This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Father John Misty is — in the best possible way — kind of a throwback. For one thing, there’s the stage name, which could have belonged to a gospel hollerer or a folk troubadour from any time in the mid-1900s. Then there’s the beard, which is full and luxuriant and ever so seventies. And the attitude: laconic, barbed, not quite kind.
Also, obviously, the music. FJM (it feels weird to call him “Misty”; his real name is Josh Tillman) makes records that have an acoustic warmth you might hear on a decades-old 12-inch discovered in a charity shop, bought on the strength of its battered sleeve and fallen in love with on first listen. Only occasional electronica flourishes and a few of his lyrical preoccupations give his true era away.
My first contact with him came in 2008, when he was the drummer and backing singer in indie-folk outfit Fleet Foxes. Their self-titled debut, which sounds like a plainsong collective dropped in the delta, was the wistful soundtrack to a sad winter of train journeys to a job I hated and considered the (temporary) wreck of my ambitions.
That was before FJM was FJM, and the gulf between his solo stuff and Fleet Foxes tells you everything about why he would need to invent an alter ego. Both are rootsy in sound, it’s true. But Fleet Foxes were deeply, insistently sincere and, it must be conceded, not very interested in sex. A lot of their songs seemed to be about trees.
Tillman’s ambitions stretched in a sharper direction. From his FJM debut, Fear Fun (2012), he established himself as a satirist of 20th century love and life. The FJM persona gave him a stance from which everything could be probed and mined for absurdities. Including himself: several of his songs refer to “Josh Tillman”, the self he’s holding at semi-ironic bay.
There are antecedents you can point to. There’s a bit of Loudon Wainwright III in his gift for stashing a savage observation inside a swooning piece of pop music. Ben Folds refined a similar stance on relationships: equally, and wittily, brutal about male weakness and female perfidy.
What makes FJM especially transfixing, though, are the unforgiving lurches between bruised romance and shocking cruelty. “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt.”, from his second album I Love You, Honeybear (which came out whilst I was working another job that made me depressed) is a character assassination that comes dressed as a love song.
In a soundscape of chiming guitars and twinkling percussion, Tillman croons what ought to be an ode to a girlfriend. Except it begins with this couplet: “Oh I just love the kind of woman who can walk over a man/ I mean like a goddamn marching band.” After enumerating everything that’s wrong with her, it ends: “I obliged later on/ When you begged me to choke you.”
Trust me: hearing that whilst picking over dismal spreadsheets, my little feminist eyes nearly popped out of my skull. Is it bad taste to joke about violence in bed? Yes, of course. But it’s an incredible way to land the song, which dances slyly through the contempt that animates so many straight relationships.
In the end, you can argue about which of the couple comes over worst. The woman is vain, precocious and not as clever as she thinks (“Someone’s been told too many times they’re beyond their years”). The narrator is even more appalling, the kind of man who’d have sex with a woman he despises.
New album Mahashmashana might be his most stinging collection yet, a chamber-pop gravestone
If nothing else, it was a relief to hear a man admit choking isn’t just a harmless consensual kink. That’s the kind of thing FJM is supremely good at locating: the uncomfortable truth on the other side of the bland consensus.
New album Mahashmashana might be his most stinging collection yet, a chamber-pop gravestone on the last decade of politics. “Mental Health” is a beautiful string-driven ballad that opens: “In the panopticon/ They never turn the cameras on/ The guards and the narcs went home/ They do a fine enough job on their own.”
It’s all the sweeter because alternative music audiences are the kind of people who, until recently, would have bitterly denied such a thing as cancel culture.
“Your true self/ Oh, they’d love if you could find it/ Makes you that much less hard to predict/ One of these labels bound to fit,” he continues, in a delicious tearing down of the idea that we should fix our profiles to our demographic, all the better to be sold to, and sold. It also explains why FJM has to be pseudonymous.
Today “true selves” aren’t the hard-won end of personal discovery: they’re a squalid tool for marketers. The best way to be real is to start from the vantage point of a phony. Say, an ersatz gospel hollerer or a folk troubadour. As Father John Misty, Josh Tillman has faked his way into a kind of blazing honesty.
