Father John Misty’s I Love You Honeybear challenges notions of love songs
Josh Tillman — better known as Father John Misty — slunk back onto the stage at the end of his set at Roxy Monday night in his typical slim-tailored suite and dark glasses, thanking the crowd for their “mandatory encore applause.” This self-aware act of simultaneously poking fun at and adhering to conventions perfectly encapsulates the walking contradiction of an artist that is Father John Misty.
His work regularly deplores the dehumanizing effects of Hollywood culture in the digital age, yet a significant portion of the crowd on Monday consisted of Tumblr fangirls squealing at every hip gyration, recording every finger wag and shoulder shrug through their iPhones. He idolizes the defiant anti-commercialism of artists like Bob Dylan and Norman Mailer, yet he embarked on a tour earlier this year opening for pop star Lana Del Rey (which he dubbed the “Who the Hell is Father John Misty?” Tour).
Discussing his artistic process, he is just as likely to invoke in complete earnest the words of Schopenhauer or Sartre as he is to sarcastically denounce all musicians in a string of expletives and unintelligible wisecracks
Tillman’s new album I Love You, Honeybear, his second release under the Misty moniker, takes this penchant for parataxis to the extreme; it’s a sonic pendulum swinging back and forth from the soul-bearing sincerity typically expected of a bearded folk singer to a slew of misanthropic observations on the absurdity of trying to narrativize one’s personal life for the consumptions of millions.
The character Tillman has created in Father John Misty is so confident and distinctive that it’s easy to forget that he spent almost a decade in relative obscurity, releasing stripped-down acoustic numbers as J. Tillman, before he got his big break when he was asked to join Fleet Foxes on tour as their drummer. This experience comes through on the new record, which is his most polished effort yet.
Father John Misty stretches notions of sincerity and authenticity on Honeybear by expanding his sound, foraying into genres and structures that are decidedly un-folk. The danceable synth-pop number titled “True Affection” sounds more like something from the mind of the former drummer of Animal Collective or MGMT than Fleet Foxes. The 21st-century sound follows the lyrical content, as Tillman wonders, “When can we talk/With the face/Instead of using all these strange devices?”.
He also sheds the usual marks of Americana influence such as pedal steel guitar, mandolins, and tambourines in exchange for a wall of loud, distorted guitars on “The Ideal Husband.” For an album supposedly all about love, this track sounds pretty angry, as Tillman confesses all the terrible things he has done in his life. His admiration for Neil Young is well noted and very obvious on this track, as well as the grungy guitar outro of “Nothing Good Happens At The Goddamn Thirsty Crow” and the conversational staccato soloing in “Strange Encounter.” Though he maintains that he is more of a writer than a “musician’s musician,” these moments show vast improvement in terms of writing songs that fit a full band setting, rather than the usual solo acoustic guitar pieces.
Fans of 2012’s Fear Fun will be pleased to hear the lush string arrangements and familiar soulful falsetto climaxes of ballads like “Strange Encounter” and “When You’re Smiling And Astride Me.” The jaunting “Holy Shit” also recalls the pseudo-political tripped out mystical prophet aphorisms that dominated his debut album. The song’s litany of modern day mundanities (“satirical news, free energy/mobile lifestyle, loveless sex”) parallels the detailed instructions for a satisfactory life read out by a haunting robot voice on Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier” off of OK Computer.
The fundamental difference between the Father John Misty of Honeybear and that of Fear Fun is not a difference in sound, but in magnitude. No matter what the sentiment is, the new record takes it further. The self-aware entertainer side of Father John Misty, for example, reaches its peak in the lead single “Bored In The USA.” The song served as a strange introduction for many people last month as he played the orchestral number on Letterman, starting the performance on a piano that continued to play on its own after he got up. If lines like “When I was young I dreamt of a passionate obligation to a roommate” didn’t tip listeners off to tongue-in-cheek nature of the song, the inclusion of sitcom laugh tracks surely did.
The sincerely romantic, confessional side of Father John Misty, on the other hand, is magnified to a similar degree in the album’s closer, “I Went To The Store One Day.” Possibly his most straight-forward narrative yet, it blurs the distinction between Misty and Tillman by telling the true story of how he met and fell in love with his wife—just in time for Valentine’s Day. The declarations of eternal love followed by plans for seven children and a house in the country seem uncharacteristically cliché.
Then, just before uttering the first words he ever said to her (“Seen you around, what’s your name?”), he comes out with one of the best lines on the album: “Insert here a sentiment re:our golden years”. It’s the perfect ending to a love record about the absurdity of love. There are moments like this scattered throughout I Love you Honeybear, in which it almost feels like he has revealed too much. He then quickly asserts his detachment and acknowledges that everything he is feeling and saying has been felt and said before—just never quite like this.