Father John Misty"I think I have some clarity in terms of what was going on that I didn’t have at the time,” Josh Tillman begins his thoughts on his new album, I Love You Honeybear, released under his stage moniker, Father John Misty.
“I think I went into the process thinking I was doing one thing and once the album was done I think there was an initial shock where I was horrified at the reality of what I’d actually done. I told myself going into this thing that there was all this talk that I was going to make an album about love, that it wasn’t going to be clichéd and I was going to take down the white stag of writing love songs. It was just garbage. On the other side of it I now realise I’ve made this vulnerable album about myself. I could have stayed where I was with Fear Fun and to be honest that was part of what made this album difficult to begin with, because I did want to keep with that way of thinking and method of working because it had worked. I can admit that that was the only success I’d ever really had. In a creative sense I was thinking I’d done it, all I had to do was just stay there but it was miserable and just didn’t work. The arrangements wouldn’t stick and the soufflé wouldn’t rise. At some point my wife Emma told me that this is a different type of song and you can’t be afraid to let these songs be beautiful. That was the light-bulb moment for me. This thing is going to succeed or fail on that.”
"At some point my wife Emma told me that this is a different type of song and you can’t be afraid to let these songs be beautiful"
There’s a sense of imagination and exuberant creativity when it comes to the diverse arrangements and instrumentation on Tillman’s recordings. “To some extent there was some kind of Freudian bartering going on in my subconscious. I can be this vulnerable but I’ll get away with it by creating this huge schmaltzy din, this Disney kind of orchestration. That’s my sound, this conflict between sincerity and self-criticism. There are these competing voices – the voice of confession and me wanting to own my own experiences and feel my own pain. Then there is this competing voice saying, ‘Are you serious? Are you really going to write that?’ It’s chaos, this relationship between the lyrics and the music.”
Many people thought Tillman was taking on a character in Father John Misty but the reality is quite the contrary. “If we’re going to stick with this theme of transformation, I’m writing about a different me. There is no Father John Misty character or something. It’s Josh Tillman, who is a human who evolves and changes. Part of why I wanted to keep some of the more grotesque parts of the album was because I wanted there to be context in these songs. If they are about transformation people need to know what or where that change comes from. It’s not a fantasy; there is no fantasy on the album.”
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