I think that for that period of time I was looking for a painless existence.
I was trying to embody something that just wasn't me. I was just addicted to some fucking archetype. “To be honest, it was sort of surreal to plunge the knife into that 10-year body of work and just be like, ‘This is over, and something else has to grow where all of this is going to die.’ I'm ambivalent because I have some empathy for 21 year old me. “I've never been particularly sentimental about the past,” says Tillman of his early body of work. His first album under the new moniker, 2012’s Fear Fun, proved to be a kind of sleeper hit, eventually charming its way onto lots of critical “best of” lists and turning Tillman into the indie-rock equivalent of a rock star.
Though he was essentially a hired gun in the band with little creative input (he eventually jumped ship from the band in 2012), the experience of touring the world emboldened Tillman to rethink his own creative ambitions. It wasn’t until he took on the job of drummer in Seattle indie-folk band Fleet Foxes in 2008 that his musical life began to radically change. It was there that he would eventually spend the better part of the next decade quietly releasing eight full-length records of earnest singer/songwriter fare under the name J. Having fled from the conservative confines of his evangelical childhood in Rockville, Maryland, Tillman eventually landed in Seattle. He spent the better part of his twenties trying, in various guises, to make a name for himself as a songwriter. I'm like, ‘Wow, you're not even going to know what these songs are about for another 10 years or something.’”Īdult-sized attention might be a relatively new thing for Tillman, but he is hardly new to the music business. “I know it sounds pedantic to say that, but at the same time it's shocking to me how many young kids are at these shows. “I'm making music for adults,” says Tillman, calling from a tour stop in Lawrence, Kansas.
More importantly, Tillman is making the admirable effort to actually speak the language of grown ups. He makes folk-inflected pop music that is both sprawling and, at times, incredibly intimate. As a result, Tillman has become a kind of sex symbol for the indie-rock world-playing the part of the charmingly erudite louse that sometimes says bad things but ultimately means well, a jerky romantic who wears his heart on his sleeve and isn’t afraid to talk about fucking. Bored to tears of the sensitive man-with-an-accoustic-guitar trope that felt unavoidably inherent in being a singer/songwriter, Tillman abandoned his previous approach and rechristened himself with the ministerial moniker of Father John Misty, a kind of alter ego that provided him with a creative rebirth. After years of toiling in relative obscurity and touring in the shadows behind other more established artists, the 34-year old musician found himself at an impasse. For singer and songwriter Josh Tillman-better known these days by his musical nom de plume, Father John Misty-the desire to explore the intricacies of human connection has proven revelatory. At a time when so much popular music seems to be literally made for children it’s refreshing to see an artist that is audacious enough to take on the messy business of complicated, adult-sized relationships.
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