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 Post subject: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 9:27 am 
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Woah, this thing is amazing.


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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 9:29 am 
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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 9:36 am 
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http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/f ... ear-review

Father John Misty: I Love You, Honeybear review – beautiful songs of unclear meaning

5 / 5 stars

It’s hard to tell where Joshua Tillman ends and his alias Father John Misty begins – but perhaps it doesn’t matter when the songs sound this good

A strange thing happens three quarters of the way through Bored in the USA, the first single from former Fleet Foxes drummer Joshua Tillman’s new album under his Father John Misty alias. The song begins life as a downbeat piano ballad. The lyrics find Tillman in the midst of the kind of existential crisis that has plagued confessional singer-songwriters for decades, gloomily ruminating on the mindlessness of modern-day life, the pointless acquisition of objects and the multifarious ways in which the daily reality of a relationship fails to live up to an idealised notion of love: “I’ve got a lifetime to consider all the ways I grow more disappointing to you as beauty warps and fades, and I suspect you feel the same.” It works in the way ballads by confessional singer-songwriters usually work: the tune reels the listener in, anyone similarly mired in gloom and confusion nods along to the words, seeing themselves reflected. But then, just after the first chorus, a canned-laughter track appears: every time Tillman enumerates one of latterday America’s problems – the sub-prime mortgage crisis, an over-reliance on prescription drugs, the failure of the education system – the virtual audience bust a gut.

Perhaps understandably, reviews of the single reflected a degree of uncertainty as to what this all meant. Depending on who you listened to, the song was either a searing satire of white male privilege, a painfully honest account of the mundane problems that beset people’s lives, or a number drawn from the bulging file of unlovely songs in which rock stars loftily mock ordinary people for having to worry about things like mortgages. Bored in the USA could quite conceivably be any of those things: at the risk of sounding like someone hedging their bets, you do get the feeling that kind of uncertainty is precisely the response Tillman is after.

For a rock or pop artist, adopting a persona is a famously risky business. It seems to create an unmanageable degree of confusion, usually among the audience, as when the online indignation machine cranked into life over the disparity between the singer Lizzy Grant and the character Lana del Rey, but sometimes in the artist themselves. Pretending to be someone you’re not for extended amounts of time causes the line between fiction and reality to blur, with varying results. There are the preposterous cases – here let us consider both Bryan Ferry, who seems to have spent the last few decades actually being the kind of ennui-laden posho his songs once expertly parodied; and the frontman of Swedish metallers Abruptum, a man called Tony who insisted on being referred to as “It” because he was “too evil to be human”. But others are actively troubling, as it was with the baleful figure of David Bowie in the mid-70s. But whatever the warnings from history, Tillman appears to spend I Love You, Honeybear wilfully reveling in the confusion between himself and Father John Misty, the character he unveiled on 2012’s Fear Fun.

That album depicted Misty as an amoral, drunk and drugged-out lothario adrift in a Ralph Steadman cartoon of LA. I Love You, Honeybear, by contrast, is billed as “a concept album about Josh Tillman”, on which heartfelt paeans to true love, inspired by Tillman’s recent marriage – “I can hardly believe I found you and I’m terrified by that,” he sings on When You’re Smiling and Astride Me – jostle for space with songs apparently written in character, including The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt., a savage evisceration of an “insufferable” female acquaintance. The latter is packed with extremely funny lines – “She says, ‘like literally’ music is the air she breathes … I wonder if she even knows what that word means – well it’s ‘literally’ not that” – but so unremittingly cruel and unpleasant in tone that it’s genuinely hard to listen to. Sometimes he seems to shift from character to reality mid-song. At others, it’s entirely unclear who’s talking, or whether the listener is supposed to take the litany of misdeeds in The Ideal Husband as the kind of agonisingly personal admission at which John Grant excels, or something more knowing and arch. “When can we talk with a face, instead of using all these strange devices?” asks True Affection; well, quite.

This is all hugely entertaining. There are moments when, if you’re listening closely, the constant lyrical shifts from caustic irony to plaintive declarations of love can really knock you for six, not least on the title track. It’s all fertile material for rock critics and amateur psychologists to pick apart. But oddly, it’s not central to the album’s success. From the chaotic bombast of the title track and The Ideal Husband to the spluttering synthpop on True Affection, all these songs would sound fantastic even if the lyrics bored you stiff. Tillman’s writing stirs together a lot of influences currently hip with a certain kind of US singer-songwriter: you can hear traces of John Lennon’s once-reviled mid-70s albums; Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman haunt the vaguely showtune-like Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow; while the aforementioned chaotic bombast is audibly inspired by Phil Spector’s production on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. But the artist I Love You, Honeybear most clearly recalls is early-70s Elton John. You can hear him in the way Tillman phrases his vocals, but mostly it’s in his melodies, which frequently sound like they’ve walked straight off Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or Honky Chateau: it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to picture When You’re Smiling and Astride Me or Holy Shit being delivered from somewhere between an enormous pair of light-up glasses and an outfit largely comprised of sequins and marabou feathers.

However complex and torturous the thinking behind the lyrics gets, there’s an effortless ease about the tunes that bear them. It’s easy to stop worrying about who’s supposed to be talking to you, what they mean and indeed whether they mean it or not when Holy Shit glides to its delirious climax, or indeed when the chorus of Bored in the USA arrives, short-circuiting the soaring strings with a doleful, resigned shrug. For all the layers of irony on I Love You, Honeybear, the biggest irony of all might be that such an ostensibly knotty and confusing album’s real strength lies in something as prosaic and transparent as its author’s ability to write a beautiful melody – whoever he is.


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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 9:38 am 
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http://www.forfolkssake.com/reviews/310 ... -honeybear

Album | Father John Misty – I Love You, Honeybear

by Dominic J Stevenson • 6 February 2015

The role of Fleet Foxes drummer and backing vocalist was never enough to satisfy Joshua Tillman. But there were only a few hints in the solo records he used to put out in his own name as to the scale of the vision he would unleash once he took on the persona of Father John Misty. His second record under that name makes plain his ability to construct and execute stunning songs with an uncommon warmth. It drips with charm which makes you forget his past identities and think only of his importance as a songwriter and artist in the here and now.

From the gripping and dramatic opener, title track ‘I Love You, Honeybear’, Misty has his claws in you. It’s a spellbinding and beautiful opening. His voice is racked with emotion, the strings soar, and the atmosphere feels epic. He gives the listener a colossal aural hug and sets things up perfectly for the next ten tracks. His music feels warm but there is ample darkness too. The accompanying music supporting him is wonderfully balanced and sensitive to the messages and the voice that carries them, but it is the lyrics, the way they are delivered and the lovely melodies that make this record such a stunning achievement. It feels so simple and timeless it could have been made by Neil Young in one of his finest moments. There is certainly a sense of that golden American folk pop sound, though it sounds equally of 2015.

The title of ‘When You’re Smiling And Astride Me’ tells you it’s a fairly intimate number, and the song is sweet and tender – one to get plenty of people swooning. The guitar solo notes are few, but pierce amazing holes through which bursts of light appear. It’s hopeful, soulful, utterly gorgeous. Just as beautiful are the fuzzy guitar solo at the end of ‘Ideal Husband’ which hurtles the track towards its own end, and the clarity of Tillman’s voice on ‘Bored In The USA.’ This is one of the sharpest and most in-focus moments of the whole record. Powerful lyrics speak of how time and its passing affects us. It’s easy to fall in love with something we can all understand so easily. His simple play on Springsteen’s classic title is backed up with stories of how America’s upper crust lord it up over those that matter now. An old familiar story is delivered with great humour by Tillman.

With January barely behind us it already feels as though we’ve heard a number of records worthy of our end-of-year lists. It’s unusual to have been spoilt by such a wealth of good music only five weeks in, but I Love You, Honeybear undoubtedly fits into such a category. It’s edging towards a classic, and it opens up a world of possibilities for a man who is clearly still growing, finding his feet, and leaving behind the band that made him famous in the first place.


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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 9:45 am 
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http://consequenceofsound.net/2015/02/a ... honeybear/

Father John Misty - I Love You, Honeybear

Love and the apocalypse have never been so intertwined. Being open and vulnerable requires the dissolution of the ego, a razing of the scaffolding of self-importance. Father John Misty’s work hinges on the difficult truth that he must level himself to allow room for another. Over its 45 beautiful but tortured minutes, I Love You, Honeybear weaves a complicated narrative of love gained at the expense of the individual.

Josh Tillman, the man behind the moniker, gained success as the harmonizing drummer for Fleet Foxes (which ended in disaster), but his solo career as J. Tillman was marked by the self-serious tones of For Emma, Forever Ago without all the “fun.” In a legendary act of self-mythologizing, Tillman took a journey down the West Coast and, propelled by copious hallucinogenics, created the Father John Misty persona. It was an affectation that perhaps began in farce, but soon found surprising depth, range, and success that Tillman’s solo work never achieved.

Separating Father John Misty, the persona, from Josh Tillman, the person, is convoluted and unnecessary. But it’s worth noting that in the interim since 2012 debut Fear Fun, Tillman married his current wife. It’s impossible to listen to this record and not hear the jagged elements of self-realization, as if the “mask” of Father John Misty is used to speak in honest ways he couldn’t express under his own name.

With Father John Misty, nothing is ever as it seems. Even when he’s declaring true devotion, as he does on opener “I Love You, Honeybear”, rising strings and soaring harmonies shoot emotional energy through the line “My love, you’re the only one/ I want to watch the ship go down with.” Yet in this earnest moment, he cannot express his love without framing it in the darkest circumstances imaginable.

Father John Misty borrows liberally from his Laurel Canyon forebearers (chiefly The Eagles and The Flying Burrito Brothers) and also infuses sonic elements from a diverse range of influences. There is no detachment as mariachi horns rise out of the mix on “Chateau Lobby #4 (In C for Two Virgins)”, further adding to the song’s celebratory tone. String arrangements, snarling guitar solos, and heavenly choral harmonies rise and fall throughout, as tremendous care has been put into fusing these layered arrangements with the album’s complicated emotional weight.

Tillman’s writing, already literate and caustically funny, has progressed as well as his arrangements. Twinkling bells, classic pop ooh-aahs, and a breezy melody mask the nasty humor of “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment”, three and a half minutes of excoriating joke-making at the expense of a manic pixie dream girl. In this unwavering attack, Tillman saves the most brutal insults for himself as he mocks his own sexual inadequacy. Is he truly disgusted by his self-involved paramour, or is he lashing out in response to his own insecurity?

Among the album’s sweeter love songs, the sentiment of “Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow” is rooted in a declaration of love but framed in the negative. Something like revelation comes courtesy of a near-death by overdose on “Strange Encounter”. After the overdose, an emotionally sober Tillman presents his most personal statement with the fiery “Ideal Husband”, where the narrator confronts his soon-to-be-spouse and reveals the skeletons in his closet — listing his flaws, weaknesses, and misdeeds. As the song erupts into the album’s emotional climax, he questions his suitability as a life partner in a moment of startling honesty, leaving a frozen uncertainty about whether we should laugh, cheer, or weep.

Tillman never misses an opportunity to mock and undermine the overarching institutions of our lives: capitalism, religion, and the contemporary culture of love. “Bored in the USA” and “Holy Shit” are among his simplest, largely acoustic compositions, but this space lets his tremendous voice and lyricism take center stage. “Bored in the USA” offers several verses that attack the social ideal that dictates we all pair up and watch each other disintegrate. The album’s emotional nadir is reached on “Holy Shit”, in which the narrator arrives at the conclusion: “Love is just an institution based on human frailty/ What’s your paradise got to do with Adam and Eve?/ Maybe love is just an economy based on resource scarcity/ But what I fail to see is what that’s got to do with you and me.”

Father John Misty gives no lasting answer to the question of whether love can survive modern self-involvement. As the album winds toward its finale, Tillman fantasizes about abandoning society so he and Honeybear can reside in peace. But leaving everything behind, good or bad, is not a solution — just an escape. In the end, Tillman acknowledges this too, pointing out that his brush with redemptive love is itself just a chance encounter.

Tillman makes a fool of himself for our entertainment, but a deep truth is rooted in all his caricatures and jokes. Modern man, as presented by Father John Misty, is a deeply conflicted entity all too comfortable lashing out in anger and irony when confronted by his own insecurity — and simultaneously deeply desirous of the solace provided by love and affection.

Essential Tracks: “Strange Encounter”, “Ideal Husband”, and “Holy Shit”


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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 12:42 pm 
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Yep, I think it's pretty great too. First two tracks are my favorites right now but I haven't listened to it that much yet.


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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 1:32 pm 
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One day you'll pick up a 2nd adjective in your journalistic travels, zeb.

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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 1:35 pm 
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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 1:38 pm 
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I thought this dropped Monday?

Edit: Tuesday?


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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 1:45 pm 
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sometimes on the internet, music leaks early.


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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 1:51 pm 
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I nevah!


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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 3:03 pm 
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This is on my radar soon. I have heard nothing but good thigs from my friends. I really enjoy Fear Fun. I'm late to the game with FJM. He is in Omaha in April. I should probably get tickets.

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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 7:41 pm 
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Iprefertheiroldstuff wrote:
One day you'll pick up a 2nd adjective in your journalistic travels, zeb.


I try and keep things simple for the kiwis on the board, soma.


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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 7:42 pm 
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Mike wrote:
Yep, I think it's pretty great too. First two tracks are my favorites right now but I haven't listened to it that much yet.


The last four are excellent, Mike, especially The Ideal Husband.


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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 8:31 pm 
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zeb wrote:
Mike wrote:
Yep, I think it's pretty great too. First two tracks are my favorites right now but I haven't listened to it that much yet.


The last four are excellent, Mike, especially The Ideal Husband.


Ha, that one and "Holy Shit" stood out to me on my last listen. Any opinions on his lyrics? I'm not a very lyrics centric person myself but his lyrics seem kind of strange to me sometimes. Lyrics like these for example:
Of the few main things I hate about her, one's her petty, vogue ideas
Someone's been told too many times they're beyond their years
By every half-wit of distinction she keeps around
And now every insufferable convo
Features her patiently explaining the cosmos
Of which she's in the middle


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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sat February 07, 2015 11:36 pm 
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love these guys

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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sun February 08, 2015 2:35 am 
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Well shit! I thought this dropped in the states on Feb 3rd! Went to buy it on iTunes but nope....not out until 2-10. Oh well, something to look forward to on Tuesday. Love what I have heard so far though.

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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sun February 08, 2015 3:28 am 
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I'm pretty excited to check this out, team.


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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Sun February 08, 2015 4:36 am 
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I got fix to see Father John on Easter Sunday. Awesome artwork on the vinyl.

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 Post subject: Re: Father John Misty | I Love You, Honeybear
PostPosted: Mon February 09, 2015 10:26 am 
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'When you're smiling and astride me' sounds like Pink Floyd in some parts with that electric guitar sound.


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