Who is father john misty

Tillman fell into a depression, wandering around the house in his bathrobe, doing little besides reading and the crossword. Emma was writing a screenplay, at least, and taking pictures. After six months, they bought a piano at a junk shop for five hundred dollars, and Tillman taught himself to play.

Messing around, he soon found that he was writing songs again. It felt like the edge of the country, the edge of the world. His previous records had been written in real time. Tillman was single-minded even about the cover art. He sent an e-mail to Ed Steed , his favorite cartoonist. Thought, I know what this is going to be. It was funny, sexy, great. When he swivels away, another camera shot reveals it to be a player piano. Steed also checked out the earlier J.

Tillman stuff. Self-important, gloomy. Tillman stuff much more deserving of that criticism. Tillman belongs to the school of thought that believes Trump is a symptom, the leader we deserve. The world is the way it is because this is the way we want it to be. One can certainly strive to keep both assertions in mind at the same time. In July, a day after Trump accepted the Republican nomination, Tillman, coming off an all-nighter, took the stage at a festival in Camden, New Jersey, and launched into a harangue about the politico-entertainment complex.

The ensuing Twitter bombardment went on for days, with Tillman popping up now and then to lay down some covering fire, until a certain fatigue set in. Tillman was offended by any suggestion that his behavior was a cynical ploy for attention, that it was anything other than an honest meltdown, albeit an artful one.

We were in the livery cab, en route to Nyack College, an evangelical school twenty miles north of Manhattan. Tillman was reared in a strict and turbulent evangelical Christian household, in Rockville, Maryland, and, in many respects, his career is an elaborate, improvised rebellion against it.

His mother, Barbara, grew up mostly in Ethiopia, the daughter of missionaries. His father, I. They met at a Christian youth group, in Maryland, when they were in junior high, after I. He speaks with his parents every few years.

He has always been game, anyway, to talk about the household ban on secular pop music. When the boys were in high school, their father removed the car stereo, to keep them from listening on their drives to and from school. Josh remembers his father instructing him to smash a Red Hot Chili Peppers album to bits.

Josh had come across the band on a pizzeria jukebox. There was always worship music. It laid the groundwork and still informs the act. His father played acoustic guitar, and his mother sang. He was encouraged to take up the drums, to burn off excess energy. Zach picked up the bass. The Tillman boys sang and played in church. There was speaking in tongues, laying on of hands, baptism by fire, slaying of the spirit—his first psychedelic experiences, in a way. He was told that he was possessed by demons.

But, if he was possessed by anything, it was anxiety and fear of drama at home. He needed a cigarette. We slipped into the chapel as it was filling up with students and slid into a pew in back. We were soon surrounded by athletes, mostly women. Softball uniforms, lacrosse sticks. The ones with the pierced noses and dyed hair, the leather jacket or the studded belt.

Christianity is an adaptable avatar for these social movements. Tillman paused. Students were hugging. The electricity in the air, the pre-service buzz, is a total narcotic to me. On a stage at the front of the chapel were some unattended instruments: a guitar, a drum kit, two pianos, and a row of music stands. This style of worship music operates on a ten-year cultural lag. Eight musicians began to play. He sang along for a while, supplying a high harmony. The singer was playing one of those electric keyboards that hang from your shoulder like a guitar.

Tillman arrived at Nyack in That began a crazy year here, wild stuff. A whole lot of prophesying. It was widely believed that in May the spirit of God was going to fall on America. The day came, and there were a hundred people in the field, waiting for the national revival. We want you to invade our lives, God, and to be yourself. Well, actually, ten years ago a friend took me to church and I did have a panic attack.

He stood to leave. I was a virgin till I was twenty-two. There were zero examples. Anything you hear me say about religion in my songs is incredibly hard-won. I have license to be even more judgmental about it than I am. This is me. There is something weirdly, cellularly conservative in me. You can only run so far. When Tillman dropped out of Nyack, in , he hitched a ride to Seattle with a drummer he knew. He donated plasma, worked construction, and washed dishes.

Seattle was soon to be the epicenter of an indie-folk renaissance—Neil Young acolytes in ponchos and heavy sweaters, with monkish beards and mulled wine.

The singing was pretty, the sentiment serious, the mood gentle, if a touch druidic—a post-grunge overcorrection, maybe. Soon, Tillman was writing his own disconsolate songs, recording them at night before taking the dawn shift at a local bakery. A demo tape reached Damien Jurado, a singer-songwriter with a small but reverent following, who asked Tillman to join him on tour.

There followed a series of J. Tillman records—eight in all, in about as many years—on a series of labels, plus occasional tours with other bands. People knew about J. Tillman, he had admirers, but despite the persistence nothing quite took. In , Fleet Foxes, an ascendant Seattle pop-folk troupe characterized by high harmonies, heavy reverb, and delicate, layered orchestration, asked Tillman to sign on as their new drummer.

He had the voice and the beard for it. The band was about to release its first album. Here was industry success: a global audience, a thriving partnership, real money, and even love, of a kind. Tillman was still making his own music and chafing at the supporting role. Singing such moonlit, almost twee material amid such acrimony felt counterfeit to him. In , while the band was in Japan, Tillman announced that the next show, in Tokyo, would be his last.

Toward the end of the second-to-last gig, he kicked over his drum set and stalked off the stage. Tillman and Emma recently moved to Laurel Canyon, to a two-bedroom house at the end of a cul-de-sac.

As spring went on, the album cycle called for rehearsals. Tillman gathered his band at S. Studios, on Sunset Boulevard, in preparation for an appearance at Coachella and then a round of theatre gigs. His description of the musical made it sound like a Robert Wilson fever dream—on acid. He was to appear onstage as Father John Misty playing the role of Josh Tillman, while the character of Father John Misty was to be played by a troupe of dancers.

They do horrible things to protect each other. And when they meet they die. In February, he had been aboard a flight with his choreographer, en route to New York to audition dancers. I was, like, I have to get off this plane. I passed what I wanted in terms of success miles and miles ago. Life is pure comedy? He pours a mug of tequila, lights another cigarette and talks about the messy conclusion of the I Love You, Honeybear tour.

At a festival in New Jersey on the day after Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination, he played just two songs and delivered a long, despairing monologue about the price of apathy. He coughs a bleak laugh. Something is wrong if that can happen. That kind of self-satisfied, self-aware apathy about the state of affairs in America somehow helped this whole thing go down.

On election night, Tillman was sitting on the fire escape of a bar in Los Angeles when he heard a voice from the television inside. Tillman mimics a horrified double-take. In that moment, satire died. I feel like the boy who cried wolf.

All this scepticism and cynicism that I have felt my whole life became so literal. Given this alarming new context, Tillman is now working out how to translate Pure Comedy to the stage. The show started with six Father John Mistys dancing around a bonfire. Now he is changing tack. Pure communication.

Look at my last album cycle, which started with me with a fresh haircut, yukking it up on David Letterman, and ended with me bedraggled, out of my mind with despair and panic, yelling at an audience about entertainment.

I would rather take that guy out into these shows than the guy at the beginning. Creatively, Tillman is on a roll. He has already written his fourth album and sketched out his fifth. Throughout our two-and-a-half-hour conversation, Tillman is constantly pausing, doubling back, amending, apologising, except when he talks about songwriting.

Then he sounds unstoppable. Music is the place where his whirring brain can find optimism, clarity and faith. The music is the times I can get my head above the water and make something out of it. All I can do is quote my own lyrics. Those are the most true things I will ever say. Everything else will just be bullshit. These are the songs that never end: 10 of music's most rewarding long cuts.

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