“Would you mind bringing me my dancing shoes?” Josh Tillman asks his wife and collaborator, Emma, as she walks into the green room. Tall, with striking eyes and a soothing demeanor, she returns moments later with a sleek pair of ankle-high black leather boots. Tillman eases into them, takes his wife’s hand and kisses her for a long, weightless five seconds. In a backstage area filled with crew, band members, and friends, they manage to have what appears to be a highly focused, private conversation. “Thank you,” he can be heard purring, but little else.
It’s shortly after 8 p.m. on a starlit January night, and Tillman—the 33-year-old singer/songwriter known best as Father John Misty—is minutes from playing the first in a run of three warm-up shows in Northern California, in support of his inspired new full-length, I Love You, Honeybear. Tonight, he is expected to fill Bret Harte Hall, a wooden hangar most frequently used for weddings held at Roaring Camp Railroads, a sort of theme park for locomotive and Wild West enthusiasts nestled amid the redwoods and mountains just seven miles north of Santa Cruz. Old train tracks loop past a covered bridge, the blacksmith’s house, and a fenced-in area dedicated to gold-panning clinics. “Isn’t this romantic, this engineered past-present-now?” Tillman asks, surveying his surroundings. “All that’s missing are the animatronic bears and country bumpkins with banjos—maybe I can ride one of the trains around, jump off, and run up on stage.”
The idea doesn’t seem at all outlandish. Since the release of his 2012 debut as Father John Misty, Fear Fun, Tillman has proven himself to be a personality unlike any other in indie rock. He is a self-described, self-styled satirist, provocateur, philosopher, and culture warrior—unafraid to casually reference Žižek, Kierkegaard, or Saint Francis of Assisi in conversation. He is also a ham-fisted, preternaturally gifted soul singer and equally self-aware sex symbol—some strange hybrid between Harry Nilsson, Tom Jones, and Will Oldham. Where Fear Fun was a wild odyssey through both Los Angeles and his subconscious, I Love You, Honeybear marks his first foray into matters of love, specifically his relationship with Emma. Though no less quixotic and absurd than what we’ve now come to expect—sample song title: “Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow”—the album is a vulnerable, deeply human affair that finds him grappling with a longtime nemesis: sincerity.
In the few years since his rebirth as Father John Misty, Tillman’s onstage dancing and well-documented taste for psilocybin have helped to cultivate a persona that’s increasingly at odds with who he is offstage. And right now, in this museum gift shop that’s doubling as his green room, he’s mentally preparing to share many of these new songs for the first time, with an audience that, he assumes, has come to watch him gyrate and maybe even lose his mind. It’s also the first time he’ll be singing them in full to Emma. “She and I have created a circumstance in which it’s safe to discuss everything, all this intense, deep-down shit,” he says. “But there’s an anxiety because I don’t know if I trust the world with my intimacies. These songs were written about our experience, now it’s time to universalize them.”
Prowling the lip of the stage in a black velvet blazer, Tillman takes on a leonine sensuality, his shoulders dropping and hips popping as he moves. Women shriek each time he falls to his knees or slowly runs his hand along the neck and waist of his mic stand. Couples of all ages slow-dance in the back of the room, beside a concession stand that’s filling the space with the perfume of popcorn and barbecue. Tillman wags his finger, puckers his lips, cracks jokes, and wipes the sweat from his palms across the foreheads of a few conflicted diehards in the front row. When a stuffed green frog is tossed to the stage early on, he hugs it tightly before punting it back to the audience, nearly clipping a few people in the head with his boot. “That frog,” he says, “broke my goddamned heart.”
The next night, at Veterans Memorial Hall in Sonoma, Emma is sitting in a new green room, dipping rice cakes in hummus while Tillman soundchecks. Bottles of local red wine are arranged on a bar behind her, awaiting the band. For the past several months, the couple have been making a concerted effort to abstain from drugs, alcohol, and caffeine in order to heighten bodily awareness and enhance consciousness. In the hour before this next set, they take to the center of the room to practice a number of yoga poses.
It’s a noticeable deviation from the debauchery that has come to be associated Father John Misty up until this point. No longer supplementing his diet with daily handfuls of psychedelics, Tillman’s writing has recently centered itself around a new form of clarity that he didn’t know existed until now. If he was interested in disorientation and distortion before, he’s firmly into “experimenting with orientation” at the moment. We walk outside to the parking lot so that Tillman can have his once-daily cigarette, and a pair of young women venture over to ask if they could take a photo with him. He agrees with a playful-but-sassy “yes.”
Emma and Tillman met in the parking lot of a country store in Laurel Canyon, not long after he'd left Seattle to live there in 2011. They exchanged niceties; it was not love-at-first-sight. But a few months later, she drove past his house as he was groggily climbing out of his van after a tour. “I was on a bender and asked her if she wanted to come hang out with a crazy person,” he recalls. They made slightly wary plans to meet for a drink at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood later that day. “By the second drink, I realized, ‘I am in love with this person and I want to see the world with this person,’” he says. “We were just speaking the same language.”
From that point forward, they’ve been close to inseparable. Emma accompanied him on 18 months of touring behind Fear Fun, and they’ve been partners in both self-destruction and self-discovery. The experience resulted in I Love You, Honeybear, an unlikely document of naked transformation. Written and recorded over the course of two years, from L.A. to their new home in New Orleans, it began as an assault on the institution of love songs as a whole. But Tillman eventually realized that love and intimacy could be as enlightening as anything he’d experienced before—if not more so.
“It’s like an antibody to narcissism and self-oblivion and not knowing yourself,” he says. “It relentlessly forces you to ask: ‘Why does this person love me? What is it about me that makes this person want to spend their life with me?’ And ideally, you start to see yourself through the eyes of this person instead of your own highly distorted perception of yourself.”
So Tillman set out to craft a worthy monument. But as he progressed, he found himself at war with himself. While working tirelessly on a song called “Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)”, he would come home in the early morning with a freshly recorded CD-R in hand to share with Emma, who was unimpressed. “She could sense that I was not fully committing,” he says. “I was trying to create this just kidding! bluster, trying to make this barter with myself, like, ‘I’ll let you be this exposed if you let me cloak these songs in giant, deranged, impenetrable Disney-orchestra arrangements.’ She told me that I needed to not be afraid to let the songs be beautiful. That that was a realization I needed to have.”
He would go through a few very different versions of the song—from a Phil Spector treatment with four bass lines to a “narcoleptic” country rendition that desperately lifted a string part from “My Girl”—until landing at the spare and guileless final recording. “On an atomic level, there’s this dialectic happening between doubt and faith,” Tillman says. “I had a real sense that there was a clock counting down the time, until I was going to expose this deep, sincere, profoundly excited, and joyful perspective on finding someone.”
Tillman grew up the oldest of four siblings in Rockville, Maryland, a remote suburb of Washington, D.C. His father worked in sales for Hewlett-Packard, and his mother was a homemaker who sang in the church choir. Both were devout Christians who ensured their house was “bursting at the seams with religious product” including family and faith-oriented music like Bullfrogs and Butterflies and Psalty the Singing Songbook. Forced to attend a number of religious schools, Tillman says he felt skeptical and embattled from the beginning. “I have this really vivid memory of my first day of Sunday School,” he says. “I asked the teacher, ‘Who made God?’ and she said, ‘Well, God’s just always been.’ I remember thinking, ‘Well, I don’t know about that.’”
As an adolescent, he found himself unable to relate to classmates speaking in tongues, or play along when teachers attempted to expel their demons—“mine would never come out,” he says. “All of that caused me to withdraw deeper and deeper into my own worldview, like, ‘I just need to put my head down until I’m fucking out of here and I can finally breathe.’” Though he grew up wanting to be a cartoonist (“‘The Far Side’ and ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ are my two biggest influences”) Tillman’s constant, nervous tapping on whatever was available led his parents to buy him a drumset in exchange for quiet and calm, at the suggestion of some concerned teachers.
Years later, after being forced to attend a Christian college in Upstate New York, he left school and the East Coast without saying a word to his family or professors. The destination was Seattle, where he slept on floors, sold plasma to make money, and distributed self-recorded demos to bartenders all over town. Throughout his 20s, he’d record a number of deliberately difficult and downcast folk albums under his own name, J. Tillman, many of which were disregarded outside of Seattle and Europe—particularly by his parents, who told him, “We don’t support this choice. Do not send us your music.” They wouldn’t speak again for nearly a decade.
But in 2008, as local folk-rock outfit Fleet Foxes quickly gained national renown, Tillman, a fan, was asked to join the band as a drummer. The transition—from installing acoustic paneling for a few dollars an hour one week to sitting in front of thousands at a festival the next—provided its own sort of culture shock. “How could you not think, like, ‘I’m saved?’” he says. “When I joined that band, I dreamed that if I could just play music for a living, I could be happy. But I really have to watch my miraculous thinking, because I was so disillusioned that it didn’t end up being this version of it that I had in my head. I didn’t feel enlarged by that experience. I felt diminished.”
What happened next is now the actual stuff of legend. On a solo trip along the Californian coast, Tillman linked up with a French-Canadian shaman and a course-altering dose of ayahuasca near Big Sur. He found himself naked, hallucinating in a large oak tree on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, and experiencing what he now describes as the first clear glimpse of himself—pretty good as far as rock’n’roll origin stories go.
“I started to recognize my voice coming through for the first time,” he says. “And all the conflict and the psychotic caveats and disclaimers and messy extraneous bullshit was, ironically, where all the clarity was: My spiritual gift is my skepticism and my cynicism and my sense of humor and my penchant for stirring shit up. That’s what I have to offer the world.” He resolved to pursue a creative vision based not on the prevailing archetype of how a singer/songwriter should look or sound, but one in service of a newfound sense of self: “I realized I’m the hero of my own tale.” He left Fleet Foxes, a decision that, at the time, looked like the equivalent of professional suicide, but one that has since proven to be more in line with quitting your lifeless day job to follow your bliss, a narrative most of us find tantalizing. He was awake.
Three years later, in September of 2013, Tillman married Emma in a ceremony of their own design in front of a small group of friends and family in Big Sur. The day before, he took her on the three-hour hike along the cliffs, to the same oak tree. They climbed up together and sat for a few hours, just talking. “When I was there the first time, there was nothing better in the world than being alone,” he says. “But you transform. Now, if I’m not with her, there’s something lacking. I didn’t see that one coming.”
The final warm-up show takes place in Chico, roughly 90 miles north of Sacramento, and the tour’s booker and promoter Britt Govea has circled it as“the one” thanks to the crowd’s potential freakiness. (The city is home to Cal State-Chico, named the country’s top party school by Playboy in 1987.) As a result, there’s a sense of genuine excitement leading up to the show; later on, Govea notes that Tillman “just has an uninhibited way of sticking a thermometer into the rectum of an audience and gauging its true heat.”
It being a Sunday night, downtown is quiet, save for a growing crowd of eager college students outside the El Rey Theatre, an old movie house-turned-concert venue originally built in 1905. After walking around the block, Tillman and I take a seat in the back of the theater, high above the stage. On either side of the room, there are identical murals of nymphs on tree-swings and meadows filled with giant mushrooms. Tillman had been thinking a lot about a conversation we had the night before, in Sonoma, about the dissonance between his private and public personas.
“I have all of these same questions that you do,” Tillman says to me, in the empty theater. “There are all of these seeming contradictions in my work: the lyrics are kinda brainy, but the execution is very body-oriented. To be really honest, I think a lot of what I do, on a subconscious level…”—he pauses—“I’m so afraid of being misunderstood that I don’t give people a chance to understand me in the first place.”
Last year, he attempted to defuse the dancing and the rampant requests to “take it off” by embarking on a solo tour that featured little more than him and a guitar (and Emma delivering props while disguised as a rabbit). When I ask if his persona on stage ever threatened to eclipse his art, Tillman laughs. “I’m like a beloved cartoon character, like Minnie Mouse, in some respect,” he says. “One part of my brain relishes that. It tickles me. But the irony of this whole enterprise is: I’m going to humanize myself and become larger than life? You’re talking to a guy who does everything in his power to get up onto stages and do this thing. I address questions of identity so openly, but there are different laws of physics onstage. There’s a completely different gravity. If a cop came onstage, I’d probably kick him in the balls.”
He has an idea. “Have you ever been onstage before?” he asks me. I shake my head. “I feel like if you came up and hit a tambourine or something, it’d be great perspective,” he says. “Some real Gorillas in the Mist shit. Because if what happens onstage could be explained, I don’t think it’d be that interesting. You should just see.”
So in the cramped green room at the El Rey, Tillman and his band prep me on how and when I’ll be playing tambourine: not long before the encore, during Fear Fun standout “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”. I spend the entirety of the set nervously wandering the room, observing what was easily the most engaged crowd of the tour, a frenzied collection of beards and dreadlocks and motorcycle jackets. Up in the back of the theater, exactly where Tillman and I had been sitting hours earlier, I see the faint outline of Emma’s face, of her long brown hair. I think back to something she told me the previous night, talking about her husband’s outsized performance guise. “I fucking love when people let go and are completely free in a moment and aren’t thinking self-consciously,” she said. “When I see him do that, it makes me so happy.”
But as the drums kick and I step onto the stage, she’s gone. All I can see is the first four or five rows of the audience, some of them singing to Tillman and some singing to themselves. Beyond that is only black. It feels like he said it might: unpredictable, like the surface of another planet. When technical difficulties force him to quickly abandon his microphone for another at stage left, I space-out completely while watching him, missing my cue to stop playing. And in that blurry, three-and-half minute spread, he is the same, but different. His movements are precise, almost surgical. He slices up the front of the stage, looking out at a void.
After the set ends, Tillman whistles as he walks backstage. “I feel like the crowd got something different than what they were expecting,” he says to his bandmates, who nod in agreement. I ask him what he thought they were expecting. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe some physical manifestation of YouTube videos or something,” he says. “What did you see?” I tell him how it felt unsettling to be so exposed but so blind. “Totally,” he says, excitedly. “It’s like that thing Norman Mailer said: The boxer never really has an opponent, they’re just fighting themselves. But that’s the human condition. It’s impossible to talk about without saying everything at once.”