Kevin Barnes talks loads and I take notes
of Montreal have a new album out. Kevin Barnes spoke with Skye Matlock about it. I want to remember some of the things he said in that conversation.
On the lyric "Surely you knew me well knew me well enough to know that I'd want to be a star in New York, not a hick in Vermont":
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.
On the song Dismissal Mosaics:
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.
On the album Aethermead:
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.