Father John Misty is the nom de soft rock of one Joshua Tillman, a.k.a. J. Tillman, ex-drummer for Fleet Foxes and author of eight largely ignored and invariably joyless solo albums of pious folk rectitude. Those LPs remain a well-kept secret. And then one day in 2010, he blew up his life. Killed off J. Tillman, quit the Fleet Foxes, let his raging id off the short leash it had been kept on since his tormented childhood trapped in a fundamentalist Christian house of pain. Instead of muting his wicked sense of humor and bottomless appetite for the absurd, he turned it up to 11. He changed his stage name to Father John Misty. Threw his guitar and a family-size sack of magic mushrooms into the van, and set the controls for the heart of Babylon. Fear Fun (Sub Pop), Father John Misty’s debut, came out a year ago, and after 12 months of trippin’-balls touring, inclusion on innumerable year-end best-of lists and a lot of swooning word of mouth on social media, the album has become the sleeper hit of the year. Tillman will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our recent print cover story on him.
Tillman: Arguably one of the most brilliant artistic minds of the 20th century takes on easily one the most mind-numbingly boring and convoluted texts of all time. Fortunately, all the female characters have those bulbous “Crumb butts,” which lessens the pain of dubious tales of morality from the Bronze Age considerably. I kept hoping Crumb would snap halfway through and have Mr. Natural on a stepstool fucking a headless Gnostic angel, but no dice. SPOILER ALERT: Mizraim begot the Ludites, and the Anamites, and the Lehabites, and the Naphtuhites, and the Pathrusites, and the Casluhites, and the Caphtorites, and Canaan begot Sidon, and Heth, and the Jebusite, and the Amorite, and the Girgashite, and the Hivite, and the Archite, and the Sinite, and the Arvadite, and the Zemarite, and the Hamatite.
Video after the jump.
