There are few better allegories for the trajectory of folk rock in the past 20 years than the career of Joshua Tillman.
After releasing several Leonard Cohen-aping records as J. Tillman through the 2000s and a soulless stint as the touring drummer of Fleet Foxes, the thirty-something was lost. By the time Tillman had launched his career and life in 2012 as Father John Misty, Fleet Foxes had broken up (temporarily, it turned out) and indie folk had almost become a pejorative term. The self-serious whimsy of indie folk felt facetious post-global financial crisis; Father John Misty instead melded folk with nu-indie, blues, country and western to create a boundless palette for ultra self-aware lyrics.
FJM’s debut record Fear Fun launched him as a witty fixture of indie rock, though it wasn’t until 2015’s I Love You Honeybear that he ascended to songwriting greatness. The album splayed out his marriage to photographer Emma Elizabeth Garr in stunningly honest detail, refusing to shy away from the ugliest sides of his psyche.
The fake name and super-alter-ego he used to get away from a projected version of himself seems to be further and further away from who Tillman perceives himself to be.
It garnered widespread acclaim and launched Tillman as an unusually prominent indie media personality. Things reached a fever pitch with the release of his 2017 political opus Pure Comedy, when most writing on FJM seemed to want to establish whether or not he was an asshole.
After one interview in advance of last year’s God’s Favorite Customer, FJM quit the press. As the end of the decade now looms, FJM’s career has looped back to its starting point. The fake name and super-alter-ego he used to get away from a projected version of himself seems to be further and further away from who Tillman perceives himself to be.
Though we will probably see more music from Tillman, it’s hard not to feel like the bombast of the five-year press cycle of 2012-2017 will never be seen again. As a capstone, we’ve decided to rank every Father John Misty song. Take it as a guide to one of the most extraordinary music careers of the last decade.
— Content Warning: This article discusses mental illness and suicide. —
#51. ‘Gilded Cage’
Recorded for Drew Pierce’s pulpy thriller Hotel Artemis, where Tillman has a memorable but brief turn as a bank robber, ‘Gilded Cage’ earns wooden spoon in FJM’s discography. He lets his cheapest Harry Nilsson tendencies run rampant to serve the film’s period setting with genericised lyrics — though a fuzzed out guitar solo stops it from completely descending into drudgery.
#50. ‘Two Wildly Different Perspectives’
An anthem for the “sensible centre” and a hamfisted political take, this track feels like a bizarre insertion into the otherwise coherent thread of Pure Comedy. Instrumentally, the track bears a strong resemblance to Moon Shaped Pool-era Radiohead but its thesis statement is a hollow cliche.
#49. ‘Generic Pop Songs #3, #9 & #16’
During his most prolific time on social media, Tillman released three offcuts from his forays into pop songwriting for Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, all entitled ‘Generic Pop Song’ and numbered 3, 9 and 16. All three capture the yodelling jingle of a car insurance ad, with oxymoronic lyrics like “While we lie around/ I can tell you where I stand” and “Every other person is just someone else.”
#48. ‘O I Long to Feel Your Arms Around Me’
While growing up in a strict evangelist household, Tillman had aspirations of becoming a pastor. The pontificating behaviour lives on today in his manic stage presence, as well as this Fear Fun cut. Structured like a church hymn with minimal lyrics, its mournful harmonies are pleasant but uneventful.
#47. ‘Holy Hell’
FJM released this track on Soundcloud, alongside a cover of Tim Heidecker’s ‘Trump’s Private Pilot’, in November ‘16 in the wake of Trump’s shock election win. It’s a piano ballad recorded in a homey fashion, and its wordy mourning remains haunting three years on: “This unfathomable, nameless rift/ Who knows if it even exists/ It’s just some highly effective rhetoric/ Used by perverts who get off on it.”
#46. ‘Just Dumb Enough To Try’
‘Just Dumb Enough To Try’, from 2018’s heartache record God’s Favorite Customer, traces one of the greatest fissures in Tillman’s relationship with Emma, comparing his gung-ho intellectualism to a pitiful knowledge of intimacy. Unfortunately, its instrumental is too drab to truly appreciate.
#45. ‘Tee Pees 1-12’
Fear Fun, among many other things, is Tillman’s ode to psychedelic drugs; although drug use would later haunt Tillman, his experiences with the spiritual Amazonian brew Ayahuasca are literally a catalyst for rebirth on his first record. This silly country and western pastiche retells an absurd trip through imagined self-castration, deep sea fishing and cosmic serpents.
#44. ‘Well, You Can Do It Without Me’
In the studio, a lot of Fear Fun’s tracks feel too uptight compared with their raucous live iterations; ‘Well, You Can Do It Without Me’ is one of these, a boot-scootin’ two minute throwaway rumoured to be about his departure from Fleet Foxes.
#43. ‘True Affection’
Tillman’s lone electronic experiment is a superb live track, but a jarring aberration on the guitar-centric I Love You Honeybear. Its bubbling arpeggiators and repetitive lyrics proved he had the pop-writing chops to work with Lady Gaga and Beyonce.
#42. ‘Smoochie’
After the existential sermon that is Pure Comedy’s first six tracks, Tillman takes refuge in a crooning ode to Emma’s care for his mental health. The alien sarcasm and theatricality is shelved in favour of lap steel guitar and tenderness. It’s sweet, but inessential.
#41. ‘Date Night’
‘Date Night’ captures the delusions of Tillman’s two month hotel exile from Emma in a T-Rex style absurdist boogie. The circular blues progression embodies the sleazeball he is trying to play to date women at the hotel.
#40. ‘When You’re Smiling And Astride Me’
Tillman struggled to reconcile the wildness of his FJM alter-ego with the passion he felt for Emma while writing I Love You Honeybear. Tillman explained it best to Q Magazine: “I was terrified that I was gonna trivialise the experiences I was trying to write about. Emma told me that I couldn’t be afraid to let the songs just be beautiful. ‘When You’re Smiling And Astride Me’ was one of those songs that absolutely benefited from that realisation”.
#39. ‘Maybe Sweet One, You Won’t Have Nightmares Tonight’
Tillman wrote this nightmarish lullaby as a skit for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, though its content was a little too graphic to air. The sinister xylophone creeps in intensity, as FJM brings you through an orgy with your co-workers in your childhood yard, and four consecutive lines about dead birds that rhyme yard with yard.
#38. ‘Misty’s Nightmares 1 & 2’
This song is embryonic of some of the lyrical and instrumental tropes Tillman would develop across his more focussed succeeding records, though it’s not without merit itself. When he sings “When all my girlfriends appear in the doorway/ I don’t know how they got here/ I don’t know what to say about this”, it’s worth the price of admission alone.
#37. ‘Birdie’
‘Birdie’ is a studio-product, couched in a spacey ambience and reverse tape effects. It meanders until the song rolls out into digital wall-of-sound to give its lofty existentialism serious weight.
#36. ‘Only Son of the Ladiesman’
An explicit reference to Leonard Cohen’s 1977 album Death of a Ladiesman, Tillman employs the full range of his indie folk arsenal of “oohs” and “aahs” on this piece of mythmaking. He hasn’t made anything as innocent since.
#35. ‘This Is Sally Hatchet’
George Harrison’s wiry guitar tone crops up in several places in Tillman’s music, but the character study ‘This is Sally Hatchet’ is his most blatant homage. Tillman explores another myth in the creation of his own when he riffs on the folk tale of Molly Hatchet, a 19th-century prostitute who would ritualistically kill her clients after sex.
#34. ‘The Songwriter’
It’s difficult for the holier-than-thou artist to reflect on the way they commodify the people in their life for work. Even casual FJM fans know how inseparable Emma is from Tillman’s songwriting, and ‘The Songwriter’ attempts to explore his guilt at “undressing her in public”. It’s melodically uninspiring, but the honesty is spellbinding.
#33. ‘So I’m Growing Old on Magic Mountain’
Nearly all of the songs on Pure Comedy are tracked chronologically with when Tillman wrote them, apart from this meditation on fear of ageing. Emma urged Tillman to include this song, which he had written in 2012. Its searching slide guitar outro is one of the simpler moments of beauty in FJM’s discography.
#32. ‘We’re Only People (And There’s Not Much Anyone Can Do About That)’
At the end of God’s Favorite Customer, it’s unclear if there is a moral to the story of exile and heartache. The closing track here doesn’t offer the grand epiphanies that Tillman’s other album closers do, instead choosing to accept the broken pieces of his life as simply par for the course.
#31. ‘When the God of Love Returns, There’ll Be Hell to Pay’
A rebuke of God himself is one of the more directed pieces of rage flung from Tillman on Pure Comedy. Using the apocalyptic pentecostal imagery from his upbringing, he challenges God to justify humanity’s decay and twirls in the Greek philosophy he became interested in later in life.
#30. ‘Real Love Baby’
Despite all of Tillman’s anti-capitalist rage, he can’t resist the self-satisfaction of a meticulously crafted pop tune. ‘Real Love Baby’ is his most played song on Spotify, and the reverb-drenched three-minute love song is smarter than it looks.
#29. ‘Ideal Husband’
Tillman’s thumping live closer since 2015 has variably been ‘The Ideal Husband’, a repository of marital anxiety. A siren-like slide guitar allows him to run through the misdeeds he irrationally worries Julian Assange will reveal to the public, until a final verse concludes with the manic declaration: “Let’s put a baby in the oven! Wouldn’t I make the ideal husband?”
#28. ‘Strange Encounter’
A bleak sister song to ‘When You’re Smiling and Astride Me’, Tillman recounts a lover nearly dying of alcohol poisoning at his house. It features some of his most haunting melodic work and a guitar solo wracked by nervous energy.
#27. ‘A Bigger Paper Bag’
In some way or another, most of Tillman’s songs tackle narcissism. In one of the more conventionally melodic Pure Comedy cuts, ‘Bigger Paper Bag’ looks at the way Tillman uses drugs and alcohol to insulate himself within his own hubris.
#26. ‘In Twenty Years or So’
‘In Twenty Years or So’ pulls the same trick as the Total Perspective Vortex from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by placing Tillman’s despair at humanity in perspective of the cosmic indifference of the universe; humanity will end — it was always going to, so enjoy the simple things. Finishing on the refrain “There’s nothing to fear” over silky violin, it’s paradoxically chilling and comforting.
#25. ‘Now I’m Learning to Love the War’
This Fear Fun track marks Tillman’s first showing as a cultural critic, pointing out the fundamental hypocrisy of being a vinyl-producing musician, oil painter and environmentalist. His point is more self-contained than the political diatribes he would write afterwards.
#24. ‘Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution’
‘Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution’ is as grand a piece of music as it is speculative fiction, imagining humanity’s return to a primal state that can’t shake its addiction to convenience. The Elton John piano lilt gives it a touch of glamour before rumbling brass ruptures the song’s mid-tempo veneer.
#23. ‘Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Thirsty Crow’
A bile-soaked repudiation of men creeping on Emma, and women approaching Tillman on tour earns its place almost entirely because of its vicious live energy. The song’s bluesy slow build bursts into unflattering fits of insecurity and tries to honestly face Tillman’s objectifying tendency.
#22. ‘Everyman Needs a Companion’
This song is a doo-wopped capstone to the myth-making and ego-destroying exercise of Fear Fun. It rips away the religious shackles of his youth and look forward to rebirth; it feels bizarrely prescient that he wrote this the day he met Emma.
#21. ‘Disappointing Diamonds are the Rarest of Them All’
Tillman hits the highest vocal pitch of his career in this two-minute whiplash of heartbreak. Stripped of jokes and heavy on bitter metaphor, it borrows instrumentally from Electric Light Orchestra to intone on his romantic failings.
#20. ‘Ballad of the Dying Man’
Tillman told Beat 1’s Zane Lowe in 2017 this song began as a high-concept short story; a man checking his Facebook News Feed right before he dies. It became one of his most caustic song-satires, where the melody is put second to the wordy conceit of a prolific online commentator.
#19. ‘The Palace’
Only Tillman’s voice and a muted piano duel for attention on this track, uncomfortably relating the sober side of his hotel exile. He avoids the temptation for an overly sentimental or major-sounding chorus vocal, opting instead for the affecting out of key sob, “I’m in over my head.”
#18. ‘Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings’
In romantic limbo before Fear Fun, Tillman evidently had some rocky relationships; whether or not the story of hooking up with a woman whose kink is graveyard sex is true or allegorical is beside the point. Seen in the context of the rest of his discography, it almost seems twee.
#17. ‘Funtimes in Babylon’
This is the Father John Misty manifesto; wryly predicting the dizzying success of his new alter-ego, he spins through all of his fears of fame before diving into L.A. Punctuated by hand-claps and light gospel, the sun-baked track is what Tillman does best.
#16. ‘Hangout at the Gallows’
It’s not clear why the opener to God’s Favorite Customer wasn’t chosen as a single, but that doesn’t take away from its morbid brilliance. Its descending acoustic riff accompanies some of Tillman’s most gothic poetry (“Whose bright idea was it to sharpen the knives?/ Just twenty minutes ‘fore the boat capsizes”) and signposts a storm to come.
#15. ‘Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)’
The flipside to Tillman’s anxious philosophising about love is the sheer happiness that he and Emma share at their best. ‘Chateau Lobby #4 (In C for Two Virgins)’ celebrates their bizarro kinks in harmony with a mariachi band in tow. Tillman hasn’t “hated all the same things as somebody else” since he can remember, and for him, that’s a love worth validating.
#14. ‘I’m Writing a Novel’
One part of the FJM mythology that is overlooked is that it took more than just a psychedelic epiphany for Tillman to find his new voice; he had to write a novel. And, he did — Mostly Hypothetical Mountains, which arrives inside every CD edition of Fear Fun in tiny font.
This 12-bar blues is a gleeful chronicle of Tillman’s process and a terrifying experience with a Canadian shaman. It’s not a terribly original form, but that’s precisely why Tillman used it (“I’m writing a novel/ Because it’s never been done before”).
#13. ‘Bored in the U.S.A’
The definitive version of this song is its debut on Letterman in 2014; Tillman appeared to be playing the song on piano, before standing up to reveal it was pre-recorded. The canned laughter in the background made the audience unsure where to clap. On record, it remains a sickeningly funny take on happiness in American capitalism.
#12. ‘God’s Favorite Customer’
Tillman experiences almost every shade of loneliness on God’s Favorite Customer, but none is as apocalyptic as the title track. Listening, you can almost see him twinkle out the harpsichord riff with his head slumped against a bar piano in downtown New York. Weyes Blood offers her voice as an angel speaking to Tillman as he teeters on either side of life.
#11. ‘Mr. Tillman’
Listening to this song feels like you’re strapped to a GoPro on Tillman’s head through his nightmarish hotel bender. The dissociative interactions with fellow occupants of the hotel are as hilarious as they are disturbing, nam-checking country singer Jason Isbell as one of the concerned parties (Isbell confirmed this account to Double J, saying “If you had seen [Tillman] that day, you would have worried about him, too”).
#10. ‘Leaving L.A.’
Pure Comedy’s first side presents incendiary judgements on humanity from a God view, largely avoiding the first person — a significant departure for Tillman’s music. ‘Leaving L.A’ arrives as the dividing line; a self-professed “10-verse, chorus-less diatribe”.
It is the unmatched zenith of self-awareness in modern music, as the singer forensically picks apart why he even bothers to make art. Tillman told LNWY in 2017 that his first memory of music, as described in the song as hearing Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Little Lies’ while choking on candy in a J.C Penney’s, might be the key to his entire worldview (“This is the worldview of this little kid, who is still me. I still wrestle with that kid part of me”).
#9. ‘I Went to the Store One Day’
Fingerpicked, hushed and gently orchestrated, Tillman closes I Love You Honeybear by looking at the past, present and future of his relationship with Emma. It begins with their chance meeting in a parking lot, brushes through their marriage and fantasises about the last time they ever make love. The blending of vignettes evokes Dylans’ amorphous ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ structure, though the conclusion is far clearer.
#8. ‘The Memo’
‘The Memo’ takes Tillman’s kaleidoscope of opinions to a new plane. The skewering of modern America over a slow-burning bluegrass bop is a greater piece of cultural criticism than most journalists could ever hope to write.
Tillman hops between mocking the pretension of the art world, boy bands, media narcissism, caffeine and the commercialisation of sports with disarming ease. He also includes perhaps the only dig in music so far at the devouring algorithmic force of Spotify in a hilarious robotic interlude.
#7. ‘Nancy From Now On’
Tillman told Grantland in 2015 that Fear Fun is a Rorschach test: “If all you see is a drug reference, then that’s what you’re fascinated by, you’re drawn to that”.
This idea is important to how ‘Nancy From Now On’ is perceived. Taken on a base lyrical level, it’s alcohol abuse brushed off with clever wordplay. Placed in its icy instrumental, the ringing piano makes it feel like purgatory. For Tillman’s dynamic vocal performance alone, it remains a fan favourite.
#6. ‘Total Entertainment Forever’
Looking past the infamous “Bedding Taylor Swift/ Every night in the Oculus Rift” line, ‘Total Entertainment Forever’ riffs on David Foster Wallace’s theories on entertainment saturation and repurposes them for the internet age.
Tillman lands dystopian humour over punchy piano-funk, before crescendoing into New Orleans-jazz cacophony. His most pertinent point is the illusion of progress of technology as being the same as progress for humanity; no matter how great a simulation is, we’re still animals seeking to numb ourselves with sex, food and drugs.
#5. ‘The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt.’
This song is the xylophone-laden folk diss track to end all xylophone-laden folk diss tracks. What initially seems like a vicious assessment of a listless lover quickly turns into self-loathing, documenting their flaws until reaching hypocrisy.
Tillman was worried about how audiences would perceive the track’s mean-spirited language — particularly the final line “I obliged later on when you begged me to choke ya”. He told Pitchfork in 2017 “I thought, I am fucked, I am done, I am going to good-person jail forever.” For most fans, it encapsulated the tightrope of taboo Tillman is able to walk while examining his psyche.
#4. ‘Please Don’t Die’
For his sake, let’s hope Tillman never writes a song as heartbreaking as ‘Please Don’t Die’ again. The bleak counterpoint to ‘Mr Tillman’s psychotic bender, FJM’s anxiety and depression reaches a suicidal low in this God’s Favorite Customer track.
Despite Pitchfork brusquely labelling Tillman as “still self-absorbed” on the LP, the chorus is a shattering falsetto plea of empathy from Emma’s perspective, begging Tillman to live on. A wavering harmonica provides the song with a more straight-edge sincerity than Tillman would normally indulge in.
Together, it epitomises God’s Favorite Customer as a reduction of the super-ego he has cultivated as FJM down to a mere man feeling “older than my 35 years”.
#3. ‘Pure Comedy’
The Jesus-bearded romantic Tillman played the role of during the Honeybear press cycle was nowhere to be seen as he took to the Saturday Night Live stage on March 4, 2017.
Moustachioed and glassy-eyed from taking LSD, Tillman debuted as a kind of terrifying New Age prophet to preach the title track of his forthcoming record Pure Comedy. The song was originally the basis of a musical Tillman intended to produce, tracking the folly of humanity from hunter-gatherers to a polarised, entertainment ruled society.
A meandering piano builds slowly into barging tenor saxophone as Tillman spits disaffection with human existence so bitter it almost seems alien: “And how’s this for irony/Their idea of being free is a prison of beliefs/That they never ever have to leave.”
#2. ‘I Love You Honeybear’
If you were introduced to FJM with his 2015 breakthrough I Love You Honeybear, your first listen was a weird one. The name shared by the record and title track is so sickly sweet that the first lines’ brutal romantic candour takes everyone by surprise: “Oh, honeybear, honeybear, honeybear/ Mascara, blood, ash and cum/ On the Rorschach sheets where we make love…You fuck the world damn straight malaise.”
Sugary strings and Tillman’s cooing vocals march in contrast to the visceral slice of intimacy with Emma, scorning the outside world crumbling into disarray. The lush arrangement fills out a song Tillman had been playing since 2012, the year he met Emma. By the time it was recorded, the passion within the song had blown out to an Adult Disney love story.
#1. ‘Holy Shit’
Marriage undid every single high-minded idea Tillman ever held about the world. Overwhelmed by internal conflict on the day of his wedding, he sat down to write ‘Holy Shit’ – his inarguable magnum opus. The song is a list of the cyclical misery haunting the 21st century, pitched to an acoustic drift that continually returns to the idea that love, in the face of it all, prevails.
Whether Tillman did it knowingly or not, the song is what is known as a list or catalogue song — a structural form dating back to Ancient Greece, originally used by oral bards like Homer to recount their world-spanning epic poems. In popular music, its greatest folk example is Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, or John Lennon’s anti-everything anthem ‘God’ (Tillman has covered the latter). The common thread between these three is their list-verses, which all diagnose society’s ills through a cynical lens.
‘Holy Shit’ contradicts its own sentiment; Tillman can continue to fret over the golden era of TV, eunuchs, consumer slaves, carbon footprints and incest dreams, but love and personal fulfilment is his only defence.
Joshua Martin is a Melbourne-based music and media writer and Father John Misty tragic. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaMartJourn.
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