I Love You, Hon­ey­bear, Father John Misty

J. Till­man spent four years as the drum­mer with Fleet Fox­es after join­ing the band in 2008. But by then he’d already pro­duced four or five solo albums. And since leav­ing the band in 2012, he’s added anoth­er in the guise of his new per­sona Father John Misty. But noth­ing could have pre­pared us for what he offers up here, with this his sec­ond album under that moniker, I Love You, Hon­ey­bear.

Till­man said that for years, he dreamt of gar­ner­ing the kind of hal­lowed praise that the likes of Townes Van Zandt or Gram Par­sons are gar­land­ed with, and of remain­ing for­ev­er one of music’s fabled secret finds. But he grad­u­al­ly came to realise that the audi­ence at his gigs were far more engaged with the relaxed, smart alec per­sona he adopt­ed in between songs, than they were with the some­what po-faced num­bers he was osten­si­bly there to perform.

So he head­ed off into the desert with enough mag­ic mush­rooms to send a psy­che­del­ic ele­phant into space and sat down to write a nov­el. And it was only then that he final­ly found his song writ­ing voice. This is the result.

Lennon and Nils­son get thrown out of The Troubadour.

As the boys from Pitch­fork note in their review here, where it gets a suit­ably impressed 8.8, it is, at least ini­tial­ly, a dis­con­cert­ing­ly slip­pery record to pin down.

Yes there are the sorts of soar­ing har­monies you’d expect from a for­mer Fleet Fox. And sure, the Bea­t­les are indeed an obvi­ous reference.

But it’s the kind of Bea­t­les album you might have heard had John Lennon made it all by him­self five years after they split up. He and Har­ry Nils­son downed indus­tri­al sized quan­ti­ties of drugs and Brandy Alexan­ders in L.A. every night, send­ing the for­mer Bea­t­le on a roller­coast­er of vio­lent mood swings that saw him oscil­late wild­ly from pro­found self-dis­gust and doubt, to arro­gant dis­dain and scorn, and back again.

J Till­man, born again as Father John Misty.

Even when Till­man puts that sim­i­lar­ly vio­lent intro­spec­tion aside to momen­tar­i­ly chan­nel George Har­ri­son, which he does in When You’re Smil­ing and Astride Me, there’s a dan­ger­ous edge to the lyrics, not with­stand­ing the hon­eyed sweep of the guitar.

It’s the per­fect pal­lia­tive to the track that pre­cedes it, The Night Josh Till­man Came To Our Apart­ment, where a lat­ter day Fac­to­ry girl is felled by the kind of undi­lut­ed scorn a young Dylan would have approved of.

“She says, like lit­er­al­ly, music is the air she breathes,

And the mala­props make me want to fuck­ing scream,

I won­der if she even knows what that word means,

Well, it’s lit­er­al­ly not that.”

And let’s assume shall we that rather than being qui­et­ly iron­ic, that that mis­use of mala­props was done con­scious­ly and for com­ic effect. What’s so impres­sive, and so emo­tion­al­ly engag­ing about the album is that it per­fect­ly cap­tures the con­fu­sion of youth, but it does so thanks to a lyri­cal and musi­cal sophis­ti­ca­tion that only comes with age.

Just say Yes.

Sure it’s hard to know pre­cise­ly when he’s mere­ly strik­ing a care­ful­ly con­struct­ed pose, and when he’s gen­uine­ly shed­ding the many masks to reveal the boy beneath. But his glo­ri­ous grasp of melody, and the unre­strained pas­sion with which he deliv­ers them give a strong sense that beneath the sur­face scorn, there’s a lot more of the real him on show than he’d care to read­i­ly admit.

And it’s that com­bi­na­tion of un-repen­tant intel­lec­tu­al con­fi­dence with pro­found emo­tion­al con­fu­sion, togeth­er with the clear sense that this is an album, that has been clear­ly thought about and metic­u­lous­ly pro­grammed, that makes this such an impres­sive piece of work.

You can see him per­form one of its songs, Bored in the USA on Let­ter­man here.

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