Peace To All Freaks

The 2020 Of Montreal album Ur Fun is essentially a Kevin Barnes solo project - he wrote the songs, played all the instruments and cooked up all the beats himself. "Peace To All Freaks" is the first single, a very danceable song that finds him channeling his Trump-era unrest into a positive vibe. In a Songfacts interview with Barnes, he explained: "It's definitely a song borne from 2016 to 2020 in the sense that the political climate is extremely divisive and extremely toxic and negative. Being in that atmosphere has affected my mentality, affected my perceptions and worldview, so I wanted to create a song that was a call to my community to stay healthy, stay positive, and try not to get too beaten down even if our parents have shown this horrible side to them. Let's stick together. There are other people out there fighting the fight."

The song was originally called "Hush" and played live a few times before Of Montreal recorded it. The song passed the road test, going over well with audiences.

The "don't let's" lines like "don't let's be negative" and "don't let's be cruel" are similar to what They Might Be Giants did on their 1986 track "Don't Let's Start." It's a backdoor way of accentuating the positive. "I was thinking about how it's so easy to get eaten up by the negativity and forget that if you just throw your phone or laptop in the ocean, life is what it was when you were a child: trees are growing and earthworms are moving in the dirt and birds are flying overhead," Barnes told Songfacts. "There's a lot to feel good about and you don't need to completely immerse yourself in this negative other side of existence."