Well, Father John Misty is back. And it’s January. So why not pick it, given my relationship with him? That’s the simple ‘yes’ answer.
The more complex answer is, well, complex, because considering FJM (as I’m going to lazily abbreviate him to a fair bit) is not a simple endeavour, evidenced by how hard it is to find a music lover without an opinion on him. To some he’s a musical hero: a louche, nihilistic character that excoriatingly muses on pop culture, America, politics and love with a cutting, often self-harming level of humour, all set to grand, classic arrangements. But the other end of the scale, well, people detest him. They see him as a fake, a lazy, drug-addled hipster chancer who couldn’t get success as himself and so constructed a persona as a vehicle for cynical success while calling out the very culture in which he exists and profits from. But as that’s mostly stuff on the the internet, there’s nuance to it and a whole spectrum of who and what he is, and some of this can be criss-crossed in a single interview, performance, a song, perhaps even a verse….
I picked Father John Misty this month, as I do really adore his music. Not all of it, but most. When I got in at I Love You Honeybear in 2015, it was a full and fast infatuation. This album that crossed over from heartfelt love, fighting even his own surprise and cynicism (Chateau Lobby #4), detached, bleak social commentary (Bored In the USA – watch his famous Letterman performance), weird love triangles (The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt., again, this video needs a watch) and anxious, delicate, almost tenderness (I Went To The Store One Day, a song which still makes my cry) and felt like it had it all. It was nothing like I’d ever heard before. It definitely had sounds I was familiar with, riffing on many classic songbook styles and genres, but somehow stilted, bent out of shape in a way that took it to somewhere new.
This is often the moment you make judgement: the mood you were in, what else you were into at the time, what you thought of Tillman. I fell for it. Others, I can very easily see, felt it was throwaway, showy performance art. But that album left a mark on me, and my enjoyment of a nexus of great music, American culture, and a sharp bite of irony. My wife and I had Chateau Lobby on the playlist as we were waiting to walk down the aisle in 2018, and it still holds a lovely place in time for us. I’d seen him twice – at Glastonbury and also famously ditching my best mate David to take my then new girlfriend (and now wife) to see him in London – that at least worked out ok – and he had a magnetism live that I’ve seen few artists have. He’s a born performer.
I quickly waded into the spikier, less fully formed debut Fear Fun, which had some huge highlights even as he was still finding his sound. Since then, I’ve greeted every album of Josh Tillman’s with excitement, trepidation, and interest. Mainly, I’ve loved much of what he’s done, from the bleak, dystopian brilliance of Pure Comedy, the more anxious, fearful and subdued God’s Favourite Customer, even the album I least connected with, the almost throwback, matinee-tinged Chloe and the Next 20th Century. There was always something for me in each of them. But by then it did feel a little like FJM had started to go off the boil a little and I wasn’t sure what his next step would be. Having mostly shunned press since Pure Comedy, and a succession of more wayward interviews, coupled with an attitude to the press that was at best adversarial, there wasn’t much to go on. He largely shut himself out of the treadmill and focused on the music, being a husband with his wife Emma (the subject of a chunk of I Love You, Honeybear onwards) and more lately a father. Was FJM settling down?
It was this backdrop that Mahashmashana arrived, semi-expectedly, in November 2024. The first taste we had were the singles prefaced that, and the first was the sprawling, semi-70s lounge disco-fied Time Just Makes Fools Of Us All (giving my strong Reflektor energy) in July, though oddly tagged onto a ‘Greatish Hits’ album. It had me from minute one, its looping verses taking in a classic range of FJM subjects from religion, humanity, death, and politics. But the title nodded in advance to one of the emerging themes of the album too: time. Tillman is now in his 40s, and a dad, and has talked about the ‘ego deaths’ that being a father has visited upon him. As you get into the album, you feel that time, its march and all that comes with it, is at the heart of much of the record. This is a barnstorming single though, and is so rich in lyrical detail and density that you could do a whole piece just on it alone, referencing Shakespeare, Ginsberg, his own rocky marriage, the music industry (and his vaunted turning down of a Rolling Stone cover) includes one of my favourite lyrics from the album: “parachute into the Athropocene / an amnesiac himbo Ken doll / I guess time just makes fools of us all.” I think we all know who that is about, but it’s not entirely about him, more just how a benevolent (or otherwise) god could get bored enough to shake things up. I had really high hopes if that was the start of all of this.
What landed in November, after She Cleans Up and Screamland were further singles, is a fascinating eight songs that span a lot of his career and albums’ energies in one slightly wayward whole. It’s arguably the most freewheeling he’s been in a while musically – since Honeybear at least, to me – but I think that freedom lets him cross over different moods and spans everything from the fully nihilistic to the heartfelt, the funniest to the most bald and searing.
It’s certainly a statement opening, with another almost epic, the title track. From the swelling strings at the start, evoking – again – classic songwriting, it’s much richer than just a pastiche. Depending how deep you want to get, it’s a tale of celebrities going to the store at midnight to avoid bumping into anyone (including each other), or a treatise on the futility of the human race, not least musicians. The title itself referencing the Hindu term for the ‘great cremation’, could be about death, or perhaps career cremation. As with many FJM themes and lyrics, it works on a number of levels, and meanings, and you’re welcome to pick whichever (few) work for you. There’s callbacks to previous albums, and a first call to stare at religion (the ‘perfect lie’) not so much to refute it but to see how it aligns with a hopeful worldview, or a cynical one. For as much as Tillman’s created a character that is biting and bleak, there’s always a strain of hope in his work. And whatever the subtext, the choruses soar here. My god, FJM can write a tune.
There’s a set of juxtapositions throughout the album, and leaping from the almost operatic opener, there’s a switchback to Misty’s rockiest track out there. She Cleans Up fizzes with energy and scuzzy, jangly guitars, taking in Misty’s own intentions to ‘clean up’ but also addressing celebrity abuse and accusation, the #metoo cycle of lack of consequence, public shaming and the deserting of the fallen star(s); “She ain’t joining you for dinner / been on the menu far too long”, calling out the industry that supports it all . A classic belter of a tune with lyrics wrap around the melody in a much darker way than you’d first see. It’s my favourite track of the album, too.
From there we flip into Josh Tillman And The Accidental Dose, into familiar FJM territory of drug (mis)use round a house he can’t leave, with people he doesn’t like, having started talking to the portrait on acid. I mean, we’ve all been there. There’s some great imagery, as we get to choose if we side with his plight or feel no real pity, a line the listener’s often asked to tread with Father John Misty in another scrape, real or imagined. In Mental Health, Misty weaves between comment on authenticity, and the philosophical ‘true self’, and whether the ‘industry’ of mental health is real illness or a way for people to frame their cries for help in a more dignified way, all cut over this slow-burning, beautiful arrangement. You can take it as ‘real talk’ or a pop at the over medicalisation of society (especially in the USA), but I quite like the angle that perhaps these mental challenges are our own selves naturally changing through life. It’s easy to be throwaway but I there’s never a simple layer to anything he puts out and this is a great examples of the ‘many things to many people’ space he inhabits.
Screamland starts with one of my favourite Misty-type aphorisms: ‘the optimist, swears hope dies last”. But is optimism good, or is the blind ‘toxic optimism’ of the current age a more harmful route than actual reality? “Stay young, get dumb, keep dreaming, screamland” goes the chorus, asking if submerging ourselves in religion, or drugs, or other distractions really is the way forward? But it’s twinned with hope, too: “Love must find a way, love must find a way
After every desperate measure, just a miracle will take“. Perhaps rather than religion, love is actually the true miracle? I find these slower FJM songs – other great examples include I Went To the Store One Day, Goodbye Mr. Blue, Buddy’s Rendezvous, and Birdie – the most moving he writes, when his voice is slow and subtle. Because amongst all of this, he has an incredible voice. When you strip away all the layers, he is such an emotive and characterful singer and mesmerising performer. I urge you to see him live if you ever have the chance.
To me, the album’s second half is almost as strong as the first, even if it’s subtler and needs more time to emerge. I first thought that Being You was about his wife or woman, but he’s addressing himself, questioning his identity and who he is, almost sounding like he’s on a comedown from the energy of the first half of the album. When performing it live recently, he stated “I had a bit of a five year fugue state after 2016 where I found it basically impossible to relate to human beings, or my mind self. I went into what Gen-Z-ers are calling a “dissociative state,” and I thought that would make a great hit song.” Equally unnerving and funny. It was ever thus in Mistyland. His voice is imploring, almost desperate, but over such silky arrangements, it’s often easier to let the whole thing wash over you, rather than contemplate its (or life’s) meaning.
The record finishes in the quietest of ways, after the rollicking Time…. with Summer’s Gone, which harks back most directly to his last album, Chloe and the Next 20th Century, with its 50s Hollywood sonics and imagery, all swelling strings, and wistfully realising that you can’t miss things until they’re over ‘when summer’s gone’, and nodding back to Funtimes in Babylon of his first album, Fear Fun. It’s a sombre end, but given he’s mused on this being the last FJM album, perhaps he’s laying down the last rites for his persona, it’s own ‘great cremation’. You can never be sure how much weight to give anything on a Father John Misty record: to me that’s part of the enjoyment. So rich musically, but also in metaphor, imagery and language, perhaps I’ve never fully dived into the lyrics and meaning because there are so many people very serious about that and I’m not that guy. I can see the broad brushes he paints with, I enjoy that and the themes and music, and that’s enough. My brain is always going onto the next thing anyway.
To me this isn’t a perfect album, but most aren’t. This is a very good one, with some incredible moments, and some of Tillman’s best songwriting. Fatherhood, marriage, age, fame, all seem to have aged him (not to mention his lifestyle, which would’ve finished off most people) and there’s swinging between moments of grandeur and lightness, tenderness, hope and then biting bleakness and I think it works. If you aren’t into that then you haven’t listened to much of his music. He’s the jester at turns telling truth but others being scarcely believable, always at risk of the whole edifice crumbling. But I’d rather musicians make their statements as truly as they can, and Father John Misty still does it for me, however you interpret that character. And that’s a huge part of how people react to what he does.
With Tillman and many before him, at the heart of any artist and whether we love them is a blend of the music and the person. To me it has to be a dollop of both, even if music takes a larger slice of the pie. We all like records that we either aren’t fully aware of, know much about, or sometimes don’t even hugely like the artist, but even musicians we love that make a duff one, we struggle to like in spite of that adoration.
So how does this fit here? Who is Father John Misty? He’s many things to many people. And trying to unpick that is not without challenge, but I’ve tried to dive into his backstory more as while I’m a definite acolyte, I realised at the point I started to think about this album pick, I knew relatively little about him, having really just engaged with the music and his construct more than anything. Even interviews and podcasts (such as this recent one with NPR), I’d ackowledged the skinny suits, and beard, the self-destructive traits, the mental health issues, the marriage and sometimes read press, but mostly I’d just let the music take the centre. Because on its own it’s a pretty consistently rewarding experience. I never felt I really needed to look beyond it, and when I did, it all seemed so knotty and spiky, that I didn’t really want to dive in. But here goes…
Tillman was born to evangelical Christian parents, a upbringing he’s referenced, both as a (negative) influence on his family life and a fuel for his consistent criticism of religion, one of the main themes running through his work. Having gone to college in New York, he moved to Seattle, which proved the entry point into music. A demo he made eventually found its way to Seattle singer and songwriter Damien Jurado. A year later, Tillman started opening for Jurado. From there he played in the bands Stanley and Saxon Shore and later more famously spent four years as the drummer in Fleet Foxes up to 2010. What I didn’t know is that he’d been releasing solo work since 2003 as J Tillman. Perhaps because it’s largely unremarkable work. There are ten (10!) albums through that time, and having listened to some of it, you can hear how he develops up to the point of FJM’s creation. But also, perhaps why that moniker was created, because it wasn’t much to stand out on.
There’s a well-repeated story about him – told here in one of the best discussions around what ‘Father John Misty’ is, a really brilliant article in the New Yorker in 2017 – going down the coast ‘in a van with a bag of mushrooms’, and him realising “that he didn’t have to identify himself exclusively with his disappointments as a musician or with his bitterness about being in someone else’s band: “I should just be myself.” “Myself” was a funnier, more playful, more self-lacerating—and just plain lacerating—version of whoever he’d tried to be as J. Tillman….. it accommodates his unease about the role of the singer-songwriter and the characters one has to play onstage. “There’s something innately false about performance,” he told me. “I wanted to be authentically bogus rather than bogusly authentic.” He’d found a way be both flamboyant and self-deprecating, to make art out of making fun of himself and others like him who were engaged in the vain act of making art. “I liked relegating this thing I’d worked really hard on to a gag”.
This demonstrates the yin and yang of Father John Misty well, both in terms of its m.o., but it also highlights why he attracts ire and adoration in equal measure. The press either got on board (he’s a darling of many from Pitchfork, but it’s clear that not everyone there, or anywhere, loves what he does either) or claimed they saw through this ‘mask’ and he was no more than a pretentious construct. But that both seems reductive and also removes the quality of the music he makes, because it’s lush, interesting, and plays on so many of the classic genres, while executing them brilliantly. You can hate the man, but surely at least accept the music is fantastically realised, at least some of the time. And it’s never as intentionally complex or woven as many think it could be. In Tillman’s words: “People think I’m toying with them, playing twelve-dimensional chess…. And if you take it that way, and you think I’m despicable as a result, I get it, because that is a despicable thing to do. But you’re not getting suckered.” His claim is that when he makes music and he’s onstage, that is ‘who he is’.
Personally, my theory is that FJM is playing a modern version of the court jester role. That he’s not comfortable being Josh Tillman and writing about his own feelings, emotion, love and suffering. The character allows him to both bear his innermost feelings at a remove from his own name, (even if we know it’s still him underneath). That showed on Honeybear, where he talked about falling in love, but still attached a wryness and detachment that wouldn’t really work nearly as well as being ‘yourself’. It also allows his humour, cynicism, irony, and withering social commentary to flourish. Like the jester, telling the King the truth about his courtiers under the auspices of a costume, and criticising his kingdom in humour and song, he can say both his warmest and coldest, bleakest treatises on love and the state of the world, cloaked in a perhaps protective layer of artifice.
Of course he can go over the top (I’ve still never fully got on board with Leaving LA), many and often times: go in too hard, be too bleak, or too lacerating on himself, or love, or politics or attack the things you love. Perhaps you don’t want to listen to an album about a near-dystopian future because it’s too close to your own anxieties? That’s fair enough. I get that this can annoy people. ‘Why can’t he just be himself?’ But art is all deception and nuance. How many of the artists we love have an image, or a character or a role to hide behind?
From the obvious turns of Bowie (with multiple ch-ch-ch-changes) to Prince, or Madonna to more modern examples like Caribou (a name, but add in AI and then…. who is he?) and even Nilufer Yanya’s talk of ‘method actors’, we all play parts in life to an extent. If we criticise Father John Misty for doing the same, then don’t we need to take down David Jones too? It’s a complex web, and it’s why I’ve found a lot of the discourse on FJM’s ‘character’ a bit reductive. I think some of the vitriol comes from people not wanting to feel like they’re getting the wool pulled over their eyes, or feel like the artist is cleverer than them. But I’m ok with it. Often, they are cleverer, or cooler, or more talented than all of us. Perhaps it’s also some frustrated (failed) musicians in the press who just don’t like he’s getting to do something well, because everyone likes taking down the hipster, too. But knowing how he’s struggled – as Josh Tillman and Father John Misty – with depression, anxiety and much more, however much it’s wrapped up in a character, how cool is it to just dismiss and attack that? Isn’t human suffering both a part of that art but also a part of his existence? It’s not very human to dismiss the art while not taking in that context? Of course he’s a rock star, and all the (oversold) mythology that exists with that, but all these people are still human.
I think having got a lot more into the discourse lately, I’ve found it pretty interesting. Because a lot of what he talks about on his records is about life now, in all its knotty, imperfect, messy glory. The emotional, unfiltered highs of love, and the artificial, temporary ones of drugs. The lows of mental health disasters, comedowns, and existentialist crises, the burning of the planet, the fascists and lunatics in power, and the malign influence of money. However, much we may want to dismiss the vehicle, it’s still the human condition at the heart of it. So however unfiltered, or wrapped up in layers, I’m still here for it.
How about you?
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