Note: A reflective piece on an Of Montreal track and a cluster of other listening moments where music stopped being background and became something closer to intervention. Starting in a cramped, overheated apartment in Furano, Hokkaido, on New Year’s Day 2006, the essay moves through a snowbound walk soundtracked by Kevin Barnes’ The Past is a Grotesque Animal, then branches outward to two other formative listening experiences—Bob Dylan on a half-awake AM radio morning, and Father John Misty in mid-career exhaustion on a city commute. It is less about music as taste than music as rupture: the way certain songs bypass interpretation and reorganize the inner self in real time, leaving the listener briefly unarmoured, and then altered.
Furano, New Year’s Day, 2006.
Outside, Hokkaido is doing what it does in winter when it stops pretending to be habitable: the air is an exposed blade, the snow hard-packed and granular underfoot, everything outside reduced to distance, glare, and breath. Inside Ken and Eri’s small apartment it is the opposite problem—heat pushed to excess, a sealed, overcompensating warmth that turns the room into a kind of shared pressure chamber. We are all in it together: Ken, serving in the Japanese army and posted up here in Furano; Eri, quietly and expertly holding the domestic center; their son Shinya, one year younger than our son Hugh; and the four of us effectively folded into one cramped sleeping arrangement that collapses night into proximity. It is kind, it is hospitable, it is also inescapably too much. The bed feels like it belongs to no one and everyone at once.
I remember wanting, with a clarity that felt almost physical, to go home. Not anywhere abstract—Kyoto specifically. My own bed. My own thermostat. The ability to set the heater somewhere between restraint and comfort rather than Arctic evacuation or sauna collapse. Kyoto’s winter is mild enough to forgive you for being human. Furano’s winter is not.
It is late afternoon on New Year’s Day. The holiday has that particular suspended quality: nothing is open, nothing is moving, and even time seems to have adopted local weather conditions. I have just discovered I have lost my wallet—ID, credit cards, the small administrative skeleton of a life—and I am trying not to let it tip everything further off balance. Eri will later find it, of course, lodged under the couch cushions, and post it back as if this is just another minor adjustment to the day’s equilibrium. At the time, though, it feels like the world tightening a little further around me.
So I go for a walk.
It is not a decision so much as a pressure release. I put on headphones, step out into the cold, and immediately the winter reasserts itself with total authority. No negotiation. Just air, snow, and the sound of my shoes biting into frozen ground. I am wearing sneakers instead of boots, which already feels like a small error in judgment that will have consequences.
And then I press play.
The Past is a Grotesque Animal arrives like a system taking over the system. Of Montreal, Kevin Barnes—whatever name you want to use for the person or force behind it—unfolding a twelve-minute architecture of confession, excess, fragmentation, and emotional overexposure that does not so much accompany the walk as overwrite it.
I do not listen once.
I walk for an hour in circles, or near-circles, or something that becomes circular by repetition. The song loops again and again—four times, maybe more—and each return feels less like repetition and more like deepening. The cold sharpens, the snow crunches, my breathing becomes part of the rhythm. At some point I am no longer fully tracking direction. I am just in motion inside the sound.
And I am crying.
Not the polite kind of emotional leakage you can disguise as weather or fatigue, but something closer to surrender. Barnes is doing something too exposed, too unguarded, too structurally unstable to defend against. It is not just lyrics—it is tone, duration, refusal of containment. The line lands like a fracture: you know things could be different / but they’re not.
That is the moment. Not because it is the most complex line, but because it is the simplest possible articulation of something I am already carrying without knowing it.
Ken and Eri are not the problem. In-laws are not the problem. Furano is not the problem. The problem is the accumulation: ambition just starting to harden into structure (new full-time role at Rits Uji after years of part-time teaching), the sense of trajectory toward IB, the pressure of becoming legible professionally, and underneath it all the quieter, more persistent anxiety about language, about my son’s future English, about whether proximity is enough when communication is not yet guaranteed.
Hugh is three. He doesn’t yet speak English in any sustained way. He will, later—Kyoto International School, gradual unfolding—but at this moment it feels like a future I am trying to pre-pay emotionally, as if worry could accelerate outcome.
And so the walk becomes something else entirely: a cold, repetitive loop through snow and sound, a private weather system synchronized to a song that refuses to stay at a safe emotional distance. I am half-lost in it, half-anchored by it. At some point I stop thinking in sentences.
When I finally turn back, the house is still there, still too warm, still intact. The ordinary world resumes its shape as if nothing has happened. Dinner will happen, conversation will happen, the night will pass.
But something has already been displaced.
That walk, that loop, that song—those remain as a fixed point. Not resolution, not transformation exactly. More like an encounter with a register of feeling I did not previously have language for, but which now exists and cannot be removed.
Barnes did not explain anything.
He just got through.
Kevin Barnes, the lead singer of Of Montreal, is one of those contemporary indie figures who refuses the clean categories people like to file musicians into. What’s known, in fairly plain terms, is that Barnes has moved over time into an openly fluid understanding of gender and sexuality—identifying in recent years as non-binary and queer, using multiple pronouns, and explicitly framing earlier work (including the Georgie Fruit persona) as something they now see as a problematic, overextended act of identification and performance. That matters because it retroactively clarifies what was already visible in the live persona you’re describing: drag-inflected glamour, exaggerated femininity/masculinity, theatrical self-invention as method rather than costume.
The deeper pattern is that Barnes’ sexuality and identity have never been “announced” in a single stable form so much as continuously staged—worked through performance, breakdown, and reinvention. The turbulence people sometimes read as “issues” (depression, relationship collapse, manic productivity, alter-egos like Georgie Fruit) sits less in the register of scandal than in the register of aesthetic method: self as unstable material. Albums like Hissing Fauna… are basically internal monologues set on fire, where romantic relationships, identity, and chemical imbalance are all entangled rather than separated into neat clinical categories.
Barnes sits in a lineage of glam and art-pop performers (Bowie is the obvious shadow) where gender play is not commentary on identity but the medium through which identity is continuously rewritten. The result is that the work feels emotionally confessional even when the persona is highly stylised: the sincerity and the artifice are not opposites; they are fused, sometimes uncomfortably so.
In short: Barns does not have a fixed sexuality, and lives t a life in which sexuality, gender, and performance are permanently entangled, and where his “issues” are inseparable from the creative engine itself.
Grotesque Animal arrives less like a track than like a prolonged exposure to someone thinking out loud with no filter, no editing instinct, and no interest in letting the listener rest. The Past is a Grotesque Animal begins with a kind of conceptual detonation: the past is no longer memory or narrative continuity, but something bodily and misbegotten, an organism that looks back at you with the capacity to reveal not just error, but total epistemic miscalibration. The emotional register is already unusual here—this is not nostalgia, but retrospective humiliation at the fact of having ever thought you were right about anything.
From there the song folds into a second movement that is almost aggressively self-conscious: desire framed through embarrassment, attraction filtered through cultural overreach, intimacy mediated by theory. The encounter with a “cute girl” is not allowed to remain simple; it immediately drags in philosophical reference points, as if feeling itself requires justification through external intellectual scaffolding. What should be direct becomes over-determined, and the over-determination is precisely the point: the narrator cannot experience attraction without simultaneously watching himself experience it. Even love becomes something like a performance being observed in real time.
Then comes the pivot where the track sharpens into something more brutal. The language shifts from reflection to collapse—academic failure, emotional disintegration, the recognition of being “gone” while simultaneously narrating that disappearance. The crucial gesture here is not despair but authorship: the insistence that even breakdown is self-produced. That phrase—“authoring disaster”—is doing a great deal of work. It removes the possibility of passive suffering and replaces it with something more modern and more punishing: agency inside collapse. One is not simply breaking; one is composing the form of one’s breaking as it happens.
By the time the song reaches its midsection, it has abandoned restraint entirely. What had been psychological becomes infrastructural. The fantasy of tearing things apart—houses, bodies, structures of containment—is not really about violence in a literal sense, but about the release from moderation. It is a desire for total unbinding, for a condition in which limits no longer apply and intensity can proceed without correction. It feels adolescent in energy but philosophically adult in implication: if order is already failing, why not accelerate the collapse and inhabit it consciously? “Let’s tear our fucking bodies apart.” Indeed.
What prevents the song from becoming mere excess is its final register shift into intimacy as circuitry rather than refuge. The closing idea is not reconciliation but connection as transmission—human relation imagined as something like hidden wiring beneath visible separation. Two people are not joined by resolution or understanding, but by something involuntary and continuous, an electrical sympathy that persists even when emotional coherence has dissolved. Love here is not stabilising; it is conductive. It carries instability rather than resolving it.
That is what makes the piece so unusual over its length. It does not progress toward clarity or resolution; it deepens a single proposition through repetition and escalation: that consciousness is unstable, self-authored, and perpetually aware of its own failure to stabilise. And yet, paradoxically, that awareness itself becomes the form of continuity. The song does not resolve the grotesque past—it learns to live inside its ongoing presence.
I like Of Montreal, but I don’t love them, and the distinction has mostly to do with form rather than intent. A lot of the catalogue is deliberately baroque—dense production, shifting textures, long runtimes that feel less like songs than elaborately staged environments you’re expected to inhabit rather than enter. There’s a kind of aesthetic overgrowth to it: too many surfaces, too many internal modulations, too much happening at once for easy emotional access. It’s not background music, and it doesn’t really want to be. The cost of that ambition, for me, is that it can be hard to get inside the songs in a way that feels immediate or bodily. You end up listening at them more than through them.
Which is why The Past is a Grotesque Animal feels so different. It breaks the pattern entirely. It is still maximal, still structurally excessive, still willing to stretch time, but it has a strange internal clarity that most of the other material doesn’t. There’s no sense of ornamental distraction or sonic clutter for its own sake. Instead, everything feels metabolised into a single forward-moving emotional logic. It doesn’t feel like it’s demonstrating complexity; it feels like it’s trapped inside it.
And crucially, it has no filler energy whatsoever. Even at length, it maintains pressure. It doesn’t meander—it accumulates. Each section feels necessary to the psychological arc it is tracing, even when the content is volatile or self-cancelling. That’s the paradox: it is expansive but not indulgent, long but not diffuse. It behaves less like a composition and more like a sustained state of consciousness that refuses to close.
That’s why it stands apart. In a catalogue where density sometimes becomes opacity, this one remains piercingly legible. It is maximal, but it is also focused. It doesn’t just add material—it tightens around an emotional core until it becomes unavoidable.
The final movement of this piece is really about how certain songs don’t just soundtrack life, they puncture it and then rearrange the internal furniture. I don’t have many of these, but I have a few, and they tend to arrive at moments when I am not exactly looking for them.
One is Bob Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand,” heard half-awake at around 6:30 in the morning on AM radio, sometime in my late teens. I hadn’t slept properly in years—there was a long adolescent stretch where nights just bled into mornings—and the room was that grey-blue pre-dawn wash where nothing feels fully solid. I remember lying there with the radio still on from the night before, drifting through news bulletins, late-night voices, static, and then this song arriving like a kind of moral weather system. It doesn’t announce itself so much as settle in. Something in it made the world feel both unbearable and forgiven at the same time. I stayed in bed longer than I intended, not because I was tired, but because getting up felt like leaving something important unfinished.
Another is much later, in 2017, walking down the steps toward a Starbucks after work, head full of obligations, deadlines, the general low-grade administrative pressure of being a functioning adult in motion. On comes Father John Misty’s “Leaving LA” from Pure Comedy, and I just stop. Not dramatically—no cinematic pause—but enough that I find myself going up and down the steps again, as if I’ve temporarily forgotten what the destination was supposed to be. The song is slow, almost patient with its own despair, and it carries that peculiar tone of someone who has both succeeded and slightly lost the plot in the process. There’s a line of thinking in it about authorship, irony, and being turned into something by other people’s projections—about how the self becomes a kind of public object. And it landed at exactly the wrong/right time, which is to say: it landed perfectly.
And then there is the Of Montreal experience, specifically Kevin Barnes’ “The Past is a Grotesque Animal.” I like Of Montreal, but I don’t love them in general. The songs are often too baroque, too long, too densely wired to immediately enter; they resist casual listening in a way that can feel like work. But this one is different. It is not just long, it is internally necessary. It moves through regret, desire, self-destruction, erotic confusion, intellectual posturing, collapse, and a kind of exhausted self-awareness that never quite resolves. The refrain—“things could be different, but they’re not”—is almost banal on paper, but in the context of the song it becomes something closer to a philosophical statement about adulthood itself. There is no exit ramp offered. Only repetition, escalation, and admission.
What ties these three moments together is not genre or mood, but exposure. Each of them removes a layer of insulation. Dylan makes meaning feel too large to comfortably contain. Misty makes authorship feel slightly embarrassing, slightly external, as if the self has already been narrated elsewhere. Barnes, in the Of Montreal track, does something more aggressive: he refuses to simplify anything at all, and in doing so forces the listener into a kind of emotional honesty that is hard to sustain.
These are not “favourite songs” in any simple sense. They are more like points of contact where life briefly becomes too legible, and then continues anyway.
Dedication:
For Kevin. I know you’ve been through it baby. I’ve been through it too and I can hear it dude. 100%. You rock baby.
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