From music to theatre, gaming to comedy, podcasting to design, Montaigne defies the limitations often placed on artists, embracing a life of creative exploration. Their work is not constrained by medium, instead finding freedom in crossing boundaries and merging art forms, a reflection of the solace they found in vibrant worlds and stories throughout their childhood.

Their career is a testament to this creative polymathy. Montaigne’s collaborations with icons like David Byrne, their representation of Australia in Eurovision, multiple ARIA awards, and a recent Grammy nomination for Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical showcase the breadth of their talent. These accolades merely scratch the surface of Montaigne’s expansive artistic world, a small peek at the depth of their creativity.

In this interview, I chatted to Montaigne about family relationships, queer metaphors and their amazing new album, it’s hard to be a fish.

All artist images by: Jess Gleeson

Alex Creece: Hey Montaigne, thanks for meeting with me today! I’m a little starstruck, and it’s so nice to see you. How have things been since your recent album release?

Montaigne: Things have been really good! I moved to Naarm yesterday, so it’s been a bit hectic. But it was nice to have the album release alongside that. I feel like that really buoyed me because I feel like it’s been received really well. I’m very pleased – I’ve gotten some really nice response from fans and people supporting through Bandcamp and Patreon and stuff. I’m excited to just keep watching it unfurl.

AC: That’s rad! I’m loving the album, too – my partner and I have had it on loop! When I first arranged to interview you, the only question I’d written down was “fish?”, so I’m going to lean into that. Can you tell us about the creative concepts behind this album – why fish?

M: Fish because they are deeply unappreciated creatures that we share the world with. When thinking of fish, many people would first jump to eating fish. I think that’s because it’s hard to anthropomorphise fish, like it’s easy to do with a dog, or even a bear – all these things with four legs and human-ish looking faces.

But because fish often look like little flat things, with flat eyes and a flat body, there’s not much humanness to them. They’re often written off as something that’s just food in the big pool around us. To me, that felt like an apt metaphor for my own experience with being alive, and my relationship with my mum, and then just being queer as well, right?

Like, we live in a world in which rights – or even the question of existence – are still contested for queer people. And so, to me, this notion of fish in the ocean really made sense to me aesthetically and conceptually as a big umbrella for themes like isolation and community. Queer people tend to find each other – because of being niche, or taking solace in each other after having not-great parent or family relationships. (I’m on the r/RaisedByNarcissists subreddit a lot!)

The ocean is this strange alien world; it’s totally different from our domain on land. We do not and cannot thrive in the same way that fish do in the ocean as we do on land.

With this album, I created a little oceanic world that’s entirely my own. It’s distinctly me, and it represents my aesthetic and conceptual tendencies. It encompasses all of the influences on me growing up – like Kingdom Hearts 2 and Final Fantasy 10 – and some current influences too, like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Disco Elysium, Ponyo and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. All this seaside stuff that I was consuming evoked this sense of loneliness, isolation and contemplativeness. The ocean provided a world that encompassed all of those ideas.

AC: What a great response. Fish are definitely underrated, and don’t get enough love and respect as beings. They’re very otherworldly, despite living on planet Earth with us. Alien, but also not.

M: Another thing I forgot to mention is that, when conceptualising this album, I was also thinking a lot about climate change.

I was trying to go for a sort of sci-fi aesthetic and sound, like solar punk. But I wanted to try to depict a hopeful future – in harmony with nature and with technology. Instead of what we currently have, which is capitalism intersecting with technology and the climate in really awful ways.

And so, that’s also why I gravitated towards fish in the ocean. Sea levels are rising, coral reefs are getting cooked, and fish die off because their environment is destroyed. So, that was an important part of it for me as well.

AC: Yeah, I can see how that comes across in the album. I was going to ask about the narrative journey of it’s hard to be a fish. I found it interesting that it starts off with songs related to growing up, and then ends on ‘it’s all about the money’, which serves as a critique of capitalism. Could you tell us about where the album starts, where it goes and where it ends?

M: It’s all kind of abstract to me, but it makes sense in my head. I’ll try to explain the way it feels in my head.

‘keep going!’ as the opening track is introducing the landscape. It’s got birds, little twinkles and all this instrumentation building to slowly bring you into the world, almost like walking from a dark room out into the outdoors.

I wanted it to be a song that does represent transition from darkness to light, resilience and hope. You know, it’s this idea that you’re going to keep going, even if it’s hard. The song is also all about my relationship with songwriting – and writing in general – and how that’s kind of saved my life. Songwriting has given me a sense of myself – because my sense of self and my sense of reality have always been in question.

Then we progress to ‘talking shit’. It’s got this impudent teenager feeling – it’s kind of bratty – but I do think the lyrics are pretty mature. The opening line, “I don’t think that you’re evil / but do you have to be bad to me?”, puts a common dynamic into plain words, and I’m quite proud of it.

The song says: I want to lend you humanity right now, and I’m going to try to empathise with you, my bully. I don’t believe anyone is inherently evil. People are constructed of all the things that have happened to them, what they’ve internalised, what they’ve learned. But given all of that empathy, all of that flexibility and lenience that I’m exhibiting, could you just chill out a little bit? Could you please learn how to deal with me in a kind, calm way?

Those two songs serve as the blueprint for the rest of the album. The subsequent songs depict my efforts to be resilient, and push through, even if things feel really heavy sometimes. It speaks to a focal character in my life, which is my mum, who I’m really trying to both empathise with and also reasonably criticise.

And then, ‘it’s all about the money’ is the capstone, because I think so much of modern malaise, trauma, mental illness and struggle is borne out of capitalism. You know, my parents are immigrants, and they very much wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer when I was growing up – because that would be the most lucrative career. They were very much ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ people. They thought that people who worked the hardest would succeed, despite the fact so many working-class people work incredibly hard – if not harder than anyone in a suit – and still don’t earn enough money to feed their family.

So, I wanted to interrogate that ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ mentality. But for my parents, it’s like, I get why they have that view. Like, it makes total sense given the history that they’ve lived through, and being not strictly white or western people in Australia in the 1990s and early 2000s, when they first moved here.

While I get all of that – we can all understand context endlessly – at the end of the day, if there’s no reform, then what’s the point? What’s the point of forgiveness if there’s no actual reform in the end? A lot of people end up having relationships with their parents where there is no closure in the end. You may forgive them, but they might never truly change, which is what’s happened with me.

AC: I get what you mean. Empathy only takes us so far if it isn’t accompanied by meaningful action or accountability. Knowing why someone hurts you doesn’t stop it from hurting.

If you don’t mind me asking, how do you navigate these personal topics and sharing so much of yourself in your art? How do you maintain your boundaries while also telling personal stories?

M: It was hard for a really long time. I’ve always been writing songs about my relationship with my parents, but I wasn’t able to speak openly about it then because I still had a relationship with them. My parents, understandably, got very upset that I’d write about them.

In response, I sort of felt like, Well, the songs wouldn’t exist if the behaviour didn’t exist, but try getting that through to them! So, I often concealed the fact that certain songs were about my parents. I would only mention it in close quarters or small live shows.

After [my second album] Complex, I’d sworn to my parents that I wouldn’t make music about them anymore, because we had a big, intense fight about it. I was like, Okay, I get it. I hear that you’re setting a boundary with me. In return, I would love for you to be a bit kinder to me. Did I get that? No, but I held my end of the promise.

So then with [my third album] making it!, it wasn’t about my parents at all. It was about totally different feelings, trying to tap into characters, trying to tap into my relationship at the time. Then at the end of 2022, I decided to go independent [without a record label]. I set some boundaries with my parents, with my mum, saying, Hey, you’re not going to get involved with my independent journey. You’re going to be my mum, and I’m going to be the boss of my career, and we’ll keep the professional and the personal separate.

I got a lot of truly ugly text messages over that decision, which was the last straw for me. I couldn’t keep living like that. If I have children one day, I don’t want them to be dealing with that. I can’t change someone else’s behaviour, so I just had to put a pin in it.

I don’t want my parents to come across as bad people. I’ve had a lot of conversations with friends about this stuff – and about words like “toxic” and “crazy” – and how reductive people can be. Again, I totally understand why my mum is the way she is. My mum grew up in the Philippines, where it’s very class-stratified. She experienced a lot of hardship and feelings of abandonment growing up. You know, there’s all these individual things. And then there’s the colonisation of the Philippines by Spain and the USA, all this fracturing of culture. This stuff shapes a person – the racism, the misogyny, all of it.

So I was trying to say with my music, I get you. I get why you’re like this. And I’m sorry this happened to you. We’re the same. But I need you to know that you’re handling our relationship poorly. This is the wrong way.

So yeah, I guess that’s been the journey. Now that we’re no-contact, I feel like I understand how to talk about them in a reasonable way. I’m not writing them off as human beings, but I also want to talk about this stuff openly, as I think many people silently suffer their relationship with their parents.

I hope that there’s some comfort in that for people who have similar experiences to mine, you know? Like, they can see me talking about it and be like, Oh shit, that’s what’s going on with me. It’s so nice to hear someone validate you: to say you’re not crazy, and the hurtful behavior is actually intolerable.

AC: I think your music does a fantastic job in offering critique, while also holding a lot of compassion and nuance. It’s hard to juggle that mentality. I feel that a lot. It’s like, I’m not going to reduce this person to a villain, and I’m going to mindful to add a lot of caveats to make sure I’m seeing them in their full personhood and context, but at the end of the day, they’re still unkind, and they’re just not good for me.

M: And sometimes it’s annoying, right? I think, as an artist, I have a responsibility – and maybe we as people, on an individual basis, have a responsibility – to depict those kinds of people in our lives in that way with all the caveats. But sometimes you just want to say, “God, they fucking suck!” You just want to say, “It’s so fucking hard to talk to that person because they’re mean and cruel every time I talk to them!”

AC: Yes, absolutely. I feel like you’ve got a good mix of that on the album – moments of “fuck you” catharsis alongside empathy and restraint.

How are you enjoying being an independent artist? How do you go about balancing mainstream success with artistic freedom, while also living within your values (and surviving under capitalism)?

M: I have very little sense of my mainstream profile. I just feel like a normal person. So, becoming independent felt very natural for me. I don’t see myself as like this big shot with like massive infrastructure around them; doing smaller scale operations feels quite nice to me, and more in line with my values.

I do not like the systems and structures that are baked into the music industry, capitalistically. I think knowing what I know now about how the business works, I feel it’s very exploitative. It’s hard because the people who work at labels are nice people who really care about music. But it’s the engine of the label that’s inherently exploitative, in the contracts and the business practices.

I’m very happy to be free of that now, and to have a lot more agility to approach my career. If I need to change track really quickly, I can. And now I have very direct and close relationships with the people that I work with. I’m involved in every email now, which I really like. It does take time away from being an artist, but I don’t mind that too much because I know I’ll get that time again once the album cycle is over. Philosophically, it feels so much better and more connected.

I feel like I have a better relationship with fans now. I’ve always appreciated their support, but it feels extra-special now that I’m not signed to a label. They’re no longer a blur of people – each individual is keeping this ship afloat.

Being independent is hard work, but I do prefer having control and oversight over everything that’s happening and getting to steer the ship. And I’m glad I’m no longer bound to contracts, companies or committees whose purpose is to make the most amount of money possible, rather than just an amount that is sustainable.

AC: Thank you for that. So, it seems I wrote too many questions and now we’re running out of our allotted time. Mind if we try to do the remaining questions in a quickfire round?

M: Go for it! I’ll try to answer quickly.

AC: I love that you were inspired by media such as BoJack Horseman, Disco Elysium and Kingdom Hearts on your new album. Can you talk about the role of games and pop culture in your multidisciplinary practice?

M: I love loving things! I love media: film, TV, video games, books. I try to weave them all into my work because they really shape me as a person.

I’m someone who really needs to be taught in engaging ways. Because of the doubt that was sown into me when I was young, I put a lot of stock in what other people think or represent. And so, yeah, all those references end up in my music because they really matter to me. It’s part of who I am and how I think.

AC: How has your creativity evolved through your albums, as you’ve grown into yourself and your identity?

M: The more aware of become of my queerness, the more politically aware I’ve become. This has shaped the aesthetic, tone and journey of the albums. Also, I started with a label – doing things with other people, while also being a neurotic person and not necessarily understanding why – and am now fully independent. I make every choice, I write with contextual sensitivity about my family life, and I can be more open about things.

I’ve now been able to make what I consider to be a very queer album. It’s unique, and it doesn’t try to compromise or fit in.

AC: Even the album name, it’s hard to be a fish, is such a queer vibe. I wanted to ask if you have a favourite collaboration so far? And do you have any dream collaborations for the future?

M: I think I have to say David Byrne! Even though we didn’t record in a room together, he’s been very lovely ever since. And he’s just a very cooperative, friendly, supportive and encouraging person. Daði Freyr, too… Maika Loubté, Tom Cardy… everyone I’ve worked with has been awesome, honestly! They’ve all just being really down-to-earth people who love making stuff – no ego, no bluster.

And my dream collaborator… Sílvia Pérez Cruz, who’s an amazing Catalonian woman who sings in Catalan and Castellano Spanish. She has a gorgeous voice, and I’d love to sing with her one day. And Kaho Nakamura, a Japanese artist that I idolise.

AC: It’s going to happen. Predicted here first at archermagazine.com.au. And, for my last question: what kind of fish would you be?

M: I’m really drawn to the chimaera, which is like this like ancient deep-sea guy who looks like a little sort of fairy alien. Highly recommend checking out a photo.

A Harriotta raleighana (long-nosed chimaera). Image courtesy of NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Gulf of Mexico 2017.

AC: I love! For the record, I’d be the wahoo fish.

M: I’m looking at a picture now. It’s a cool fish.

Wahoo.

Buy, stream and listen to it’s hard to be a fish now.

You can stay up to date with Montaigne on Instagram.