He opened the Oct. 25 show rambling about purple mountains, jingoism and baseball. He acknowledged that he might have been inciting groupthink as he riled up the crowd. He said that he could not consume any creamy New England clam chowder while on tour, claiming it is bad for his throat - though he quickly admitted to a tour?time "singer's diet" of Adderall, cocaine and beef jerky. On stage, he combined the sexy rambunctiousness of Jagger with the acute yet abstract cultural commentary of Dylan.
This is Father John Misty, the new incarnation of Joshua Tillman. He is perhaps more famously known to many as "J. Tillman," ex?drummer for Fleet Foxes. But Robin Pecknold, the frontman and songwriter for Fleet Foxes, is hardly a comparable character to Tillman, which makes it hard to picture the two of them ever sharing a stage.
As Father John Misty, Tillman described a character who, high on the medicine of some "Canadian shaman," "runs down the road/ Pants down to [his] knees." In another song, he's the only son of "womankind's first husband," who recounts how "painted ladies want to hold [his] gun."
In text, Father John Misty is a drugged?out sexual deviant and culture critic. On stage, he embodied this whirlwind of traits. In between singing of copulating on a gravestone in "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings," and of the tragedies and contradictions at the intersection of American foreign policy and art?making in "Now I'm Beginning to Love the War," he talked about American nationalism and materialism and joked about making moves on the "bartendress" after the show. He was obsessive in his efforts to balance the contradictory impulses of intellectual analysis and raising hell. If he said something too overtly philosophical or anthropological, he'd follow it up with a cheap sex or drug reference. If he started to sound too shallow, he'd comment on the deeper implications of inciting groupthink when he called for a particular chant from the crowd.
How did J. Tillman become Father John Misty? How did he go from the Fleet Foxes' performance of pensive, reverb?rich vocal harmonies to one of radical philosophy and debauchery? J. Tillman has been writing and recording music as a songwriter for years; in fact, his first album as Father John Misty is actually his eighth solo record. According to him, it was during the process of coming out of a debilitating period of depression after Fleet Foxes finished touring for their latest album, "Helplessness Blues" (2011), that he underwent a personal and artistic transformation. In an interview with Sub Pop Records, he described his aversion to songwriters in the contemporary music culture who convey "chest?beating pathos" and write "wound?licking music" - as he had been doing.
Tillman told Sub Pop Records, "I spent months demoing all these weird?ass songs about weird?ass experiences almost in real time, and kind of had this musical 'Oh?there?I?am' moment ... It was unbelievably liberating."
In a 1965 press conference, Bob Dylan described himself as a "song?and?dance man." This, of course, was in the midst of his shaking up of the entire American music scene. Might we be seeing someone else with the same kind of potential? The short answer is, of course not, at least not in the YouTube age of musical access, democratization and niche building.
But Father John Misty just may have tapped into that special kind of folk music that protests against just about everything. We are no longer innocent listeners, as Misty plugs us into our own deviant inner voice and asks us to question what it is exactly that allows us to put our noses down and follow the rules we inherited. He does this by combining the coy, postmodern, curmudgeonly banter of '65 Dylan with narrative lyrics that tell stories as straight forward and layered as a Vonnegut novel. He makes you think, and he makes you sing and dance. Father John Misty is the kind of cultural icon that has the potential to cause a real ruckus. So listen up.
