April 02--The creation myth of Father John Misty is well-known to his followers. The singer-songwriter known as J. Tillman (aka Josh Tillman) ate mushrooms, climbed naked into a tree and had a revelation that basically said: Be yourself.
And so the darkly introspective J. Tillman transformed into the funny, profane yet sometimes oddly poignant, self-deprecating and brutally honest Father John Misty. Yes, it's a willfully ridiculous name, as Tillman will be the first to say. It's a name that "looks like a Christian puppet show has come to town." But it works.
As Misty, Tillman has released two albums, including the recent "I Love You, Honeybear" (Sub Pop), which do the seemingly impossible by tightroping the line between vulnerability and sarcasm. The latest album's grand subject is Tillman's courtship of and marriage to photographer Emma Garr. It's an unvarnished look at the jealousy, neediness and self-discovery Tillman had to confront within himself as the relationship blossomed. Portions of the album suggest black comedy, but the gags aren't done for cheap effect. They're often not just self-deprecating but revelatory. The effect is made even more jarring by the often lush orchestrations and arrangements, which touch on everything from '70s California pop to mariachi music.
It all started with the idea that "J. Tillman" was as much an alter ego as "Father John Misty" came to be. Coming out of a strict religious upbringing on the East Coast, Tillman moved to Seattle 12 years ago and put out eight J. Tillman albums over the next decade.
With J. Tillman, "I wanted to prove to myself prematurely that I was a serious artist and distance myself from how I grew up," the singer says. "A lot of my identity at the point was built around not being taken seriously to my satisfaction. You can insert 'laughs bitterly' after that. It was cathartic to purposely alienate this imaginary audience in my head. It was this joyless, austere thing. I was catering to an archetype, to some sort of cowboy myth of what I wanted to be in my head."
He became the tour drummer in Fleet Foxes but found himself creatively unsatisfied. His tree-climbing inner sojourn freed him up to write the songs that would become Father John Misty's 2012 debut album, "Fear Fun."
"When I played that album for people I knew, they said, 'This actually sounds like you.'" he says. "They had all been uncomfortably dealing with these J. Tillman records for a long time."
"Fear Fun" pushed the boundaries of what's acceptable in indie rock, a genre not known for its sense of humor. "There's a lot of what comes across as 18th-century Dutch people out there on the indie-rock landscape," Tillman says. "It all comes back to this persona thing. This realization that I had while naked in the tree is that I should just be myself. In that moment it meant writing and singing and performing the same way that I would while drunk at a party for five or six people. Writing the way I talk -- that never occurred to me before. The humor thing is dangerous, it's like preparing blowfish, you have to do it just right or people could die. It could be horrible. But that's how I think, that's how I express myself."
He says that his wife encouraged him to run with lyrics that he said bordered on "character assassination" for "I Love You, Honeybear" rather than hold back.
"I struck this Freudian bargain with myself that I'll let myself be this vulnerable if I can completely goop over these songs with impenetrable Disney arrangements," he says. "In some respects I was terrified. I was not ready to completely part ways with this sardonic thing that was working. It's only album two and I have to part ways with that already? I was coming home at 3 a.m., wild-eyed with these insane, just-kidding versions of these songs. And Emma was like, 'What are you doing?' She was the person who was straight with me. 'You can't be afraid to let these songs be beautiful.' It led to some intense fights in the Tillman-Garr household over songs of devotion I wrote for her. I'd be huffing around the house saying things like 'I'm the songwriter around here.' It was a process of peeling back layers of fear and self-doubt, and I couldn't have gone there without her encouragement."
It's an album that Tillman says he couldn't have made a decade ago, when he was grappling with his fear of intimacy and learning about himself. "I sometimes see kids in the front at my shows, and I'm thinking, 'You're not gonna have any idea what this song is about for 10 years,' just like I couldn't have," he says. "But I like that they dig the songs, that in some abstract way, they're just good songs. It's funny, they know there is something slightly deranged about them. As time goes by, the less deranged the songs become, I would like to think. These alarming things you hear upon first listen, on repeated listens or greater scrutiny, you realize it's really relatable. I hope it's the kind of music that people can keep digging into."
Greg Kot co-hosts "Sound Opinions" at 8 p.m. Friday and 11 a.m. Saturday on WBEZ-FM 91.5.
greg@gregkot.com
When: 8 p.m. Friday
Where: The Vic Theatre, 3145 N. Sheffield Ave.
Tickets: $25 (sold out);
jamusa.com
