Montell Fish on Ghosts, Little Deaths, and Liminal Spaces

OFFICE — You came up in the Christian music scene, right? How was that?

MONTELL FISH — The first recording I ever did, I was 6. When I was 16, I made non-Christian music for a year but had this mushroom trip and I got really existential after that. I kind of had a religious epiphany, so I started making Christian music at 17. 

And it was still cool, it was still kind of alternative Christian music and I still had my kind of influences but just with Christian lyrics. But eventually, I realized I didn’t connect with it as a creative stamp. Like, “It’s Christian because you mentioned God, it’s Christian because you check all these boxes…” It started to feel ilke some of the Christian doctrine was getting in the way of the art. 

So once that started happening, I started questioning a lot about what I believed. And eventually I released “Hotel” and like some other songs that focused on the darker nature of humanity, and I kind of had a “fuck you” moment. All my Christian fans were like, “I'm sorry, you don't understand this.” But I'm just not making it for that reason. So that was my crash out moment. And then I've just been slowly figuring out what I believe, and what I still would like to take from those aspects of Christianity.

What epiphany did you have on your shroom trip? 

I didn’t have an epiphany in that way, but I had multiple moments. Once, I was at church and the pastor said, “There’s someone in here that’s gonna do music.” There would be little things like that that made me feel like God was speaking to me, but that was also paired with the anxiety of feeling like I needed to be saved. I was also in the middle of my first heartbreak, so there were definitely things that pushed me in the direction of continuing on the Christian faith. I think I was just feeling purposeless — more scared, and maybe the shrooms brought me to the point where I felt like I needed God to come save me. 

When I think of Christian music, I think of what I heard growing up Catholic in Ohio — very acoustic guitar and ballady, a little different sonically. Do you think there are aspects of Christian music you still find yourself gravitating towards? Or are there aspects that you think you've kind of left behind? 

I mean, church was one of the places where I feel connected with the soul or whatever that place is that makes you feel something. There’s a lot of ambient influence in music and I feel like that comes from church. Some days I’d be at church for two hours playing piano while the pastor was just praying over people and people would be crying and shouting. I definitely gleaned from those experiences. Hopefully my concerts can give that bit of cathartic release. 

But there’s so many other things too. There’s some really good poetry throughout the Bible. And I like to keep aspects of the divine, or even just pointing to this thing that people believed for thousands of years. So this mixtape, “The Spirit Still Remains,” is a play on the project I released in 2022, “Her Love Still Haunts Me Like a Ghost.” “Spirit” is just building this purgatory ghost world. The Jamie Charlotte Marshall trilogy is in the same world of processing like loss and grief. I love the themes of processing loss and grief because I feel like life is about learning to let go. It’s about little deaths. Your first heartbreak is a little death. So I like to have all these projects that breathe that energy. 

And there are these biblical aspects in songs like “Sweet Divine,” and there are other moments where I mention spirits, like in “Devotion.” Those themes pull from that feeling from a partner — when you have someone that’s being your light when you’re in a dark place. 

And there are obvious ties between romantic and religious devotion. My favorite sort of spiritual-adjacent song is where you can’t tell if someone’s praying to a lover or praying to something higher than the both of you. And I think you being pushed toward Christianity after your first heartbreak really mirrors that. 

Who is DJ Gummy Bear to you? 

I created Gummy as a force to keep me pure and experimenting. He was created during the Charlotte era, just after my breakout album Jamie, and I just didn't want to follow the same formulas I knew I could do, so I created Gummy to help me go the opposite way. He's more of a spirit of experimentation. A way to throw paint at the wall. 

You talk about him as a totally different person. 

I know, I sound insane [laughs]

No, it’s super interesting. Do you see him as a separate entity from you or just a different part of you? 

A different part of me, for sure. Yeah, but I use art and music to process a lot. So I almost pin it on the character going through it, so it’s not as close to me, but it still is close to me. There’s not a lot of talk of religious trauma and processing the doctrine of hell on the album, but I think there’s something beautiful in that feeling where you’re kind of uncomfortable. That’s what I was trying to portray with the cover and how the intro sounds. 

Yeah, talk to me about the cover art on Purgatory. What’s that mask you’re wearing?

That’s him. That’s Gummy. There’s the deer, which are his ears and his antlers, and to me, that’s a symbol of home, of Pittsburgh. The Pennsylvania state animal is a deer, so when I was creating his face with Pandagunda, who’s this amazing artist, I was talking to him about incorporating that and having something metallic. The album just feels so electronic, so I wanted it to feel like a robotic version of Gummy. And the black and white is how I imagine puratory — it feels like you’d just be in this big white space and you wouldn’t know when you’d be getting out. And purgatory, for me, was the time in between albums. Now we’re in between Charlotte and Marshall, which is the final project to end this series in my head. 

What non-musical sounds have you been inspired by lately?

I’ve been trying to sample a lot of machinery. Whenever there’s a saw or any loud machinery, I think it’s really interesting how the low bass notes can feel. I wanna try some more stuff under a different name, maybe sampling sounds around cities. 

I feel like with AI coming in, we’re in this weird spot musically where we don’t have a definite sound like the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and the 90s and the 2000s. 

We’re in a sonic purgatory. 

As a human race, I feel like we’re just waiting for the next sound of the future or something. It was kind of a spiritual statement for me to be like, we have to do something or else music could just be gone. 

I mean, this all goes back to that idea of having a spirit that remains, because even though we might not have a distinct universal sound yet, we have things that we refer back to to influence our individual sounds now. I also do think it’s easier to say that the previous decades had defined sounds because of hindsight, but when we look back at the decade, we’re not looking at every individual song that was coming out, just the top 100. So maybe in like 50 years, we'll be able to say, “Yeah, the sound of the 2020s.” I don’t know what that’s going to sound like. 

I mean, I love what Jane Remover is doing. A I love a lot of underground hip hop where they’re just breaking rules. I feel like anyone who’s breaking rules and just finding accidents is the future. And I love how crazy it sounds and how overstimulating some of it is because that feels like the future too. 

Walk me through your creative process — what comes first, feelings, lyrics, or certain instrumental?

I think the visual aspect inspires me before the music. I think about the setting a lot. Whether on a walk around the city at night, or a night club in a foreign city at 2am. I think about how I’d want the next sounds I create to exist in the world. Feeling is also very important, even before words. How a melody and chords make you feel is so important. 

I mean, looking at the cover art versus a few of your music videos, they’re a bit different visually and I wanted to ask about your reasoning behind that. Like, why don’t we see your face at all in the “Devotion” video?

I just wanted people to listen to the music where I listen to it — usually at night. Sometimes I go for walks at like, 5am, and I just sit by the water and listen to music. I released headphones with the album and I want to bring back that spirit of putting in a CD and listening to one album, and just taking it on a walk, or listening to it for a whole day. 

This project has to do with purgatory and liminal spaces. What’s the space between Montell Fish and DJ Gummy Bear, because there’s a few tracks on the mixtape where you have both Gummy and yourself listed as contributors and I wanted to ask why — why have both of you and not just one? 

I mean, with the song titles featuring me, those were just where my vocals were featured a little more. I mean, with songs where it’s just my vocals sampled or looped, I don’t need to credit myself. But I see Gummy as a producer. 

Are there some production tricks or techniques you learned while playing as Gummy that you’d like to bring to your other work? 

I think about the synths and music technology of the early 2000s and late 80s and 90s — I like how limited but cohesive a lot of it feels. I’ve been drawn to more analog synths. On songs like, “Ostentatious,” I love finding the duality and puragatory-esque feeling inside of the art. Very somber lyrics with this almost victorious, video game-esque dance beat. On “Devotion,” I wanted to feel like I was in this all white dance room with elements of the woods. I created it on Sims 2, actually. I wanted it to feel like you’re somewhere with your lover and it’s just you and them and everyone else are ghosts. 

Do you feel like there’s a gap between you and Gummy a musical identities?

I do and I don't. I think I feel both. I definitely want to have different shows for DJ Gummy Bear. I want to make him feel like his own thing. But then I feel like it’s also a yin and yang of knowing when to experiment and go crazy and knowing when to pull back and almost restrained. And I think my Montell Fish side is hopefully getting more refined and restrained, but in the best way. The Gummy side lets me put out anything that sounds like anything. So yeah, I see them separating, but I also see them so connected and meeting each other in a weird way. 

But Gummy will always be your place to play. 

Exactly, yeah. And I definitely want to DJ forever, so I think Gummy will go along. He’s a character I made. There was a character I made for “Her Love Still Haunts Me Like A Ghost,” his name was Ghost Boy. I kind of see him like a weird cousin. I know this is getting absolutely mental. 

No, it’s great. I’m picturing the family tree. It’s very Holy Trinity — Father, Son, Holy Spirit… You, Gummy, Ghost Boy.