In roughly 24 hours, Josh Tillman will go on national TV and sing about having virtual-reality sex with Taylor Swift. As heard on his new song “Total Entertainment Forever,” the name-dropping lyric in question reads like commentary on rampant celebrity culture, Kanye West-style outspokenness, and humanity’s increasingly digitized sexuality. Or is it just pure, puerile provocation?
When I ask the singer-songwriter best known as Father John Misty what he means when he sings, “Bedding Taylor Swift/Every night inside the Oculus Rift,” he kinda shrugs. “Nobody else rhymes with Oculus Rift,” he offers, adding that his songs come from his subconscious and that every interview he’s done in the last year has included questions about the pop star. He’s more interested in talking about the seemingly inevitable backlash than the inspiration, anyway. “The internet is going to read, ‘King Indie Troll Father John Misty Slams Taylor Swift on SNL,’” he guesses.
The reaction around the web turns out to be a bit tamer than Tillman suspected. Perhaps his accumulation of meta stunts over the last couple of years has resulted in a kind of blasé numbness: That’s just Misty being Misty. But without his uncanny talent for taking the piss out of his targets—from streaming services that don’t care about sound quality, to an L.A. juice bar that’s a little too into crystals, to Ryan Adams’ stylized Swift covers, to indie bands doing car commercials—Tillman would skew far more toward killjoy philosopher than jester.
“People have been saying to me since I was a kid, ‘I can't tell if you’re being serious or not,’” he tells me. “Like how Eskimos have 12 words for ‘snow,’ I feel like I have 12 words for ‘funny’ in my mind.” And yet, he’s got higher ambitions for his music, beyond humor or cynicism. “Anything you’re hearing is the product of a commitment to beauty,” he says, straight-faced.
We’re about three and a half hours deep into an interview in the back of the Bowery Hotel lobby, a sort of human terrarium styled to look so perfectly moody you could scream. Tillman sits to the right of me on an ottoman sipping tequila sodas with a bamboo leaf sticking out, which a chipper waiter brings him every 45 minutes or so. He is as roguish as usual, in slightly high-water black pinstripe slacks, a long black coat, and a white shirt undone at least a button lower than anyone else’s, chest hair visible.
During our enjoyably meandering conversation, he always asks “Do you know what I mean?” to underscore his point (when he manages to reach one), perhaps because he’s convinced we’re exactly the same. Well, not me per se, but people who spend their days thinking and writing about music. “If music was made by some kind of critical theorist, it would sound like my music,” he says.
Pure Comedy, his third album, makes it clear that the 35-year-old’s commitment to provocation is stronger than ever. At times he strips back the record’s gorgeous orchestral instrumentation—courtesy of acclaimed composers Gavin Bryars and Nico Muhly—to reveal little more than a piano or an acoustic guitar, forcing listeners to consider his satire about, say, the dying man who checks his newsfeed one last time, or the ideological prisons that both liberals and conservatives have built around themselves, or the “radiant blandness” of streaming-service algorithms.
“A lot of it’s a pretty easy bait-and-switch, which I will admit that I enjoy,” he says of the hyper-modern reference points tucked inside his quietly epic folk-rock tunes, which could make you wonder how this music will hold up down the line. But it’s in service of a theme as classic as it gets, as Tillman tells me: “What I see celebrated largely as humanity is, like, a grotesque counterfeit.”
Father John Misty’s last album, 2015’s I Love You, Honeybear, centered around love and monogamy, in the wake of his own wedding. It was not exactly your typical honeymoon record, though. “I would lay awake at night, writing the think-pieces that were going to come out about that album because of what I had included in it—repugnant aspects of what goes on in the male psyche when they are dealing with intimacy,” he says. Honeybear’s “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment” is a song that captures the Misty dichotomy well. It’s a scathing judgement of a groupie-type, the punchline being that the narrator’s repugnance doesn’t stop him from having sex with her anyway; “I obliged later on when you begged me to choke ya,” he sings at the end of the song. Misty detractors thought it misogynistic; Misty fans might say that’s the point—that it’s an honest comment on misogyny. Tillman himself figured that controversial last line could be ruinous: “I thought, I am fucked, I am done, I am going to good-person jail forever.”
But he was largely embraced for the second Misty album, which followed a stint drumming in Fleet Foxes and a mountain of miserably earnest folk releases as J. Tillman. Of course, as with any divisive artist, his success was met with more haters. He seems to selectively let this bother him, like when he fixates throughout our interview on a colleague of mine who doesn’t care for his music, convinced that he could win her over if they spoke. He says his ideological steadfastness comes from “that child place,” though his childhood was anything but typical. Talking about his upbringing, he describes a very ugly home scene permeated with “the cult of Pentecostal, Messianic, Jewish, demon shit.”
“I grew up being told by psychotic adults that I was filled with sin, that my experiences didn’t matter, and that I would die before I reached adulthood because we were living in the end times,” he says. “I made a decision as a child that I would never let anyone tell me that I was invalid or inauthentic, or that my experiences were.” This belief allows Tillman to be neurotically self-aware enough to know everything that’s even vaguely #problematic about his lyrics—but to not let it stop him from releasing the songs anyway.
“When I listen to music, I don’t think about correct, prescriptive, how-to-live shit,” he says, taking a shot at political correctness in the music world. “I think that life is messy and that human beings are insane. In some way, music demystifies the parts of us that we’re most afraid of. When I was growing up, I was taught that a sexual thought equaled sexual deed, and the thing that really disturbs me about the current liberal environment is how eager liberals seem to impress upon you how infrequently they ever have an incorrect thought.”
He sees this heightened liberal morality manifesting in many things. For example, the first 90 minutes of our chat consist largely of critiques of this very website, which he says causes musicians “psychic trauma.” He never seems all that antagonistic about it, more matter-of-fact and disarmingly friendly—relieved, even, to air his complaints to an actual human instead of some faceless brand avatar. For a second I have to wonder if he’s trolling me, if anything he says can be believed. Somehow, he seems serious when he casually mentions, “You know, the idea of ruling the world was a patriarchal concept. I don’t really believe in the patriarchy.” When I prod, he doesn’t back down but is quite low-key about the whole thing, asking me not to be “willfully ignorant”—it’s just that “there’s always one master bigger than you.”
He would say that.
Pitchfork: Your lyrics seem very in-tune with the pitfalls of self-conscious internet culture. Do you think your worldview would be any different if you went completely offline?
Josh Tillman: Well, the fact of the matter is, I don’t look at the internet that often. I look at the internet when I Google myself, and that is a four-in-the-morning, wasted kind of scene. I mean, the number one rule on acid is: Don’t look in the mirror. But it happens enough that I know what people’s idea of me is. I pick up a lot of information from those isolated incidents where I’m just like, “Whoa!”
Does that tension make the weight of your own words feel more substantial to you—because you can witness people reacting to them?
The irony is that the people who hate me the most are the people who are exactly like me. I’m sorry, but if you are reading music blogs and tweeting about people like me, then there is no meaningful distinction between that person and me. My music asks people to think critically, so how can I get upset when people think about me critically? The thing is: I’m not bamboozled when people hate me. There’s nothing where I’m like, “Huh?” I am just incredibly insufferable to people, and at the same time, take up probably like .0000000000001 percent of their thought-life.
Hating someone takes more energy than simply ignoring them.
That’s true. Basically, I think that the culture needs to deal with this smug, ironic white-guy thing. It’s like liberals have now whittled down and self-perverted to nothing. You’re not allowed to be.
You wrote most of your new album a couple of years ago, but a song like “Two Wildly Different Perspectives,” which talks about “the hell that we create on both sides,” definitely feels apropos in our current political moment. When exactly did you stop working on the album?
It got mastered last October. But if your whole life you’ve been like, “People are insane, entertainment is deeply suspect, and politicians are goons,” and then an event happens that confirms all of those things literally overnight—it’s like some boy who cried wolf, but then the wolf actually shows up.
Did you read that New Yorker article about how we’re living in a simulation, with the Oscars flub and Trump? I hate that idea, because it’s basically the liberal equivalent of conservatives saying, “Well, the war in Iraq is happening because these events were all prophesied in the Book of Revelation—it’s no one’s responsibility, because we had no complicity in this.” You’re telling me that every economic, political, philosophical point from de-industrialization to the dissolution of unions, to Vietnam War images being projected into people’s houses, to the internet, to full-immersion celebrity culture adds up to anything other than Donald Trump? It’s like, “Yeah, blame the Russians!” But look at where we’ve been headed towards.
I feel like people are trying to shoehorn [Pure Comedy] into, “Well, we don’t need this guy who is cynical right now, who is just like, ‘Oh, I know it all! Rama-lama-ding-dong!’ What we need right now is Lorde music.”
The song “Leaving LA” has you recounting a formative bad memory associated with pop music—when you choked in a JCPenney while Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” played in the store. Do you remember the first bit of pop music that stuck with you in a good way?
Michael Bolton’s Soul Provider. I was in a carpool when I was in fourth grade, and my friend Andy Greenfield’s mom would listen to that album all the time. I loved it. I thought he wrote absolutely beautiful songs: “How can we be lovers if we can’t be friends?” Andy gave me a copy of it for my birthday because he knew that I loved it so much. But I had to hide it at school, I couldn’t even take it home. The other album was Peter Gabriel’s So; it was the only secular album that was allowed at home.
Michael Bolton wasn’t allowed but Peter Gabriel was?
Michael Bolton wasn’t allowed because of the fact that he was long-haired, and when he first started out he was kind of a hard rocker. But when you’re a child, it is possible to fall in love with music as a thing. I just liked hearing sequential sounds in premeditated modular movements. You start from there, then you begin the refinement process.
You helped write Beyoncé’s “Hold Up” and a couple of songs on Lady Gaga’s latest album. Do you still like pop music?
The more important question is: What does the word “like” mean?
To have a genuine reaction to something—an enjoyment that is not ironic.
OK, let me tell you as someone who made a grotesque foray into this world—because I have also been subjected to this music my whole life and wanted to know how the sausage was made just out of fucking morbid curiosity—there is nothing not wildly audience-tested and calculated about this fucking music. Exempting myself from this conversation, the people who get accused of being calculated? Psht! It’s truly a joke.
What do you mean by that?
Someone in the indie world is more likely to be accused by other indie people of being over-thinking, calculated psychos, when this whole fucking world of pop music has been [calculated]. It’s all this bourgeois bullshit. It’s neo-Orientalism. It’s basically like, “Since I’m special and exist in a place of pure exemption, then this thing that the normies like is the working man’s music.” There could not be a more potent form of soft bigotry than that whole thing.
I get to say this as someone who does not listen to that music in that way. If you asked me: “Have I ever enjoyed pop music?” Yes! Of course. If I am in a dance club and I am drunk and I’m with a beautiful woman or a group of friends, and a fun song comes on, that’s one thing. But you’re talking about people who are talking about this music, sitting at their desks, listening to 100 other songs that are indie songs and going, “I’m sick of this. This indie shit is too indie. Blegh!”
When you lionize pop music, you lionize the very thing that feminism purports to be against, which is a culture of exploitation and overcharging. Which is what cracks me the fuck up when you read these ridiculous puff pieces about how wonderful major-labor pop music is, and the whole fucking industry is run like you actually buy into the idea that that woman that’s onstage, wearing next to nothing, is powerful. Because that is like being a child.
So you probably won’t write for pop stars again then?
If you think that pop stars are anything other than prisoners, then you are fucking kidding yourself. I know them. They are crying for help in their music. We think that we’re doing the world a favor by recognizing the innate wholesomeness of this form of music, like, “Oh, I don’t know, it’s just fun! Something that was made to be liked!” But why do you think that Lady Gaga or Beyoncé would come to old Uncle Jerry over here for songs if they weren’t looking for something? If they weren’t like, “Get me away from these fucking psychos.” Both of them know I’m not running around looking for these gigs. I’ve just done co-writes with those two people. The only reason it happened is because people played them my music and then they asked me to write for them. It’s as simple as that. I have no interest in doing it.
I heard that you were offered an imprint with Interscope but then you re-signed with Sub Pop. Were you just not interested in a major label?
I considered it.
What did it come down to?
You strip the gravity of my choice to sign with Sub Pop when you think about it in these terms: “I’m just a fucking religious indie dude—I’m a Shiite, and major labels are Sunnis, and I would never fucking do that kind of thing.” No, of course I considered it, I’m a human.
There’s this thing of “it’s time to go to the next level,” where there’s a whole wave of indie bands with records coming out this year that have signed to major labels. I met with all the majors, and it’s like that line in “Leaving LA” when I say, “national treasure now, his major label debut.” That song is all about self doubt, because if you’re going to make a record about capital-H Humanity, you have to have something at the center of it that’s like a portrait of a human being. I don’t have any experience to draw from other than my music career, because if you take away my music from me, all you have left is a mustache and a bad attitude. Even though I know it’s going to be interpreted as me self indulging, it is the substance of my life, for good or for bad.
Being about those latent middle-class values about graduating up to a major label is something I had to confront. I tried to think about it terms of pragmatism—chapters of life and shit. I realized that you can only make these decisions based on ideals, that in this world you believe in things or you don’t. There was a time when getting signed to Sub Pop was a dream beyond dreams. I don’t want to move forward. This world has shitty values, and it tells you that you just have to take your shit and be ruthless. [Sub Pop] is like my family—it means something to me. I know that people will be like, “It’s so pretentious to want to stay on an indie label,” but they don’t know shit. If I had signed to Interscope and was at “SNL” surrounded by eight new Steves, and all my friends weren’t here, it would actually mean nothing.
You wouldn’t view it as your own victory in some way?
No, it’d be like, “This is a career move to sell more records.” If you don’t have family around you, then it just becomes about this empty Sisyphean narrative of pushing the rock a little further up the hill. Who the fuck cares? I did the work and I finished my record. Everything since then, I’m just taking it as it comes. The progression and the success is in the creative survival. Everything else is about family.
That’s a clearer line than a lot of musicians seem to have about business.
A lot people make shitty music, and there’s so much space in this world for shit music because we don’t have values. Do you want to know why things like the fucking Pepsi-sponsored Super Bowl halftime performances or these disgusting, cross-branded promotions exist? It’s because that whole industry is now based on people not writing their own music. When some lizard person comes to you and says, “Why don’t you let us put Doritos on this thing that you struggled and hated yourself and fought for to wrench out of the nothingness?” You’re like, “You must be insane.”
But let’s say you did the major-label imprint and used it as some kind of opportunity to fuck shit up from the inside—
I don’t believe in fucking shit up from the inside. That means you have enough faith in the system that it can be perfected in some way. I don’t believe in that system, so I don’t have any petulant desire to toy with or antagonize it.
When the Grammys “discover” you an album from now, which version of your fake name do you think will become a meme, a la Bonnie Bear?
It won’t be interesting. It won’t be funny. It’ll be Papa John Murphy. “Like the pizza guy?” Yep.