I think we probably have more in common with the ‘70s Glam stuff and the Prog stuff that was happening, and the funk — Funkadelic and all that stuff, too — just putting on a show.

JL: I think that's missing right now from a lot of live music.

KB: I guess there's always gonna be some people that do it and some people that don't. And the people that don't would probably hate to do it. I think that if it naturally comes to you, you should do it. And if it's going to be this forced thing, it's not really gonna work. I'm really fortunate, that everybody that's involved with the of Montreal thing, I've known for decades, and we've done so many shows together, traveled all over the world together, and we're still excited about doing it. So, nobody's jaded about it. It's fun. And especially getting those two years off where we couldn't do it has made us really appreciate the time that we have, and really appreciate these tours. You never know if you're gonna get another one.

JL: With the extensive discography you have, is it hard trying to choose what you're going to play every night

KB: Yeah, the funny thing is, usually, in past tours, I would try to cater to what I perceive as somebody that doesn't really love of Montreal, but just likes of Montreal and maybe knows a couple of our songs. I'll try to figure out a very newbie-friendly set. But on this tour — just because we've had the two years off, and also because there's so much material with I Feel Safe with You, Trash and Freeway Lucifer — I actually looked at the songs, and was like, “Well, what would be my dream set, that'll just be fun for me to do?”  Not really worry as much about being accessible. 

I know when you put out a new album, it's not like you just put out Sgt. Pepper's and everyone's a Beatlemaniac. You know, people might like the band but not have even heard the last three records. I'm definitely like that about certain bands. So, I understand that not everyone's gonna be 100% familiar with every new thing we put out. But I decided, “Fuck it. I'm just gonna pick the songs that I want to play.” And even if they're not super well known, hopefully people will still appreciate them. And we'll still approach them in the same way with the theatrics and the visuals and everything. 

So, on this last tour, we've been playing a lot of stuff off of Freeway Lucifer, and then at least two or three songs off of I Feel Safe with You, Trash, a couple of Ur Fun songs and a bunch of Hissing Fauna songs, just because, number one: they're fun to play. And number two: that's the record that most people are familiar with. So, we're definitely still kind of considering that. It wasn't just like, “I'm going to pick the most obscure, most unknown songs,” but focusing a lot on the new material — just because it's super challenging — we spent a lot of time working on the parts and getting it all together, because it's all over the place musically. 

When I was recording it, I wasn't really thinking, "Oh, it's gonna be hard to pull off live," or whatever. It was just basically like I just want to make interesting music, and then if we have to figure out how to perform it live, we'll figure out how to perform it live. So, a lot of stuff was a bit challenging to figure out. But it's so much easier, too, because if you're using backing tracks, you're like, "That sound would be impossible to reproduce, but we'll just throw it in the tracks," and it's fine. So, we actually lost a member during the tour, so we're a four-piece band now. But it's fine, because, like, the guy that left we're like, "OK, well, we'll just put his parts in the tracks."

JL: Yeah, in regards to playing new stuff and songs that people aren't familiar with, there's also that potential that, in the live setting, those songs become new favorites. There's definitely something about experiencing it live.

KB: Yeah, it's interesting that you said that because I was also kind of thinking, "Am I making a mistake?" I got through a couple of nights when you see the audience's reaction, when they've never heard the song before, and it's a really weird song — all the songs off the new album, they're just sort of jumping all over the place, and there aren't hooks, necessarily. It's kind of just this weird landscape that you're traveling through, and then it's just kind of over after five minutes. 

But, so, I was like, "You know, maybe we shouldn't play that song since it seems like people aren't really reacting to it." But then one of the performance artists that's with us — he's also one of my good friends — he was like, "You have to play them live for people to make that connection with them, and then maybe in a year or two, that's a crowd statement, whereas it just would have been an album track that nobody would have really checked out.”

JL: Totally. I just saw The Afghan Whigs in the past week, and they played a bunch of the new material and it ended up being my favorite stuff that they played. They were just so into it, and the songs are great. Sometimes, because the artist is more interested in it, it also vibes better with the audience.

KB: Yeah, definitely. It's probably better to see a band being excited about performing a song that's new and fresh for them, compared to a really bored version of this song you've heard a million times,

JL: You have to wonder, with bands like The [Rolling] Stones, how tired are they playing the big hits every single night?

KB: That's the funny thing. I read an interview with Keith Richards where he said he actually gets the same charge when he plays "Satisfaction" now as he did when it first was written. And that's been in my mind. I thought, "Man, that's so cool." I always try to cultivate that in myself. It should be new. It should be fun and fresh every time you play it because it is a new time playing it. And even though, maybe you've played it a thousand times, you haven't played it in that moment a thousand times. You've only played it in past moments a thousand times. So, I'm always approaching it like this is a special moment that may never happen again, and don't take it for granted.

JL: It's good to hear that people can still feel like that after so much time.

KB: Yeah, totally. And also, it shouldn't really be boring, because it's your song [laughs] and people like it. So, I think that it'd probably be different if everyone hated "Satisfaction," but they would still play it.

IF YOU GO

Who: of Montreal with Locate, S1
When: Sunday, Oct. 16, 8 p.m.
Where: The Grey Eagle, 185 Clingman Ave.,  thegreyeagle.com
Tickets: $20

(Photos by Christina Schneider)