Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes is 14 songs into a new album. Photo by Chad Kamenshine.
By: Kyle Eustice
‘s Kevin Barnes is already 14 songs deep into the band’s latest album. The as-of-yet untitled 14th album is slated for Summer 2016, just over a year after the months-old “Aureate Gloom.” If that seems quick, it’s not to Barnes, who has what you might call a Protestant work ethic. Work is creating, and he loves his work–if not for his fans, for himself.
Making “Aureate Gloom,” for example, helped him through the recent dissolution of his nine-year marriage. True to that, the album’s lyrics read like a journal detailing one of the roughest periods of his life.
“Itap definitely a therapy album,” Barnes says. “I was dealing head-on with what was going on in my personal life, trying to direct all of that energy into something positive rather than just sink into misery. You can feel the misery, but itap put into something artistic so you at least have something to show for it.”
Recorded at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, “Aureate Gloom” was born in near isolation. The band shut themselves off from the world to help Barnes tease the raw emotions he’d been dealing with into an album.
“[The band and I] wanted to get out of our comfort zone and go somewhere where we didn’t know anybody,” Barnes explains. “With no distractions, it allowed us to focus intently for a very short period of time. We had to record and mix within a three week window. I wanted to work quickly and didn’t want to give myself time to second guess or revise too much.”
Everything had already been written—from disco opener “Bassem Sabry” to the classic rock “Apollyon Of Blue Room”—but it was still an intense few weeks. The average day went like this: wake up in the morning, go to the studio, work all day until exhaustion took over, and collapse into bed for six hours before waking up and doing it all over again.
“I felt really turned on by the whole thing,” he says. “We could lose track of time and become completely focused on the project.”
For most, that’s exhausting, but again, Barnes proves an exception. By the time the album was cut, he’d already moved on to writing the next Of Montreal album.
“I don’t take that long of a break before I move on to the next thing and then that thing becomes the one thatap really exciting and personal,” he says. “I always need to be focused on a project and be productive.” (That goes without saying: Since Of Montreal’s debut, 1997’s “Cherry Peel,” Of MOntreal has spit out over a dozen studio albums.)
With influences heavily rooted in ‘60s/‘70s glam-rock acts like David Bowie, the Athens, Ga. band has always reveled in the eclecticism of their music. As Barnes tells it, the new album is an even further left-field departure than usual.
“The styles are all over the place,” he admits. “At first, I was nervous about that. We’re combing electronic elements with the more rock oriented stuff we’ve been doing. Then I realized it doesn’t really matter. Itap cool if itap a really different collection of songs and doesn’t feel like a straight narrative.”
These days, Of Montreal is almost a musical institution. No longer do they long for attention or critical acclaim–they’ve got that. Barnes now has the freedom to make music simply for the sake of making music, which he’s been finding therapeutic lately. It puts him in a good place, where he can write selfishly and simply appease his unquenchable thirst for creativity, void of any rules or regulations.
“When I’m making a new record, I want it to do well and I want people to connect with it,” he says, “but itap not the motivating factor. I will never think, ‘What do people want?’ That doesn’t inspire me. I just make what I feel like making.–that’s all I want to do.”
Of Montreal play the Bluebird Theatre with Diane Coffee and Denver’s DéCollage on Wednesday, Oct. 28. You can get tickets at bluebirdtheatre.net.
