Before really speaking with Josh Tillman, the former drummer for Fleet Foxes who has emerged as the mysterious and entertaining Father John Misty, I’m not sure how to refer to him. Do I call him John? Or your worship? Or dad, even?
“Ooh, I like dad,” Tillman says, breaking the tension. “That would add a real interesting spin on this interview. You can just call me Josh. That would be fine.”
Tillman’s debut as Father John Misty is called Fear Fun, and it was released this past May on Sub Pop. The LP is a bold debut that recalls the clever, hazy pop of George Harrison and Harry Nilsson. Among the most striking aspects of his songwriting on Fear Fun is just how self-aware and playfully meta some of the songs are.
In things like “Now I’m Learning to Love the War,” Tillman writes about his process as an artist in a very direct way that few others employ, discussing the ecological impact of manufacturing albums in a droll, matter of fact manner.
“The album is a pretty intimate excavation of myself and the creative process,” he explains. “That song is not like a message song or a ‘save the environment’ song. There are a few big red herrings that might make it appear that way but ultimately it’s about complicity and acknowledging the disparity between the way people regard the purity of the creative process and some of the realities that predicate it. They’re pretty disparate and kinda hilarious and the song is a moment of becoming an observer of one’s self.”
“Living in the Western world requires no small degree of ideological mystification,” he continues. “Though you know something’s one thing, you have to call it another just in order to sleep at night. I guess the most interesting truths to me are the ugliest ones.”
The fourth wall crumbles some more in songs that Tillman populates with real figures like Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, Jean-Paul Sartre, Heidegger and more. It’s an ear-catching narrative device and, if it’s a gimmick, it’s done charmingly enough. In the song “I’m Writing a Novel,” for instance, Father John Misty rides a dune buggy with Young who says, “You’re gonna have to drown me down ‘on the beach’ if you ever want to write the real.”
“As an artist, especially at this point in time, there’s such a wealth of previous mythology to reference,” Tillman explains. “It’s easy to fall into this trap of, ‘Well, here’s the algorithm, here’s the course laid out in front of me.’ Or also the idea that the best you can ever be is some approximation of your hero. So for me, getting to this point as an artist, it’s like ‘F--k my heroes. I don’t wanna be my f--king heroes.’ So that’s why you have to kill that hero, so you don’t get stuck.”
This idea of escaping pigeonholes and indulging restlessness, almost as a muse, even led Tillman to leave the drum throne in Fleet Foxes while they were arguably at the height of their popularity.
“The unsexy reason is, being in a band like that takes a lot of time and energy and when you have your own interests combating for attention, it just became untenable at some point,” he admits. “How can you make an album about discovering one’s personal truths and not live that truth? I had some realization about what I really wanted to do and that’s to write and give myself the time to do it.”
It was a gutsy move for Tillman to make and now that Father John Misty has legs, he has no regrets.
“At the time, I thought I put myself on the road to ruin and that I was gonna suffer for my art,” he chuckles. “Anyone who’s serious about what they do wants to give it the dignity that they suspect that it deserves.”
See Father John Misty live in Vancouver on Sept. 22, Victoria on Sept. 23, Montreal on Oct. 26 and Toronto on Oct. 27.
Related:
Drive Stories Thursday, September 20
Talkin’ Bob Dylan: Father John Misty on ‘Visions of Johanna’