of Montreal - In Conversation
Introduction & interview by Skye Matlock
photo by Bảo Ngô
Kevin Barnes has never been too precious about his personal life. As the sole creative force behind of Montreal — the Athens, Georgia-born project he's steered for thirty years across nineteen albums — Barnes has always written from the inside out, turning private upheaval into some of indie rock's most restless, shape-shifting music.
Aethermead, the project’s twentieth album, is no different, except that this time the upheaval was significant enough for a location change. Following the end of an eight-year engagement and a departure from rural Vermont, Barnes relocated to Brooklyn, where the record was made quickly and in good company. It was tracked live to tape at Honey Jar studio with his longtime band over the course of five days. The result is something that feels both new and deeply familiar: stripped back, direct, and emotionally unguarded in a way that recalls the raw intimacy of his earliest work. Aethermead is, in the best possible sense, a document of personal rebirth— an album that says plainly what most of us have only felt, turning the unspoken residue of a relationship into something uncomfortably, beautifully real.
I caught up with Barnes ahead of the June 5th release to talk about creativity, reinvention, and the many ways relationships can impact a record.
INTERVIEW
SKYE MATLOCK: Kevin! Hello Hello!
KEVIN BARNES: Hi! What's happening?
SKYE: Not much yet. Thanks for making time for me today. Can you hear me okay?
KEVIN: Perfectly.
SKYE: I'm Skye, by the way.
KEVIN: We're Instagram friends now. I saw a video of you playing bass — that was cool.
SKYE: Thank you. Yeah, my musical endeavors are ever changing and evolving. Seeing what everyone else is doing on Instagram fries my creativity a little bit.
KEVIN: In what sense? How does Instagram influence it or impact it?
SKYE: I follow so many different musicians on every level, and at various places in their career. Scrolling through what everyone's posting — all the self-promotion, the constant push to be seen and heard — makes me step back and second guess what I’m doing at times.
KEVIN: Yeah, but that's interesting. You feel like it deprives you of main character consciousness or something, like there's too many like stars in this film.
SKYE: Right. It can make what I'm doing feel less significant, because my approach isn't really about being seen or reaching everyone — it's more about sharing something that genuinely comes from who I am, and I don’t always get the vibe that there's an audience for that.
KEVIN: The numbers game is the hardest, weirdest thing. Because on the surface it's all equal — we all have the same basic device to upload and share. But if one thing gets viewed more than what you do, you start thinking, "I guess my thing has less value." And with streaming and all the ways we track popularity, that can really fuck you up. I know people who've given up on music because of it. You work so hard on something, and it seems like nobody cares, but then you see other stuff that you think is inferior getting way more attention. And you wouldn't want to do that — you just want to do your own thing. But you can't survive doing your own thing, so maybe you should just stop, because the world's telling you they don't want it. But the world doesn't work that way..
SKYE: Yeah, it’s the combination of all those elements that leaves me feeling paralyzed at times.
KEVIN: When I first started, popularity felt less important than the community around you — the support from people in your real life, the other bands that were part of your scene. When I was starting the Elephant Six Collective in Athens, Georgia, we were all so supportive of each other. It really felt like we were just in this little bubble, so it didn't matter that Rolling Stone or MTV weren't paying attention. Everybody was just making these bedroom recordings like "Hey, you play violin” (maybe not well) “will you come over and play on my song?" I didn't feel the need for any sort of global appreciation, because I was getting enough affirmation from the freaks that I wanted the affirmation from. I loved them so much, and it gave me strength. I felt empowered by it.
SKYE: I love hearing about of Montreal’s beginnings, knowing this year will be the thirtieth year of the project. Do you even consider that a milestone as much as others are making it out to be?
KEVIN: It's like a blink of an eye. I don't even think about it, because it barely feels real. My concept of time is really warped and strange, because a day will feel like 1000 years, so I guess I just don't even think of thirty years as thirty years. I don't feel the weight of it all, or like I've done anything, like what have I done today? Nothing. Okay, so I've done nothing. It's all about today.
of Montreal by Taryn Segal
SKYE: You recently moved to Brooklyn, right?
KEVIN: Yeah, last summer.
SKYE: Did the writing of Aethermead start before or after the move?
KEVIN: For the most part after. I wrote "Already Dreaming" when I was still in Vermont, and a couple of other songs too, but I wrote the majority after I moved here.
SKYE: Did the vibe of your new neighborhood influence your writing in any way?
KEVIN: I don't know if the city necessarily had that much of an influence sonically, but I'm sure it did psychologically and emotionally. I had just broken up with my fiancé, who I was with for eight years. I was looking for a place that would feel like a new chapter in my life, figuring out who I am outside of that relationship. Eight years is a long time — there are things you take for granted, things that are just happening in the background of your brain, and once they're removed there's a vacuum. It takes some time to find your footing again. So I was definitely in the throes of that when I was writing the songs for this record.
SKYE: You're able to get so specific with the pictures you paint with your lyrics — the kinds of things you want to talk to people about that tend to get shut down or pushed away. It felt like I was listening to you watch yourself experience those things in real time.
KEVIN: A lot of the songs are written about a person I had started a relationship with once I moved here, so they are very direct songs for her. The way our relationship was, it was encouraged to communicate through songs. Sometimes in the past, if I wrote a song about someone I was really into, I wouldn't say certain things — I'd focus on whatever I was projecting onto the relationship that was nicer, more romantic. But with this, there was a lot of yearning, a lot of longing, a lot of frustration, so I was just putting all of that into the songs. Now with some distance — that thing sort of fizzled out — I can see I was in such a strange state of mind. I'd just left this long-term relationship, so I sort of felt like a drowning person. But you don't need another person — you have all you need inside yourself, as far as self-care and self-regulating. If you're too reliant on someone else it makes the relationship strained and sucks a lot of life out of it. I didn't realize that at the time. I feel like I've become more emotionally intelligent having experienced that, and being on my own again and looking back — oh man, I was pretty messed up.
SKYE: When you're writing about those feelings, do you feel like you're trying to run from them more than face them?
KEVIN: In general, trying to face them. I have a tendency to think darkly about my life and zoom into those feelings — I find that realm inspiring. But I realized I'm not really getting that much joy out of my personal life, because I'm not allowing joy to exist. Maybe I don't feel like I deserve nice things, or maybe I feel more interested in bad feelings. So I definitely don't run from it — I run towards it. But maybe that's actually unhealthy for me. Not the writing itself, but just operating on that level. Like, oh, my personal life's in shambles — yeah, it's always in shambles, you must be orchestrating shambles. I look back and think, why are all these songs so sad? I have everything I need, everything's fine. You could have everything and still feel like a loser, or you could have nothing and feel great — so much of it is just perception based.
SKYE: Cherry Peel and The Early Four Track Recordings were records my friends and I lived in. Going into Aethermead I expected something completely different, but it had that same feeling, just more experienced. What struck me most was how stripped back it is. Your records have always had mind-boggling layers of sound, but here everything is pulled back and the lyrics just have room to breathe. Is that just where the songs wanted to go?
KEVIN: I definitely wanted it to be more on the side of minimalism than maximalism. That's why I got the live band to help me record — we did the basic tracks live with drums, bass, piano, and keys, and recorded to an eight track tape machine out at a studio in Brooklyn called Honey Jar. We had pretty extreme limitations, maybe four or five days, so we had to get as much done as quickly as possible. In the past I've had months to work on a record, building every song up one instrument at a time by myself. But with this record I wanted it to feel more communal. I was in a pretty low state of mind and I wanted to be around people I loved, just do something together to lift my spirits. It felt so fulfilling to be working with those guys again — we worked together on Lousy with Sylvianbriar, Innocence Reaches, Aureate Gloom — so there's a long history and great chemistry there. It was also just nice to trust people and not have to do everything myself. I set up a little home studio in my apartment and overdubbed some slide guitars and pianos, but for the most part it was all recorded at Honey Jar.
SKYE: I love that, and you used all the time during those days, was it enough?
KEVIN: It was crazy because we were running out of time. It would have been better to have ten days, but it worked out to only five, so I had to do more stuff by myself. It's a fun but also scary thing — you have this song you wrote on acoustic guitar, and now you have some musicians, and they're going to help you create a version of it. What kind of groove do you want? What kind of style? What kind of production? It could be anything, and you just have to pick one. We were going to do this thing inspired by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs — that raw energy felt right for the song. Clayton, our drummer, isn't really into that kind of music, but I was like, just play like that. If we were fully equally collaborating we might not get anywhere — you kind of need one person to say, no, it's going to be like this. Even if someone's like, what if we did it like Herbie Hancock — no, we're doing Yeah Yeah Yeahs, let's go. I think living in New York put me in that state of mind, thinking about the bands that created a personality or sense of identity for the city. Velvet Underground, the CBGB punk thing, indie sleaze, LCD Soundsystem, the Strokes. It felt cool to have some of those elements on the record. And then of course some songs are more folky, but you could connect everything to New York if you wanted to — because New York is everything. Every kind of person, every kind of music, it's all here.
SKYE: How do you think this album would have come out if you had stayed in Vermont
KEVIN: Probably folkier, less horny. Vermont doesn't have much of a sex drive. It's pastoral, so beautiful, but it's more forest energy than human energy. Even though I'm very introverted, I go more crazy being separated from people. I need to be around human energy to feel inspired and alive. I shouldn't have said I don't want to be a hick in Vermont, because it implies everyone there is a hick, which isn't true — but I think it's a funny lyric, and I'll keep a lyric even if it's mean and unfair, if I think it's clever.
SKYE: I have that line highlighted in my notes, “a star in New York, not a hick in Vermont…”
KEVIN: Yeah, that song is definitely more judgmental. I was in an angry state of mind when I wrote it, so I think I wanted to be hurtful. But now that I've had enough time to process things, I feel like I would never say that now. That's the interesting thing about songwriting — you record the song, the energy gets captured in that moment, and it exists there forever. Six months later, someone who you wrote the song about hears it like, "What the fuck?" and you're like, "Oh, yeah, I don't feel that way anymore." But it's there, you wrote it. It's embarrassing, it's mean. You have to do these things in the moment and you can't worry about whether you'll regret it in six months. You can't live that way, and you definitely can't live that way as an artist.
SKYE: As we approach the release date, how are you feeling about Aethermead now
KEVIN: I could easily regret everything, but I think I'm at peace with it — it's not really my job to feel connected to it, you know? It's my job to make the thing and be true to the feeling of that moment. I also feel divorced from it in a lot of ways, because that's how my mind works. Being deeply immersed in a feeling, and it's everything, the world's collapsing, I'm writing the song — and then months later I'm in a completely different state of mind, thinking it's so funny that I ever felt that way. There's a healthy detachment. So even though it's my new album, it's not really my new album — I'm working on my new album right now, Aethermead is just the one that's coming out. Like how we started the conversation with "What have I done today?" I didn't create that record today, so I don't feel as connected to it. I only feel really connected to what's happening in this present moment. But I am proud of it, and I'm excited for it to come out and to play the songs live. We've added a new band member, Matthew Danger Littman — he's really cool. We're going to be a five piece now, after being a four piece for a couple of years.
SKYE: And you guys are playing at Webster Hall June 23rd, right?
KEVIN: Yeah, that should be fun. I mean, we've had some really epic shows there, so I'm excited to play there again.
SKYE: That's a fun venue — I'll catch you there. Thanks again for your time. It's really great to hear your thoughts and feelings on Aethermead. It's all just very genuine, so refreshing.
KEVIN: Well, thank you. I'm happy you liked the record.
SKYE: I'm excited for everyone to hear it!
Aethermead by of Montreal is out everywhere this Friday, June 5th via Polyvinyl Record Co.
You can find vinyl pre-order, merch, tour dates, videos and much more for of Montreal all here on the website.
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