Next week, Father John Misty will release his sixth album, Mahashmashana. It’s one of his best, displaying all the qualities associated with the man: wit, insight, grandiosity, melody, beauty, a willingness to be viewed as pretentious in service of forwarding big ideas, impeccable beard care, and so on.
It’s been a dozen years since Josh Tillman introduced this cagey and endlessly entertaining guise to the world. This seems like a good opportunity to explore his career — and to explain why he is one of the very best singer-songwriters of the 21st century.
Jeeeeeesus Christ, girl — it’s time to rank the 30 best Father John Misty songs. Some call it work, I call it “the poem zone.”
30. “In Twenty Years Or So” (2017)
The last time I interviewed Josh Tillman was among the last times that anyone interviewed Josh Tillman. It was May of 2017, one month after the release of the third Father John Misty LP, Pure Comedy. As it was with many things involving Josh Tillman at the time, our conversation happened via unconventional and somewhat chaotic circumstances. He had previously reached out via DM after I talked about the album on my podcast. During a brief back and forth, I asked if he would appear on the show. He said “yes,” and then I didn’t hear anything for a few weeks. Then, out of the blue, he asked if we could talk. “When?” I asked. “Now,” he replied. The problem is that I normally recorded in a studio, and I was presently at home. No matter. I told him to call me, and I recorded the conversation off my speaker phone.
When you listen to the episode, you can tell. It sounds like Tillman is calling from a phone booth situated inside of a soggy cave on the moon. At least he was talkative – he stayed on the phone for 80 minutes, which probably wouldn’t have been allowed had I gone through a publicist. As the conversation unfolded, it felt like an exit interview for the tumultuous Pure Comedy media cycle. With the benefit of seven years’ worth of hindsight, it also sounds like a capper for the first part of Josh Tillman’s career as the shamanistic, Frankenstein-like persona he constructed for himself with great success (and considerable headaches).
Looking at the transcript for the first time since ’17, I was reminded of tidbits that I had long forgotten. Example: Do you remember that Pure Comedy was supposed to be a musical? I did not. Our conversation began with Tillman detailing how this preposterous fever dream did not come to pass. “I had 25 people in here,” he said wearily. “People flew in for this big production meeting, and my treatment for the show was the kind of thing that would’ve looked like something that should have been held by a transient on the side of the freeway, written on cardboard.”
He claimed that he finally came to his senses 3,000 miles above Colorado while en route to New York City, where the production was to be staged. “My choreographer is like, ‘So, this scene where you have these Girl Scouts masturbate on planet Earth …’ And I was like, ‘Could you just give me one second?’ And I had my first ever midair panic attack, where I was thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve just got to get off this plane!’ And then I realized, ‘Oh, you can’t get off a plane!’ And then I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just have a cigarette!’ And then I realized, ‘Oh my God, you can’t smoke!’ And I went to the bathroom and emailed my manager. We had film crews, we had all this stuff set up, and I’m just like, ‘What if we just didn’t do any of this?’”
How real was this? Was he pulling my leg? To this day, I’m not sure. But hearing Tillman talk about this “deeply misguided musical that I wrote on cocaine in my underwear” seemed indicative of how crazy FJM 1.0 had become. And, looking back, it feels very far from FJM 2.0. In 2017, the media circus around Tillman was threatening to completely overshadow the music. In the press, he was routinely described as an irony-addled troll of questionable sincerity. But those adjectives only applied to his pranksterish interviews, in which he jousted good-naturedly with journalists and skillfully identified the ways in which the media simultaneously roasts artists for being candid while exploiting the eyeballs such honesty attracts. A Pitchfork headline from this period personifies this phenomenon: “Here Is The Scandalous Father John Misty Interview You’ve Been Waiting For.” The promise of provocation — and a hypocritical critique of said provocation — is laid out plainly.
But none of this really suited Tillman’s songs, which for all their surface slyness and cynicism are deeply earnest at their core. Love, death, the meaning of life, the modern obstructions to genuine human connections — these were his pet subjects in the 2010s (and beyond), they are just about as deep and emotional and sincere as you can get.
This was all especially true of Pure Comedy, an album I loved despite it troubling me for the better part of early 2017. I found it to be the most misanthropic record I had heard since Kanye West’s Yeezus, though Tillman even exceeded the rancor of that famously rancorous LP, since unlike Kanye, Tillman was disgusted with the whole human race and not just himself or his perceived enemies.
I found Pure Comedy to be deeply depressing, though at the same time it made me laugh more than anything at the time. Above all, it moved me, in part because Tillman couldn’t help but let in a little light. I think about the final song, “In Twenty Years Or So,” where he observes about how eventually “this human experiment will reach its violent end” and yet he can still carry on because right now, at least, he’s having dinner with his soulmate. “As our second drinks arrive / The piano player’s playing ‘This Must Be the Place’ / And it’s a miracle to be alive.”
That line got me in 2017, and it still gets me now. It is the “Summing Up The Rationalization One Must Do To Survive This World” Father John Misty song lyric I was waiting for.
29. “Pure Comedy” (2017)
In my review of Pure Comedy, I wondered how the album would age. I called it “the most 2017 album of 2017,” because the record’s strident rage seemed perfectly attuned to the times but, perhaps, not for the long haul. What I underestimated is that the “prison of beliefs” that he sang about on the title track was hardly a topical concern. Rather, it was a tale as old as time itself.
I’m now well over 1,000 words into this column, so I might as well finally type the words “Donald Trump.” My revisiting of Father John Misty’s discography coincided with the delayed re-election of the 45th/47th president, and it was an instance of my personal soundtrack queasily coinciding with the news cycle like the world’s worst Wizard Of Oz/Dark Side Of The Moon-esque media mash-up. Critics immediately positioned Pure Comedy as a #resistence record in 2017, a designation that Tillman instinctively, ahem, resisted. There was the matter of the timeline — the songs were written, recorded and mastered before Trump’s election — as well as the urge to not get locked into a singular moment. (The reason Pure Comedy endures while most anti-Trump music from the late 2010s languishes in the dustbin of history is that it was accidentally timely.) At the same time, in a Vulture interview, he recognized the utility for listeners trying to make sense of a confounding moment in history. “If people need that,” he said, “then I do want my music to be useful.”
This music is still useful, especially the song “Pure Comedy.” I advise paying particular attention to the concluding lyric, where he again lets a sliver of light into the void: “Just random matter floating in the dark / I hate to say it but each other’s all we’ve got.”
28. “Mr. Tillman” (2018)
At the time of Pure Comedy’s release, there was reason to question (or worry about) Josh Tillman’s mental health. For all his goofy publicity stunts — mocking Ryan Adams’ cover of 1989, eulogizing the breakup of Chuck E. Cheese’s house band, the “controversy” over the possible theft of crystal from a Moon Juice shop — there were also genuinely concerning incidents like his public meltdown at a Philadelphia radio station-sponsored concert in July of 2016. His rant that day about the shallowness of entertainment and the pettiness of humankind later formed the basis of songs like “Pure Comedy’ and “Total Entertainment Forever.” It was also a Rorschach test for fans and haters alike — the former viewed it as an alarming manifestation of a sensitive artist’s mental fragility, while the latter saw it as the act of a pretentious, above-it-all asshole.
I think I’ve made it clear where I stand. My feelings were re-enforced by my own interview with Tillman, where I observed first-hand how exhausted he was by the media hamster wheel and the ways it informed (if not perverted) how his songs were heard. “A good day for me is a day that I am absentmindedly scrolling the internet at a stoplight, and I don’t see the name ‘Father John Misty’ anywhere,” he sighed. “I mean, we put out four press releases on this album cycle. Four. There were two headlines a day. I would rather my music be the context that people experience as my thing.”
Of course, he was far from blameless. Tillman intentionally needled music journalists. He was, at times, a shameless troll. (“I remember when trolling became a saying and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve been doing that my whole life,’” he admitted.) But things had gotten out of hand. The paradox of the music press — or any part of the media — is that we fantasize about smart, interesting people who say smart, interesting things, and then we crucify them for saying smart, interesting things, which inevitably encourages everyone else to keep all of their smart, interesting thoughts to themselves.
After revisiting our interview, I’m not surprised that Tillman went into media semi-retirement soon after. “In some ways I feel good,” he told me, “because the Band-Aid has been ripped off and the most horrible takeaways or the most horrible assessments of me as a person have all happened now and I’m still alive … But I do feel good about the work. I stand by my work.”
His angst over those “horrible assessments of me as a person” was palpable in the interview. More subtle were the tremors in his personal life, which he referred to obliquely as fodder for his next album. “There’s a lot more blood in it,” he said of the record, which at the time could only be read as cryptic. Then I heard “Mr. Tillman” — a first-person recounting of a profound mental breakdown and the first single from God’s Favorite Customer — and I finally understood.
27. “(Everything But) Her Love” (2022)
God’s Favorite Customer is a song cycle about a six-week period when Tillman was estranged from his wife and living a depressive existence at a hotel. It’s the least guarded album of his career — the snark that shielded the gooey-eyed love songs from scrutiny on I Love You, Honeybear is largely absent (references to straying into “the poem zone” notwithstanding). Overall, the buffer between Tillman (introspective, melancholy, pensive) and Misty (swaggering, confident, decadent) was narrower than ever.
Tillman waited four years until putting out the next FJM record. The pandemic was a factor, but Chloë And The Next 20th Century also felt like a decisive break from the first four albums. Misty again was less present, but so was Tillman. The songs this time were short stories, not confessionals, and the music departed from his usual ’60s/’70s SoCal pop-rock sumptuousness to ornate, lounge-y jazz and bossa nova. “(Everything But) Her Love” is the rare track on Chloë that bridges the gap between the old FJM and this chillier, ghostlier FJM, shining like a classic Burt Bacharach production broadcast out of a distant crypt.
26. “Mahashmashana” (2024)
I suspect that most Father John Misty fans will greet the new album as a return to form. The one reason I might push back is that I think Chloë And The Next 20th Century is a misunderstood and mostly overlooked record. I include myself in the group underrating it — I wrote kindly about it upon release, but it’s still not an album I totally get, even though my gut tells me that I’m to fault for that. Regardless: Mahashmashana is an easier Father John Misty record to like, as it restores many of the things that are great about earlier Father John Misty records. Among those attributes is messianic grandeur — Pure Comedy is the apoethesis of that in his catalog, but the title track of Mahashmashana finds Tillman on a similar track, boldly surveying the world’s grotesque burial grounds and corpse dances over nine minutes of orchestral folk-rock reminiscent of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass at its most bombastic. Lyrically, “Mahashmashana” is less literal than the Pure Comedy songs — the dense and knotty narrative refers to ancient Roman political chicanery and the violence and betrayals they engender. It reminds me of Dylan’s “Changing Of The Guards” from Street-Legal, because (1) it feels like an epic summation of his career up to this point without “actually” being about that and (2) I can stare at the words endlessly without coming close to “solving” their elusive mysteries. Josh Tillman would take this as a compliment, I think.
25. “Goodbye Mr. Blue” (2022)
Hypothetical question: Can a song be accused of ripping off “Everybody’s Talkin’” when it actually improves upon “Everybody’s Talkin’?”
24. “She Cleans Up” (2024)
The hardest rocking FJM single since “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings.” Tillman lifted the melody from Viagra Boys’ “Punk Rock Loser,” which has been described by the band’s frontman Sebastian Murphy as “a song about a real asshole.” I assume this subject matter must have attracted Tillman as much as the rubbery garage rock music. Though for “She Cleans Up,” he doesn’t write his own asshole narrative — instead, he reimagines Mary of Magdalene having a vision of the crucifixion right before Good Friday and deciding to not follow God’s plan and instead get “armed to the teeth” to defend Christ. You know, typical Father John Misty stuff.
23. “Nancy From Now On” (2012)
Josh Tillman has been Father John Misty for so long that the unlikelihood of his rise has been virtually forgotten. But at the very beginning of his career, he was known mainly as the ex-drummer of Fleet Foxes. And it’s not like he was a founding drummer of the band. He was a hired gun brought on before their second record, Helplessness Blues. He wasn’t the Dave Grohl of Fleet Foxes. He was more like Lori Goldston.
Given the path he subsequently embarked upon, I can only imagine what he must have thought of playing so many pastoral songs about wildlife and mountain ranges while sitting behind Robin Pecknold. And I mean that as no shade to Fleet Foxes — like every other white guy who voted for Obama in 2008, I played that self-titled record more than a few times back then. But it’s easy to imagine how doing a stint in the defining folk-rock band of the late aughts fueled the comparably acerbic material that would make John Tillman famous. “For me, being a drummer in a popular band was complete anesthesia,” he said later. Then he told a story about the night he left the band’s home base of Seattle, and how he was “watching Netflix, on two different screens, at the same time, because I was just so bored.” Which is a perfect Father John Misty anecdote, because it sounds like a perfect Father John Misty lyric. It zeroes in on a relatable, mundane activity that exposes how ridiculous tech-dominated modern life can be. It makes you feel depressed, and then it makes you laugh at your own depression. (Or maybe it’s the other way around.)
I don’t know the exact moment when Josh Tillman decided that Father John Misty would be a very different kind of folk-rock project from Fleet Foxes. But I like to think it was when he wrote the opening lines to this song: “Oh, pour me another drink / And punch me in the face / You can call me Nancy.”
22. “I Love You, Honeybear” (2015)
The title track to the most popular — and also (probably) best — FJM record. It’s the one where he staked a claim for being a male indie-rock sex symbol, an archetype that barely existed before Father John Misty and pretty much seems extinct almost a decade later. But I swear: If you saw him in concert during this era, you were rubbing shoulders with packs of striking, wine-drinking women between the age of 35 and 45. Even Bonnie Raitt talked about having the hots for FJM in interviews. Yes, it helped that he was handsome. But Tillman also had that Han Solo quality, where he didn’t seem to care if you thought he was a jerk. (Which was an act, because he did care. But still.) This is a positively electric attribute whether you’re a man or a woman. As humans, we are inexplicably attracted to those who are oblivious to their own potential scoundrel status.
For Tillman, this quality set him apart because virtually no other guy bothered to compete in the “confidently prancing” indie lane. In the 2010s there was Misty, and there was Matt Berninger, and that was it. (A decade later, there’s Matty Healy, but the “clever” quote-marks around his act are a little too pronounced.)
It also mattered that Misty unveiled an album of love songs that also were lust songs, and he delivered them with the melodramatic fervor of Tom Jones with a graduate degree. “Oh, honeybear, honeybear, honeybear Ooh-ooh / Mascara blood / Ash and cum / On the Rorschach sheets where we make love.” You simply could not doubt his steadfast conviction after hearing that.
21. “The Next 20th Century” (2022)
On the final track of Chloë And The Next 20th Century, Tillman dramatically departed from the album’s Kubrickian deep-freeze in order to delve into some menacing art rock reminiscent of Here Come The Warm Jets. (Dig the scorching Robert Fripp-style guitar solo, that baby’s on fire.) The lyrics return to the hell of Pure Comedy, with Tillman musing about the ease with which the media and internet can safely enclose us all in a perpetual nostalgia cycle, a 20th century that never ends. But just as “In Twenty Years Or So” concludes Pure Comedy on an ambiguously “happy” note, Tillman finds some comfort inside the technological prison that “The Next 20th Century” depicts: “But I’ll take the love songs / if this century’s here to stay / I don’t know ‘bout you / but I’ll take the love songs / and the great distance that they came.”
20. “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools Of Us All” (2024)
A mid-2020s Father John Misty song that musically resembles a late-1970s Steely Dan number? Have I died and gone to “louche middle-aged guys who love tragedy laced with sardonic humor” heaven?
(Also the line about how he is the least famous person to turn down the cover of Rolling Stone is apparently true.)
19. “When You’re Smiling And Astride Me” (2015)
More sex symbol stuff from I Love You, Honeybear. You can practically feel the coital thrusts emanating from the sultry back beat and those celestial backing singers. “You see me as I am, it’s true,” our debauched hero croons. “Aimless, fake drifter / And the horny man-child Mama’s boy to boot.”
To appreciate his path to “horny man-child status,” one must account not only for his stint with the relatively virginal Fleet Foxes but also his long-forgotten pre-FJM solo guise. Between 2003 and 2010, he put out eight albums as J. Tillman, two more than he’s so far released as Father John Misty. But when you listen to those records, they feel more like 20 albums. They feel like 20 years of downbeat, no-beat, extremely deadbeat music. It’s not a fun body of work. The amount of “confidently prancing” material is zero.
I saw him on one of his final tours as J. Tillman, as an opener for Phosphorescent. He sat on stage — I think it was a stool, though it might have been a folding chair, I wasn’t paying that close of attention — and he sullenly plowed through his set like a man praying for a tragic accident to suddenly turn him into a martyr in the afterlife. “That’s really what I wanted out of this music,” he said later, “to be taken seriously, which is a very understandable pursuit in your twenties.”
Years later I interviewed the talented producer and songwriter Jonathan Wilson, possibly Tillman’s most important collaborator during the FJM years, and he said something about his own music that could also apply to Tillman. “I’m trying to push things. You can’t really push them in songwriting, playing the old fucking cowboy chords again. You’re not gonna be Townes Van Zandt, it’s just not possible. So, I’m trying to push it in some other ways.”
“When You’re Smiling And Astride Me” was Josh Tillman trying to push it in some other ways. (Namely with his pelvis.)
18. “Josh Tillman And The Accidental Dose” (2024)
The most “we’re so back” moment from Mahashmashana. I’m happy to report that Josh Tillman is once again writing “Josh Tillman” songs. This track in particular feels like a flashback to the Fear Fun era, with Tillman reminiscing about a bad trip against crashing piano chords and a startling string arrangement that bops and weaves in breathtaking fashion amid the narrator’s panic attack.
It opens with a familiar snapshot of vapid discourse, a la the most infamous “Josh Tillman” song, “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt.” Once more he’s at a crappy party. “She put on Astral Weeks/Said ‘I love jazz,’ and winked at me / This is the last place I oughta be / But I can’t drive, and I sure can’t sleep.” This time, however, he’s not headed to a disreputable sexual encounter at the song’s conclusion. This is, after all, an older and wiser Misty. Instead, his fate is more existential in nature. “Dawn long broke by the time / I realized that I lost my mind / I ate an ice cream / Dazed in the street / But it never tastes quite as sweet / Again.”
17. “Bored In The U.S.A.” (2015)
Another Rorschach test separating the lovers from the haters. Perhaps the definitive test. If you can’t stand the guy, I’m sure you find this song unforgivably smarmy. “Save me, White Jesus,” indeed. If you love the guy … you can probably concede that the laugh track is a little much. (Maybe it should be called “Broad In The U.S.A.”) But if you saw him do this song on Letterman before I Love You, Honeybear dropped, it was just abundantly clear (to the heads, anyway) that this guy had the juice. Nearly a decade later, the juice is still palpable. We’re talking Led Zeppelin II levels of juice here.
16. “Chateau Lobby #4 (In C For Two Virgins)” (2015)
Fear Fun was one of the great debuts of indie’s “late” imperial era. But things shifted dramatically away from that kind of music by the following year, when an emerging generation of pop-minded acts with indie-adjacent resumés took over and drop-kicked most of the bearded guys out of the musical vanguard. Tillman was among the few who managed to not only stick around but thrive for much of the decade. And I Love You, Honeybear was the reason why. The album presented him as the complete package: great singer, funny lyricist, flamboyant musical orchestrator, exciting live performer, compelling persona.
At the same time, he was still just another white guy writing about his life with unguarded sensitivity. In “Chateau Lobby,” he gives a more or less straightforward account of falling in love with his wife. “And I haven’t hated all the same things / As somebody else / Since I remember / What’s going on for? / What are you doing with your whole life? / How about forever?”
What is this, an Ed Sheeran song? Again, the audacity of the Misty persona — note the jokey mock-sophistication of the titular parenthetical — provided the cover Tillman needed to pour his heart out in embarrassing fashion without the public exactly realizing how embarrassing it was. Pay no attention to the soft-hearted man behind the curtain. Enjoy this mariachi band instead.
15. “Just Dumb Enough To Try” (2018)
God’s Favorite Customer is the flipside to I Love You, Honeybear. Upon the album’s release, Tillman told Uncut, somewhat cryptically, that “This one needed to go down near the blast site, so to speak. If I had waited the industry standard amount of time between cycles I might not have been able to find a way back into the songs.” I think what he meant is that Josh Tillman needed to venture near the blast site of his personal life, which you hear him do on one of the more agonizing tracks, “Just Dumb Enough To Try.” There are no distractions this time. An army of chirpy horns isn’t coming to save anyone from the anguish. Tillman instead indicts himself at every turn. “I know my way ’round a tune / Won’t be a single dry eye in the room / But you can take what I know about you / And maybe fill a small balloon.”
14. “Hangout At The Gallows” (2018)
This song appears to start in the middle of the instrumental introduction, right before Tillman starts singing about Noah appearing over the horizon with an ark and the ensuing battle to be among the few who are saved. Perhaps he did this to convey how “Hangout At The Gallows” points to the themes of the predecessor record, Pure Comedy. Or maybe it was beamed from the future — January 2025 to be precise. Either way, sneaking one his most despairing politic songs on his “romantic dissolution” record makes it hit twice as hard once you catch up with it.
13. “Things It Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution” (2017)
Pure Comedy is the album that prompted critics to compare Josh Tillman to Randy Newman. And songs like this are responsible for Pure Comedy earning that reputation. Randy Newman is renowned for voicing characters in his songs that are alien to his mostly liberal and upwardly mobile audience: racists, sociopaths, racist sociopaths, etc. In the process, he humanizes these monsters. Tillman actually does the opposite of this in songs like “Things It Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution.” His songs voice characters that closely resemble the people in his mostly liberal and upwardly mobile audience. And then he turns these humans into monsters. In “Things It Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution,” these people (us people?) are sent back to the caves after consumerism destroys the world, at which point we slowly rebuild the very consumer system that destroyed everything in the first place.
12. “Total Entertainment Forever” (2017)
“Bedding Taylor Swift / every night inside the Oculus Rift.” That line triggered numerous critics, journalists, and stans, because media literacy in this country underperforms like the Democratic Party with most demographic groups. Say it with me: That lyric does not endorse virtual sex with a pop star, it critiques artistic and moral bankruptcy enabling bottom-feeding entertainment. And to think that Taylor Swift’s career was at a relatively low ebb in 2017. If anything — given the proverbial, ahem, Oculus Rift-type behavior the press has exhibited toward our top pop-star nation state in the 2020s — “Total Entertainment Forever” hardly registers as satire now.
11. “I’m Writing A Novel” (2012)
Around the time that Josh Tillman wrote this song, he literally wrote a novel. Give it a read and come back. We have some discussing to do.
10. “True Affection” (2015)
The least “Father John Misty”-sounding Father John Misty song. He once explained to Grantland that he was writing about being “on tour while trying to woo someone with text message and email and trying to make a connection that way and the frustration of that. So that song had to be synthetic and inorganic.” That is certainly a clever way of describing how the electronic music informs the lyric. But he could have also just said, “I wanted to write a pop banger but do it on my terms.” Based on this track alone, Charli XCX should have asked him to appear on the Brat remix album.
9. “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt.” (2015)
The pinnacle of Josh Tillman doing his Han Solo “I don’t care if you think I’m jerk” thing. Though, again, he does care, and putting this song on I Love You, Honeybear apparently caused him anxiety. “I thought, I am fucked, I am done, I am going to good-person jail forever,” he told Pitchfork. But that didn’t really happen. I Love You, Honeybear was acclaimed, and most critics took him at his word that this was writing about a misogynistic character and not endorsing misogyny. At least they did in the moment. Within a few years, the environment shifted in part because of you-know-who. At the time, Tillman dismissed the view of music as “correct, prescriptive, how-to-live shit” — which became predominant shortly after I Love You, Honeybear came out — and stood up for weird and difficult songs like “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt.” that cut against the grain.
“I think that life is messy and that human beings are insane,” he said. “In some way, music demystifies the parts of us that we’re most afraid of. When I was growing up, I was taught that a sexual thought equaled sexual deed, and the thing that really disturbs me about the current liberal environment is how eager liberals seem to impress upon you how infrequently they ever have an incorrect thought.”
He was right then, and I think he’s right now.
8. “Please Don’t Die” (2018)
There aren’t three words in the English language more vulnerable or desperate than “Please Don’t Die.” He’s literally pleading, I fucked up, I’m sorry, don’t ever leave me. Not to beat a dead horse but: How can you listen to this song and think this guy is just some aloof, irony-poisoned hypebeast?
7. “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” (2012)
His rock god move. Also, the music video not only established Misty as a sexually magnetic and spiritually haywire figure in 2010s pop culture, it did the same for Aubrey Plaza, who did her own transformation after starring as the bookish April Ludgate in Parks & Recreation, aka the Fleet Foxes of 21st century sitcoms.
6. “Only Son Of The Ladiesman” (2012)
Another classic Letterman performance. Unlike the “Bored In The U.S.A.” clip, he’s not fully locked in with the 100 percent pure FJM juice. You feel him working out his mojo in real time. He’s shorn the Fleet Foxes mane and he’s working out some hip shakes. He does a mock wink. You sense that his beard is filling in with each word he sings the hell out of. By the second verse, you’re buying in: He really is a Dodgers fan, a leading brand, and a one-night stand. Then Dave comes out and calls the performance good, great, and very nice and very good. “Are we touring this summer? I’m coming,” he promises. Me too, Dave. Me too.
5. “Leaving L.A.” (2017)
The longest song in his catalog, and possibly the most personal. It’s also the most J. Tillman-like song credited to Father John Misty, this never-ending dirge about his decision to move to New Orleans after the release of Fear Fun. Only I doubt J. Tillman would have thought to describe clout-chasing L.A. bands as phonies that “sound like dollar signs and Amy Grant.” Or himself as “another white guy in 2017 / who takes himself so goddamn seriously.” He later claimed that he had the first line — “I was living on a hill” — stuck in his head for a year. And he just sung it over and over until he figured out that that particular lyric was an entry point for the most sprawling retelling yet of his own origin story, in which bullshit mythology is finally set aside for bracing stories from Josh Tillman’s childhood. Like the story about how he almost choked to death in a JC Penny’s store while Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” played in the background. Anecdotes like that give you permission to write a 13-minute song.
4. “Ballad Of The Dying Man” (2017)
As we reach the end of this column, I hope I have demonstrated a sufficient level of FJM critical knowledge. I like to think that I have, but I also know that I will not match the top FJM critic, which just so happens to be Josh Tillman. Here’s the single most insightful thing that Tillman once said about Father John Misty: “The irony is that the people who hate me the most are the people who are exactly like me.”
That quote instantly makes me think about this song. It’s the best example of Tillman doing the reverse Randy Newman on his own audience, skewering our online habits until its’ ridiculous and self-defeating true shape is revealed. If Bob Dylan had been young at the time when the social-media industrial complex loomed over daily life like the military industry complex, he would have written “Ballad Of The Dying Man” rather than “Masters Of War.”
3. “The Palace” (2018)
“Last night I wrote a poem / man, I must have been in the poem zone” is probably the single greatest lyric in the FJM songbook. It’s also a red herring, a redirect from all the other words in this song, which are among his most romantically despairing. And they’re rendered over stark piano chords that echo out in brutally dark loneliness. “Last night I texted your iPhone / and said ‘I think I’m ready to come home’ / I’m in over my head.” Our hero is at the hotel, popping prescription feed, and slowly losing his mind over a broken heart. The poem zone is no laughing matter.
2. “Funtimes In Babylon” (2012)
The first song on the first record. It announced Tillman as the latest in a lineage of L.A. songwriters who serenade their town will equal amounts of love and bile. In “Funtimes In Babylon,” he’s coming at the city from the opposite side of Warren Zevon in “Desperadoes Under The Eaves” — he’s the wide-eyed newcomer rhyming with Warren’s grizzled lifer, opening himself up to Hollywood despite his suspicions of what might lay ahead. Government camps, the ghouls who will paint you up like a corpse, the beast looking for last month’s rent — none of them can keep Misty down (for now).
1 “Holy Shit” (2015)
I once called this the best song of the 2010s. For now, I’ll stand by it. It’s certainly, to me, the song that captures what the decade felt like. In the documentary about my life that plays in my head, “Holy Shit” is on the soundtrack when I think about the good things that happened that decade (my kids being born, the Packers winning the Super Bowl, I think that’s it) and the bad things that happened that decade (too many socio-political disasters to list here). It conveys the information overload and the technological malaise and the paralyzing self-reflexiveness and the soul-destroying stupidity and the hilarious stupidity and the surprising moments of grace, and the love, always the love. Multiple lines from this song make me tear up, but I’m not going to say which ones because I don’t feel like tearing up now. I just fail to see what that’s gotta do with you and me.