JOSH TILLMAN is King of the Trolls. After leaving Seattle mountain-monk band Fleet Foxes, Tillman moved to Los Angeles and underwent a grand transformation. In 2012 he released his solo debut, Fear Fun, under the moniker Father John Misty. But Misty isn’t just a name, it’s a character: a suited prophet who seems to fancy himself some sort of obnoxious cultural savant, with a moral compass locked on true north and x-ray vision that can permeate any societal structure, straight through to the feeble foundations of our corrupt institutions.
Since then it’s remained largely unclear where Misty stops and Tillman begins, especially on his 2015 follow-up, I Love You, Honeybear—a record that vacillates between genuine-sounding professions of love and sour assessments of humankind. “My ambition, aside from making an indulgent, soulful, and epic sound worthy of the subject matter,” he explained in a 1,680-word self-penned promotional bio, “was to address the sensuality of fear, the terrifying force of love, the unutterable pleasures of true intimacy, and the destruction of emotional and intellectual prisons in my own voice. Blammo.”
During a rant at a New Jersey music festival last month, Tillman referenced a song off the album, “Bored in the USA,” in which he sings about capitalism, materialism, and the passage of time. “I always thought that it was going to look way more sophisticated than this when evil happened,” he said. “When the collective consciousness was so numb and so fucking sated and so gorged on entertainment… How entertaining should this be right now, with a fucking battleship in the background and this shit on TV, how fucking fun should this be? How fucking fun can it be? Can it be real in any sense? Like, I cannot play ‘Bored in the USA’ for you right now. No no no, because guess what? I soft-shoed that shit into existence by going, ‘No no no, look over here, it’ll never actually be that bad because we’re too smart.’ And while we were looking in that direction, stupidity just fucking runs the world because entertainment is stupid! Do you guys realize that?”