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Father John Misty

FATHER JOHN MISTY and Guy Blakeslee at the Danforth Music Hall, Wednesday (February 18), doors 7 pm. Sold out.


“Songs can be really inhospitable places, especially when you’re being so vulnerable. I think that in order to do these songs justice, I have to plunge my knife into my dignity and drink its blood.”

This is the headspace of Josh Tillman, aka Father John Misty, as he talks about his sophomore album, I Love You, Honeybear (Sub Pop), over the phone from his home in New Orleans. It’s his most personal work yet, a collection of rollicking songs, piano ballads, acoustic guitar whimsy, weird synth melodies and intimate accounts of his budding relationship with his now-wife, Emma Garr.

The album also contains the first genuine love songs the 31-year-old has ever written, a long time coming considering he spent the last decade as an active musician, performing as J. Tillman before becoming Fleet Foxes’ drummer during their heyday in 2008.

“[At first] I thought I was writing an album about love in almost this kind of macho way, where I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to write these songs, but they’re not going to be clichéd, sentimental or this or that,'” says Tillman. But when he listened back, he was horrified to learn that while he had gracefully captured the moments when he’d fallen in love with Garr, he’d also revealed his own jealousy, neediness “and really ugly aspects of the male psyche.”

For instance, on the surface a song like The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apartment reads as a cruel story about an ex-girlfriend, with Tillman breezily singing, “Of the few main things I hate about her, one’s her petty vogue ideas” over a jangly guitar melody.

“I think of that tune as being primarily about me. Yeah, you’re making fun of this woman. Congratulations. But what are you doing here if you’re so repulsed by her? What are you doing looking for her approval? That’s the kind of narcissism at the centre of the album.”

Since these songs were “so close to the bone,” Tillman had to abandon a lot of what he’d leaned on in the past, especially the irony-laden wit that accompanies the FJM persona. But Tillman says that alter ego, the smooth-talkin’ Casanova trippin’ on mushrooms, never quite existed for him in first place.

“To me, Father John Misty is just some dumb thing I call myself because that’s my sense of humour, and employing that sense of humour is being myself.”    

Interview Clips

On the album cover and how it articulates the overarching theme of his sophomore album, I Love You Honeybear.

On how he approached songwriting differently this time around.

music@nowtoronto.com

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