There are many things to like about Of Montreal—the slinky melodies, the kinky rhythms, the enigmatic lyrics—but one of the Athens, Georgia, band’s best qualities is the way Kevin Barnes lets his listeners play Spot the Influence with every song.

The singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, whose one-man studio project occasionally morphs into a five-piece touring ensemble, readily admits that he borrows riffs, hooks, and sonic atmospheres from the musicians he admires.

“Obviously, I listen to a lot of David Bowie, Prince, and Sly and the Family Stone,” he confesses, reached on his cellphone while shopping for vintage garb in a Los Angeles boutique. “And my roots are in ’60s pop, the Beatles and the Kinks and stuff like that. So, yeah, I just try to incorporate all these different influences. The main thing is that it’s fun to do: it’s kind of cool just to explore these different styles of music and try to build on what my icons and heroes have created.”

The impact of Talking Heads, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, and Roxy Music can be felt on Of Montreal’s latest effort, Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? But the new disc’s lyrical themes mark a move away from the elliptical fairy tales that marked previous efforts such as The Sunlandic Twins and Aldhils Arboretum . Barnes’s writing has been shaped by his fondness for fantasists Roald Dahl and Edward Gorey, but on Hissing Fauna his words are, at times, considerably more straightforward. In fact, on album highlight “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal”, which starts with the lines “The past is a grotesque animal/And in its eyes you see/How completely wrong you can be”, he’s explicitly addressing heartbreak.

When he was writing Hissing Fauna , Barnes explains, he was going through a particularly bleak period. “My girlfriend and I had just had a kid. And also we were touring a lot, so there was a lot of tension in my life, because I was away on tour but we had this new child, right? We even split up for a while so, yeah, that song is all about that. It’s sort of like a breakup song.

“The songs have always mirrored my life,” he adds. “Whether I’m writing these fantastic stories about characters that I’ve invented or coming up with really personal, autobiographical songs, the music is deeply interwoven into the fabric of my existence, and in that way there’s always going to be a personal element to everything.”

In the background, a happy child burbles away. Barnes has reunited with his girlfriend. For now the world is rosy, and once he gets back from the road, he’s looking forward to finishing the most ambitious project of his eight-CD career.

“Right now, I’m trying to make something that’s a bit more fragmented and a bit schizophrenic but still pretty poppy and interesting,” he says. “I want to kind of deconstruct the pop-songwriting template, the whole riff/chorus/riff thing. So I’m trying to do a 55-minute piece with 47 different movements or something. I kind of view it more as one piece than a collection of songs.”

Brian Wilson—another of Barnes’s chief inspirations—may have written “teenage symphonies”, but Of Montreal’s main man sounds like he’s shooting for something more mature—and it’s likely going to be worth the wait.

Of Montreal plays Richard’s on Richards Wednesday and next Thursday (February 7 and 8).