Despite any of the artifice involved, or the playacting, or the rockstar booty-shaking, Father John Misty is, it turns out, the real Josh Tillman. More so certainly than J. Tillman, the alias under which he released seven albums throughout his twenties, during which he also spent a stint drumming in Fleet Foxes. In 2012, he released Fear Fun, a record that managed to convey his personality – whip smart, self-deprecatingly droll and acerbic as hell – in his music. The follow up, released this month, I Love You Honeybear is, in his own words, ‘travelogue of my experiences with intimacy: the good, the bad and the ugly.’ We tried to dig a little deeper and tell fact from fiction, and did it the hard way.
I was going to ask you to hash over the genesis of the Father John Misty story, but I think I know the basis of it, so will we flash forward to hallucinating in the Joshua Tree?
Well you got a handle on it, but I was actually in Big Sur. I had this well documented ‘a ha!’ moment in a tree, where I knew what I needed to do. I just had a moment, and then I started writing this book … basically just take the Joseph Smith story and replace my name!
So, in 2011 I wrote this book called Mostly Hypothetical Mountains, which was a major download of my consciousness – you can put in brackets ‘laughs bitterly’ after that, because that will look so unbelievably stupid in print – but I just got in touch with my voice. It finally occurred to me to write like myself. And shortly thereafter I started writing tunes that sounded a lot different to what I had written before. And I didn’t want to go by J. Tillman for a few reasons. I didn’t want to bill myself as J. Tillman and go play songs that I had written ten years prior, I wanted a clean break. I was spending a lot of time thinking about identity, how arbitrary it was, the whole profession of being an entertainer, the innate kind of artifice to it and simultaneously the opportunity for sublime honesty and all of that converged in a spider-shack in Laurel Canyon.
Is there a sense of ironic distance in the Father John Misty material that wasn’t there in the J. Tillman music?
No. I think the definition of ‘ironic distance’ is going by your own name and not writing about yourself at all. I had a song about, off the top of my head, called Steel on Steel, about a husband who watches his family get run over by an 18-wheeler and how he feels about that. And that’s not about me, but I kind of copped to some kind of weird attitude that it was. It was all confused. The irony is that irony is part of my voice. So if there’s irony in my music then that’s the opposite of distance to me, that’s me using my own voice.
Do you think you’ve gained a lot by making this shift? It seems like Father John Misty records are a lot more successful, commercially, in that sense, than the J. Tillman ones. Do you miss anything about what you were doing before?
Well you’re sort of putting the cart before the horse. I mean I was just telling you that I had a major paradigm shift creatively, and I just started writing differently. I was in the creative space, I hadn’t gotten anywhere near the commodity implications in my mind. You have to believe that there is some degree of innocence to the creative place. Different people get more popular for different reasons. I would like to think that what I’m doing now is more relatable, or more fun. But it’s not like I was ever confused as to why I wasn’t more successful when I was in my twenties and I was making this J. Tillman music. I knew what I was in for and that was the music that I needed to make at that time.
Maybe I shouldn’t have phrased it in terms of commercial success, and more like what it feels like to be doing it in this mode and what it felt like to being doing it in the previous mode.
Right. I think that in the previous mode, there was some kind of membrane that I was trapped behind. J. Tillman had really become this alter ego, and he sang a certain way and expressed himself a certain way, there was all these parameters and I had some moment of clarity about that. With the last album [Fear Fun] I would never have put a ballad like I Went To The Store One Day, I would never have put that song [on it]. There was a point where I never thought I would write a song like that again, that I wasn’t interested in that mode of creativity. But with where I am right now creatively, I really feel liberty and agency to do whatever it is I want, and that’s very rewarding, certainly the most rewarding aspect of growing up as an artist. A song like True Affection, or even singing so vulnerably about my experiences with intimacy, that’s a major paradigm shift from what was happening last time around.
Do you sense that much of a change in the writing from Fear Fun to I Love You Honeybear?.
Well, do you?
In terms of arrangements it’s more elaborate…
But you weren’t talking about arrangements, you were talking about writing. But down to the atomic or subatomic levels, the DNA of the writing, do you hear a shift?
I hear a lot of similarities in terms of the tone of the humour and the kind of reference points that are made to the, the ‘narrative’ of rock and roll music, Bored In The USA as a nod to Born In The USA…
I think of that song as a nod to Party In The USA by Miley Cyrus. But you’re still dancing around, that stuff’s all superficial on some level. You asked me if I noticed a major shift in the writing, which I do do. I more or less already articulated it. I’m just asking you, on a human level. If all you hear is some arrangements and some post-modern intertextual pre-existing modes, then I should just stop doing what I’m doing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIFrG_6fySg
Well no, but from my perspective, it still sounds like the character, the singer, the voice is the same person, so I wouldn’t say there is a huge shift.
I’m just having fun, I swear to you I’m not being combative. Don’t take it that way. But an alter ego, or a cartoon character doesn’t change, it doesn’t evolve. It has to remain the same thing. It has to stay frozen in time in order to stay relatable, even just recognisable to an audience or something. But the fact of the matter is there just has been a huge change in my life since I wrote Fear Fun in perspective. Or even just in the way that I live and the issues that are interesting to me, that’s gonna come out in my writing, that’s what you’re gonna hear in my music.
For example, with the song The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apartment, how much of the narrative is autobiographical? Or is it the sense of humour telling this fictional story based on a combination of various events?
No, I wouldn’t say that at all. Trying to nail down how real an event is or not, a lot of the time, narrows the scope of a song as opposed to broadens it. But I’m certainly not interested in writing fiction at all. I’m not that good of a fiction writer. I can’t stop thinking about myself long to invent something imaginary.
I was thinking ‘fiction’ in terms of a device to tell a story that’s true to you.
Yeah, any time you write about yourself you turn yourself into a character. I’m definitely interested in exploiting that to some extent. Putting your own name in a song title is so real and so obvious that people doubt whether it could actually possibly be real, like you’re daring the listener to accept that there’s some reality to all this.
I was going to ask if the version of your wife Emma was an idealised version of her, but I guess, since you said it’s not fiction, that it’s just her.
It’s just her. On a song like I Went To The Store One Day, that is the antithesis of idealisation, these thoroughly unideal, or unmagical circumstances that bring two people together. There’s nothing more banal that I Went To The Store One Day. That’s kind of the point of that song, to go through this whole intense thing between two people, and between me and myself, and getting this perspective of being ‘Are you really just someone that I met at the store one day?’ But you can’t have that perspective until you’re way deep into this thing with this other person. And then you have this realisation of this almost cosmic joke that at one point we were both just people at a store. Like, ‘I’ve seen you around, what’s your name?’ – that’s really how it started.
All the language around love is so passive, like ‘finding it…’ and I think Emma and I made a choice. And even last night, we made a choice to keep creating this thing, this collaborative work. Like any collaborative work, it’s rewarding in this profound, transcendental way. It’s a thing that transcends everything else, that you can have the most awful kind of misunderstanding or fight – and I’m not using the word ‘transcendental’ incidentally – but there’s this understanding that you’re not going anywhere, the other person isn’t going anywhere, it’s not susceptible to circumstance, or the failure of language, all that junk.
I love the term used ‘the massive deranged schmaltz’ that’s written in the notes. What was the sonic inspiration for the greater embellishment on this record?
I’m not sure that there was any real musical point of reference. I had been out in the desert hallucinating around the time that I wrote Honeybear and I just heard this sound in my head. It was just this huge crazy sound. The listening instructions [that accompany] Honeybear are very instructive in terms of what that tune’s about. This music is intense and these themes are intense, so the sound has to be intense, unhinged. I’m not sure how tuned in [producer Jonathan Wilson] was to what was going on in my head, because I don’t just talk to anyone about that, but I think he intuited what I was going for. The record’s kind of a monument to second-guessing and obsessing. I just kept adding more and more stuff and then taking more and more stuff away until I knew that I had it. I couldn’t really describe it to anyone, I just could hear the sound in my head.
Father John Misty’s I Love You Honeybear is out on Bella Union on Friday 6th February, and he plays Whelan’s with his band on Sunday 22nd February.
Words: Ian Lamont / Photos: Emma Tillman
