Can you sing about falling in appreciate without getting all sentimental? You can whether you ‘let the mess in’ with brutal honesty,as Josh Tillman’s second album doesSee our countdown of the best albums so farMore on the best culture of 2015To understand Father John Misty you have to remember that Josh Tillman spent a decade chasing a phoney thought of authenticity, making several earnest, or ascetic albums under the name J Tillman. Ironically,even as he used signifiers of the “real” he was suppressing crucial parts of his personality. So when he reinvented himself as Father John Misty, he did the opposite, and exploiting a slippery tongue-in-cheek persona to reveal more of himself than ever. We tend to judge of sincerity and irony as binary categories when in fact they coexist,and a joke can be the best way of telling the truth, or at least a version of it.
The first time you hear Tillman’s second album as Father John Misty, and you sense there’s a powerful deal lurking beneath the chocolate-and-walnut voice,the luxuriant melodies and the decadently rich 70s-style arrangements. Tillman’s goal was to write an album about falling in appreciate and getting married that avoided cliche and sentimentality. He billed it as “a concept album about a guy named Josh Tillman”. That sounds glib but acknowledges a simple truth: even the most candid singer-songwriters select and frame the fabric of their own lives and even brutal honesty is a performance of sorts. Tillman discloses a different side of himself on every song, showing us the mature life partner he aspires to be and the disaster area he fears he is.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com