How Father John Misty Made an Ideal Album for the Era of Outrage

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/arts/music/father-john-misty-pure-comedy-interview.html

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Josh Tillman had recorded eight albums under the name J. Tillman when he had an epiphany, prompted by his first (but not last) experience with a hallucinogenic drug: He should change his name as a way of rebooting his career. He was unsatisfied with the somber, sedentary folk songs he’d been making — “sad bastard music,” he called it — and wanted to spring free his sense of humor, absurdity and playfulness.

Mr. Tillman, who had also played drums in the indie-rock band Fleet Foxes for four years, was readying the release of his 2012 album “Fear Fun.” A friend asked about the moniker, and Mr. Tillman unveiled it: Father John Misty.

“He was like, ‘No! Do not call it that,’” Mr. Tillman said with a chortle. He was sitting in a hectic hotel lobby in downtown Manhattan, two days after a “Saturday Night Live” debut that exposed him to new admirers, skeptics and online hecklers. “And I said to him, ‘Yes!’ Because that’s my [gosh-darn] personality. I have a weird, cheap petulance. People hear it, and it fills them with loathing: ‘What kind of [chump] calls himself Father John Misty?’ But when I hear it, it makes me laugh. It never gets old.”

After adopting a ridiculous pseudonym, Mr. Tillman emerged, belatedly, as a sterling songwriter. He has a side gig, writing pop songs with Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, which might surprise fans of Father John Misty’s ruminative, smutty, increasingly-soft rock. Two years ago, he released “I Love You, Honeybear,” a record about the male psyche, and all the insecurity and fear it generates when faced with the prospect of monogamy. It was widely picked as one of the best albums of 2015.

Mr. Tillman, 35, has surpassed it with “Pure Comedy,” due April 7, in which he addresses the lofty theme of The Way We Live Now. It’s a sprawling, incisive, exasperating, hilarious, and yes, petulant look at modern life — references include news feeds, metadata, Oculus Rift and, because it rhymes, Taylor Swift — with, he stresses, a small but significant amount of hope. But by ratio, the hope is overwhelmed by his scorn for religion, prescription drugs, advertising, pop music and shiny objects that distract us from love and mortality.

“There’s a fricative disconnect between what Josh is saying and the way he’s saying it,” said the composer Nico Muhly, who contributed string arrangements for the album’s closing song, “In Twenty Years or So.” The record, Mr. Muhly said, evokes the traditions of “lovely folk music, with a real attention to harmony, but it also insists on the lyrics being difficult to listen to. It’s sort of a Trojan horse of emotional content.”

To focus on the songs, Mr. Tillman, a merry libertine, gave up booze, drugs, cigarettes and meat. “I needed all my wits about me if I was going to take on these issues. Music is chaos. When I write songs, I’m opening the door to madness.” Judging from the tequila-and-soda in front of him and the pack of American Spirits in the pocket of his gray, slim-fit overcoat, he’s now abstaining from abstinence.

“I didn’t like it,” he said with a theatrical shrug. “Not for me. When the ledgers of history are drawn up, I’ll be on the side of the smokers and the masturbators. Those are my people.” After seeing me laugh in appreciation of the pithy quote, which, we both realize, summarizes his wit in a way that’s vivid but not too vulgar for print, he laughed, too. “I love the exhilaration of feeling a pull quote come out of your mouth,” he said. “The words just taste better.”

Your feelings about Mr. Tillman probably mirror your feelings about clever, self-aware, white Gen-X men who live in cities and have distinctive facial hair. (Mr. Tillman recently eradicated a beard that made him look like a spokesman for fiverr.com.) He’s rangy, nearly gaunt, with active green eyes; he’s also charming and endearingly candid. His hands never stop moving, wiggling, gesturing. His parents, devout Pentecostals, thought they could cure his twitching and redirect him to Jesus by buying him a set of drums. The joke’s on them.

Mr. Tillman knows Father John Misty better than anyone, and there isn’t a mocking jape he hasn’t heard. “It’s just too easy to mock this white guy who has clearly read too much and thinks he’s so smart,” he said. “I’m not bamboozled when people don’t like me. I am kind of annoying.”

“Saturday Night Live” was Mr. Tillman’s most prestigious TV gig yet, and on Twitter, many novices likened him to ’70s soft-rockers, notably the bearded dreamboats Kenny Loggins and Dan Fogelberg. Many of the tweets echoed comments Mr. Tillman makes about himself. “I bet Father John Misty vapes during sex,” read one. Another snickered, “If you taught a comedy podcast how to play guitar you’d get father john misty.”

“I have a pretty good idea of what it looks like on the internet today about me,” he said. “I’m symbolic of a thing white people really hate about themselves. And the fact that I appear to be enjoying it is a bridge too far. It’s like, ‘You should be sitting around, hating yourself on Twitter, like all of us.’ Interpretive thinking, as an art form, is dying. We enjoy the dopamine rush of outrage so much more than the slow-burning nutrition you get from thinking with nuance.”

Mr. Tillman’s nearly apostolic enthusiasm for art and ideas — when he talked to me about “the isolation of late-era capitalism,” he wasn’t joking — is likely to be the residue of a late bloom. For instance, he didn’t hear the Beatles until he was 18. (When he did, “I was like, ‘This is [extremely] incredible.’”) His childhood in Rockville, Md., was dominated by religious instruction and fear. “Fourth through eighth grade, I was having demons cast out of me, speaking in tongues, and learning Zionist propaganda at a Pentecostal messianic Jewish cult school.” He said his parents and teachers instructed him to ignore the material world and focus on End Times, which were imminent; his sense of humor was proof that he was possessed by demons.

“I’ve been diagnosed with PTSD by three therapists,” he said. Mr. Tillman has such severe depression and anxiety, he can’t take vacations. In lieu of anti-depressants, he self-medicates with micro-doses of LSD. “Acid really helps,” he said. “I probably shouldn’t talk about this, because Jeff Sessions will come after me.”

He was short-haired, preppy and earnest when he enrolled at Nyack College, a Christian school in Rockland County, N.Y., and pretty soon without telling his family, he moved to Seattle, where he washed dishes, worked construction and sold his plasma, while also writing songs. “My depression and angst was at an all-time high in my 20s,” he explained. “I was truly alone: no family, no church.”

Because he’d rejected the church, he said, his parents rejected him. They’ve rarely spoken since he left college, though they attended his wedding, in September 2013, to the photographer Emma Elizabeth Tillman. “The fact is, the religion issue is kind of a scapegoat,” he said. “It’s easier for me to talk about that than about the real substance of the matter.”

Although Mr. Tillman sits firmly in the realm of indie artists, he has had songwriting credits with two global pop stars. He’s one of 13 co-writers credited on Beyoncé’s “Hold Up,” which hit No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 last year, and he co-wrote “Come to Mama” and “Sinner’s Prayer” with Lady Gaga, for her 2016 album, “Joanne.”

The success of those songs, as well as an earlier collaboration with the rapper Kid Cudi, has brought more offers of celebrity collaborations. “But I don’t really want them,” Mr. Tillman said. “People think the world of music is so great, and it’s just not. It’s so boring, the way music is conceived and then declawed for public consumption.” The pop music machine, he said, “is categorically anti-woman. I know a lot of women in that industry. They were pitched an American narrative about success equaling freedom, when there couldn’t be anything further from the truth.”

At one point in our long conversation, he said “Pure Comedy” is largely about “the counterfeits of freedom.” That theme resembles some Pentecostal injunctions against worldly pleasure and distractions.

Mr. Tillman agrees that, in a way, he has come back around to what he hated being taught. “The real takeaway from religion is the idea that we’re just passing through this world,” he said. “If so, why not help people? Why not speak the truth?” As a result, he said, “Pure Comedy” is “like a secular gospel album.” He began with a list of grievances, he said, and eventually found a new theme: “The album is about survival, and I think love is the substance of survival.”

The long, emotionally complex ballad “Leaving L.A.” is its centerpiece. At 13 minutes of verbal bravura, it’s the “Stairway to Heaven” of Gen X self-examination. Mr. Tillman mocks himself, examines the vanity of songwriting and wonders whether his Father John Misty persona has outlived its uses. “I’m merely a minor fascination to/Manic virginal lust and college dudes,” he sings, and he predicts they’ll ditch him in favor of other musicians after they hear the “10-verse, chorus-less diatribe” he’s in the midst of singing.

“I know who my audience is,” he said. “Not to say it’s only educated, isolated weirdos who grew up on message boards, and for whom the substance of their life is electronic distraction, but there are a lot of them.” He added, “I think they get a lot of messaging that their pain is invalid, is inauthentic, and the things in life that are hurtful and make you feel alone are [malarkey] problems, and you can make yourself look sophisticated by constantly laughing.”

Even if he was one only briefly, Mr. Tillman understands college dudes better than that. Like him, they love a chorus-less diatribe. By predicting they’ll abandon him, he has ensured that they’ll stick around.

“Hey,” Mr. Tillman said. “Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?”