9th May 2012: Father John Misty / Playlist

Featured: Father John Misty - Fear Fun (Sub Pop)

Father John Misty – the moniker of former Fleet Foxes’ drummer J Tillman, has announced the release of a new album, ‘Fear Fun’. Produced by Fleet Foxes’ producer Phil Ek (who has also worked with Band of Horses and Modest Mouse), ‘Fear Fun’ has already spawned key single “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”, of which the video features comedienne Aubrey Plaza.

When discussing ‘Father John Misty’, Tillman paraphrases Philip Roth: “It’s all of me and none of me, if you can’t see that, you won’t get it’. What I call it is totally arbitrary, but I like the name. You’ve got to have a name. I never got to choose mine."

He goes on, “‘People who make records are afforded this assumption by the culture that their music is coming from an exclusively personal place, but more often than not what you hear are actually the affectations of an ’alter-ego’ or a cartoon of an emotionally heightened persona,” says Josh Tillman, who has been recording/releasing solo albums since 2003 and who recently left Seattle’s Fleet Foxes after playing drums from 2008-2011. “That kind of emotional quotient isn’t sustainable if your concern is portraying a human-being made up of more than just chest-beating pathos. I see a lot of rampant, sexless, male-fantasy everywhere in the music around me. I didn’t want any alter-egos, any vagaries, fantasy, escapism, any over-wrought sentimentality. I like humor and sex and mischief. So when you think about it, it’s kind of mischievous to write about yourself in a plain-spoken, kind of explicitly obvious way and call it something like ‘Misty’. I mean, I may as well have called it ‘Steve’”.

Musically, Fear Fun consists of such disparate elements as Waylon Jennings, Harry Nilsson, Arthur Russell, “All Things Must Pass,” and “Physical Graffiti,” often within the same song. Tillman’s voice has never been better and often sounds like Roy Orbison, “The Caruso of Rock”, at his most joyous, while the music maintains a dark, mysterious and yet conversely playful, almost Dionysian quality. Lyrically, his absurdist fever dreams of pain and pleasure elicit, in equal measures, the blunt descriptive power of Bukowski or Brautigan, the hedonist-philosophy of Oscar Wilde and the dried-out wit of Loudon Wainwright III.

Father John Misty

Playlist 9th May 2012 (HERE)


Cian Nugent - My War Blues [VHF 7”]
The Falls - Home [Hollywood EP]
Father John Misty - I’m Writing A Novel [Fear Fun]
**
Poor Moon - Illusion [Illusion EP]
Rusty Bear - Hollow Bird [Source To Sea]
Hollow Mirrors - Amber Eyes [S/T]
**
Father John Misty - Funtimes In Babylon [Fear Fun]
Helicon - Panic, Everything Is OK [Drinking Of You EP]
The Brian Jonestown Massacre - Panic In Babylon [Aufheben]
**
J. Tillman - My Proud Mountains [v/a Introducing Townes Van Zandt Via The Great Unknown]
Dawes - My Way Back Home [Nothing Is Wrong]
Father John Misty - This Is Sally Hatchet [Fear Fun]
**
Cave Country - Hard To Love [Just A Little Coal EP]
Melodie Nelson - Six Six Six {feat. Geoffrey O'Connor} [ 7”]
Jonathan Wilson - Morning Tree [B-Sides]