The Palaver Of Solipsists Exploding In My Skull

Of Montreal “Vegan In Furs” – For some reason, the songs that speak to me the most usually make the least amount of literal sense. “For some reason.” I mean, yeah, I kinda know the reasons — I’m responding to a feeling and a sound, and the words fall into place around my experiences. I don’t need every line to be applicable to my life as long as a few have some kind of resonance, even if it’s something inscrutable like “their brains are like porcupines and mine’s a paper ball.” I tried to figure that line out a few months ago and my friend Grant offered this interpretation — “the brain that is spiked by things rather than spiky and/or written on rather than accumulating via impalement” — and though that makes some sense, I’m still not 100% certain why I feel like I’m definitely on Team Paper Ball.

I listen to “Vegan In Furs” all the time, usually at least once per day for the past four months. (It’s the first song on an Of Montreal playlist that I play quite often, and so I always expect “My British Tour Diary” to come on immediately afterwards.) It seems like it might be the theme song for my year thus far. At first, it may have been something from Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, but I guess things have been a lot more cheerful and optimistic for me lately than anxious and freaky. And that’s where the song gets very literal — “I’m peaking in so many ways / the gloom is in retreat / the dark epoch is over.” There’s also something very conspiratorial about the lyrics — “we both despise all the academic swine…,” “I know they don’t understand, they don’t get us at all” — and I suppose I need that too, the excitement of feeling like I’m in on something, part of something, with someone, connected, connecting. It feels new to me, and sometimes I forget how much I like new things. (Click here to buy it from Polyvinyl.)