Page 10
Street Roots • August 4-1U, ¿ui
Culture
‘Each other’s all we’ve got’
Father John Misty’s third album is a sardonic sermon
on hope, despair and the doom-laden future of humanity
BY KATHERINE SMYRK
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
ather John Misty’s back catalog
is enough to convince you that
he is a brilliant, slightly unhinged
misanthropist who can’t wait for the
whole lot to fall to pieces. And he’s the
first to admit it.
“I don’t think you have to go much
further than listening to my music to
go, well this is obviously a somewhat
mentally unstable, quasi-religious
weirdo,” he said with a laugh over the
phone. “In court, my album would be
Article One in terms of proving that
point.”
Known to the
state as Joshua
Tillman, the
musician was an
unenthusiastic
perform Aug. 26 at Project
drummer for
Pabst in Portland’s
popular folk band
Waterfront Park. For the
Fleet Foxes right
full lineup and ticket
when they were
information, visit portland.
hitting fame, had a
F
IF YOU GO
s h o r t s tin t playing
slow, brooding folk
as J Tillman and
has since released three albums under
the pseudonym Father John Misty -
which he insists is a name that
randomly came to him while on a
magic mushroom trip up a tree, and is
not an alter-ego. The first, “Fear Fun”
(2012), jangles with a country twang,
and introduced the world to his
peculiarly verbose style and no-holds-
barred lyrics. The second, “I Love You,
Honeybear” (2015), is ostensibly an
album about the end of the world but is
also a kind of letter of confession about
how a cynic fell in love with his wife,
Emma Elizabeth Tillman. A favorite
example of this would be the lyric,
“Everything is doomed/ And nothing
will be spared/ But I love you,
honeybear.”
On stage, Tillman appears as a tall
drink of water with a bushy beard -
gyrating tirelessly across the stage in a
suit, moaning and crooning his
complex lyrics. It can be a strange,
dark and entrancing affair. But his
latest album, “Pure Comedy,” is
probably the darkest he’s produced so
far.
Even the cover art is enough to
raise some red flags. The illustration
by The New Yorker’s Edward Steed is
a caterwaul of disturbing cartoon
characters: manically grinning football
players attacking each other with
chainsaws while the crowd cheers; a
preacher violently worshiping a
wedding cake and piles of money; a
woman holding a leash attached to a
businessman who’s yelling on the
See MUSIC, page 11