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“I don’t really try to say I’m this or I’m that,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I don’t even necessarily think it’s healthy to define yourself in that way. You might have characteristics of one thing or another from one day at a time, and if you’re open-minded I guess you could say you’re bisexual. So I guess I could say I’m bisexual, but I’ve never dated a guy. I’ve never had a long-term relationship with a guy, so I can’t really say that. But maybe, 10 years from now, I will.”

Aside from Georgie and the fixation with sex, a third aspect of Skeletal Lamping has set tongues wagging – the music mosaic alluded to earlier. Rampant eclecticism has long been a feature of of Montreal’s records, but here that approach is taken to its logical conclusion, and applied not just to an hour-long record, but to four-minute songs. We had fair warning of this last year, when Barnes stated in an interview with an Australian website: “I am going to create a bunch of 30-to-50-second sections and string them all together. I don’t think there will be any pauses between pieces. I want it to feel like one long piece with hundreds of movements.”

He has been almost as good as his word. Coherent songs do appear from time to time (first single ‘Id Engager’, ‘An Eluardian Instance’, the excellent Seventies piano rock pastiche ‘And I’ve Seen A Bloody Shadow’), but throughout the rest of the album, ideas come and go with bewildering speed. Hooks, lyrical ideas and melodies threaten to burrow into your brain before, tantalisingly, being snatched away. It’s a frustrating experience, but strangely addictive and reminiscent of bands like Wire, the Minutemen and Guided By Voices (who Barnes specifically cites as an inspiration). The difference is, those bands finished the song when the idea was up. Barnes doesn’t; he just heads straight into the next musical motif without finishing the “song”. Why do it?

“Mainly just to create an interesting arrangement,” he reasons. “I feel like a lot of songwriters use repetition out of laziness, or just because that’s the conventional thing to do. You know, pop songs can be so predictable and, to me, they lose their value when they’re like that. It’s like you know exactly what’s going to happen, and it’s just boring. So I wanted to make a record that destroys that pop template. It’s kind of arbitrary – I could easily have put the track markers anywhere. It’s not like these four sections work any better than these six sections, but it’s kind of fun too when you’re open in that way – anything goes and you can do any sort of tempo changes or key changes or musical style changes, wherever you want to do it. I really tried to keep it interesting for myself.”

All the same, Barnes acknowledges that this approach might infuriate some listeners, who hear a glorious 30-second section and fantasise about Barnes turning it into fully-fledged, three minute pop song. “Yeah, I can definitely see that. Going back to David Bowie, he has that record Low, where he fades the song out. He makes a one minute song, or a minute-and-a-half or whatever, that’s so amazing and you want it to go on for another two minutes. But it’s kind of sweet in that way that it’s short and you go, ‘Aw, I want to hear it again!’, so you go back and listen to it again. There’s something to say about not getting what you want, but getting a taste of it.” Leave them wanting more? “Yeah, like if you get some dessert or something that’s so delicious, but you only get three bites. But if you’d had 10 bites, you would’ve been sick of it.”

Talking to Barnes even for a short time, it is very apparent that he is borderline obsessive about music. With such a prolific record over the last decade, that’s no surprise. However, he is also refreshingly – unduly – modest about his capabilities as a songwriter, musician, performer and producer. When asked if he feels unable to limit his sound, a sound that has touched upon so many different styles in what is often – by now erroneously – labelled an indie-pop project, his answer is simple:

“I don’t really want to. For me, what’s exciting about making music is pulling all these references together. I don’t really think of myself as terribly original. All I’m really doing is taking all these other people’s good ideas and putting them together in my own way. That’s all I can really do.”

That said, he knows that if this is all he can do (and it plainly isn’t), he is among the best around at it. He doesn’t offer any doubt that he will have the opportunity to keep making music for as long as he wants, and he sees himself doing it into old age, as his heroes have done.

“I look at people like Robert Wyatt or Fela Kuti, people that never really stop making interesting music. There’s plenty of people who have really long careers, but they’re completely irrelevant because they stopped taking chances and they just keep spinning out the same crap over and over again. I don’t want to be like that. For me, my main goal is to always stay excited and to continue moving, and developing and changing, and doing different things. Kind of like what David Bowie did. He went through so many different periods and so many different phases, and he’s left the world with so much to dissect and go through and explore. That’s definitely my goal.”

Skeletal Lamping is out now on Polyvinyl

of Montreal play the Stiff Kitten, Belfast on Tuesday, January 27 and the Button Factory, Dublin on Wednesday, January 28.

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