Maybe God is a curious God
A World Exclusive Spyplane interview with Father John Misty the music king about his great new album, becoming a dad, flambéing his giant chinos & more
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Father John Misty, a.k.a Josh Tillman, is one of the all-time-great singer-songwriters, and he occupies a special place high up in the Spyplane Chune Wizard Pantheon. He’s sly, moral, funny, and flawed, winkingly pompous here, self-deprecating there, a razor-sharp phrase-turner and lovely melody builder blessed with a clarion voice, nice with this fine-grained observation and nice with these sweeping cosmic profundities, too. Here at HQ we nestle his records next to Leonard Cohen’s and Randy Newman’s.
10 years ago, I (Jonah) spent a boozy afternoon with Josh at the Chateau Marmont — where else? — for a Rolling Stone profile around the release of his breakthrough second album, I Love You, Honeybear. Real talk, at the time, I liked his music OK, but hadn’t fully found my way into it yet. But I got a kick out of Josh, a deep thinker and deep feeler with an endearing habit of interrupting himself while saying some incisive s**t to… start making fun of himself.
After a flotilla of highly entertaining and opinionated interviews around the release of his brilliant 2017 LP, Pure Comedy — an album about how to live a meaningful life against a mounting backdrop of despair, cynicism and doom — Josh took himself out of the public eye, deading his social media and turning down interviews for the last 7 years.
His new album, Mahashmashana, comes out next month, and if you ask us, it’s the best record he’s put out. It’s the most lyrically cryptic but no less evocative for it, and pound for pound, the songwriting is tighter, more assured, and catchier than ever.
Even more impressive? The man is a certified hottie who wears clothes very well. So the other day I was stoked to link with Father John Misty, who came out of media-blackout-mode and banged my line for a World Exclusive Spyplane Interview.
We talked about how he writes songs; the “non-elective ego death” of becoming a dad; whether our experiences of our bodies are in fact the vivid hallucinations of a burningly curious God; how I’m ambivalent about ‘brat’ discourse but he sat next to Charli XCX on a flight once and respected her grind; rocking Lemaire back in 2017; getting buried in the Ralph; meeting for a secret coffee with David Lynch; and more unbeatable topics.
Father John Misty: “How’s life treating you?”
Blackbird Spyplane: Man, I’m in hog heaven. I’m up the Sonoma Coast right now — I was just out for a hike, watching the ocean crash against the bluffs. Some guys with chainsaws were felling enormous Grand Firs nearby, which dampened the idyllic vibes a bit.
Father John Misty: “If I were to go outside right now, our locations would probably start phasing, they’re so similar. I’m in [coastal locale redacted]. We moved here about 2 years ago.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Beautiful. All right, Blackbird Spyplane is pro-long-songs, and you’ve become a true master of the ~6-to-~9-minute banger. I wanted to start off by asking, What can a good long song do that a short one just can’t?
Father John Misty: “I actually don’t know that there’s anything a long song can do that a short one can’t, if they’re both good songs. Both can bend time. You kind of get lost in a great short song in the same way that you do a long one. As far as my own songwriting, the process looks way different now than it did 15 years ago. I’ll end up writing these huge, unstructured things, pages and pages, almost like an epic poem. From that I’ll get, say, three interminable songs. And downstream from that, I start strip-mining those three songs for parts to use in other songs. It seems chaotic, and really unfocused, but there’s an internal logic to it.
“I haven’t ever actively set out to write long songs, though. And you don’t really know how long something’s gonna be until you cut it and go into the control room and ask, ‘How long was that?’ I’ll be kind of shocked. On the new album, ‘I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All’ comes in around 9 minutes, and that surprised me because I’d had an earlier iteration that was just three verses and one chorus. But then I kept compulsively writing additional verses for it. One of which was the line about when Rolling Stone told me I was easily the least famous person to turn down the cover.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Well you knew that I was gonna bring that lyric up if you didn’t, because I was supposed to write that cover story. If I’m remembering correctly, they offered you a feature, and you said, ‘I’ll only do it if they give me the cover,’ never thinking they’d go for it. But then they did — and you turned it down anyway. I was bummed, but I understood it. It was 2018, I think you hit me saying you were going through some heavy s**t, and you’ve been on a near-total media blackout since.
Father John Misty: “I’ve been sitting on that line for a while. When I got that text, I knew I had to use it for something.”
Blackbird Spyplane: OK in the spirit of 9-minute-long songs, here’s a 9-minute-long question. A theme you’ve explored continually in your music is, I guess you could call it Endless Recurrence. It’s there in the title of your last album, Chloe and the Next 20th Century, where you frame the 20th century as the nadir of human history and an endless loop we’re stuck in: An epoch when we industrialized the worst parts of ourselves — our capacity for violence, genocide, destruction, greed — and, more ambivalently, when we industrialized art-making. On the last song on that album, you sing about Nazi wedding bands, about the sense that “things keep getting worse while staying so eerily the same,” and about how we build burial grounds on top of old burial grounds. That song feels linked to the title song on the new album, except now you’re singing about “the next universal dawn” and the infinite silence of what Tibetan Buddhists call the Mahashmashana, a “great cremation ground.” It isn’t as grim a vision. When you listen to the albums back to back, one song flows immediately into the other. Are these two visions of recurrence related in your mind?
Father John Misty: “Part of the reason making the last album was so gratifying is that I didn’t really know what I was doing, or why I was doing it. It was an album full of these alternate-timeline American-songbook tunes, and on its face it’s pleasant music, but there’s also this unsettling undercurrent to it. I think it’s OK to listen to that album and say, What the hell is this? It’s an outlier. But to your question about continuity between the two, the last one was, among other things, an experiment in seeing what happens when I erase myself from my work. And the new one is definitely work about erasing myself.
“I mean, I’ve had an amount of fame that you could drown in the sink. And still, I found fame to be a brutal teacher. The irony is that I think people like me gravitate towards fame because, consciously or not, you’re thinking, ‘If I can achieve this, I never have to learn anything again.’ You know? ‘No one can tell me s**t.’ And it judoed me into what felt like a very public face-plant. It was a really humbling experience. So there’s that in play. Also, I became a parent. I have a family. I don’t know how much more I wanna disclose, but we can say that, over the last few years, I’ve had a few non-elective ego deaths, where the self is receding.”
Blackbird Spyplane: On the last couple albums you do feel less foregrounded in the lyrics. The narrators of your songs feel more oblique in their connection to you than they used to be.
Father John Misty: “There’s an actor in every one of us. The actor is part of naked reality, and we don’t really know what that looks like. But maybe we have some kind of inkling that we are, in our truest form, an undifferentiated part of a non-localized consciousness, and that maybe God is a curious God who is dying to have this extremely poignant experience of being a Josh Tillman, or being a Jonah.
“The song ‘Mahashmashana’ is definitely written from a dream-logic place, but in the end it’s, like, ‘Yeah, maybe there’s reason to believe that the real truth of our experience is non-human — but the flesh wins every time. The body wins. It’s just too vivid. The hallucination is too strong.’”
Blackbird Spyplane: I’m curious to ask you, as a keen observer of the intersection of mass entertainment, narcissism and evil, and also as a self-identified demon, what do you make of the “brat” phenomenon, which seems to celebrate a kind of demonic narcissism…?
Father John Misty: “I mean, I wanna answer the question, but I also don’t really wanna chime in, because it’s a lightning rod. [Pauses.] I think all art is a sanctioned space where we as a culture give ourselves license to engage with things that are maybe unsavory. And in that way I’m very permissive of anything happening. I have my own thin red lines that probably wouldn’t shock anybody, but all I know about Charli XCX is I sat next to her on a flight once, and the whole time she was going crazy on her Notes app, writing down ideas, and I sat there feeling like a total slob. Like, ‘Damn, this girl’s driven.’ It was cool to see.”
Blackbird Spyplane: You hired the great psychedelic artist Joe Roberts a.k.a. LSD Worldpeace to do the artwork for the new album. I love his paintings and drawings, and they played an important role in my one and only experience dropping acid a couple Christmases ago. I was flipping through his books and got to this painting he’d made of people eating peanut butter sandwiches in the woods — I was like, Oh, he’s reminding me to go eat something, and I went to the kitchen for some peanut butter. I felt very grateful to him in that moment. And this might be an illustration of how the radical imaginary gets colonized by the banal, but there are all these smiley faces in his art, and while I was tripping I got really into drawing smiley faces. It’s funny to talk about, but they suddenly made a molecular-level sense to me, which I still feel.
Father John Misty: “I’m sure when you dive into the quark level of existence, you just get little smiley faces. That’s what they’re doing at the Hadron collider, sending little smiley faces back and forth.
“Joe’s the sweetest guy. There’s a folk-art feel to his stuff. The first thing I saw of his was a Ninja Turtles drawing, which bonged me right in the archetypal center, because when I was a kid, I wanted to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. So I dove in from there, and yeah, for the cover, I commissioned him to do some collages, and they’re great, but he also sent along some doodles. There was one (above right) that really grabbed me, and I texted him, like, ‘Are these Seraphim? They look like Biblical angels.’ He was like, ‘I don’t know man, it’s just what I saw when I was listening to the record.’ He said it was the first thing he drew, but there’s this red splotch on there and he almost didn’t send it because of that. And that became the cover.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Am I imagining this — didn’t you want to be a cartoonist when you were a kid?
Father John Misty: “Yeah, and it was really heartbreaking when I realized that my ambition was gonna outpace my talent. I of course learned much later that it’s not about technical ability, it’s about a voice. But by that time, I’d lost the practice of drawing. It’s funny, though, I’ll never forget being really young, drawing with my brother, and I was sitting there, like, painstakingly shading a thigh — and he was just drawing circles and a worm, and it said, The worm that ate NY. I remember crying laughing at it, because there was so much personality, so much of him in it. And he looked at me with this smirk and I thought, ‘This drawing has heat. That’s what it’s about.’
“Years ago, though, I got ruthless and got rid of all my old drawings. I got rid of all my personal possessions, actually, all this stuff I was sick of having around. I went through an extreme minimalist phase that predated normcore by a wide margin, where I wanted to go vibeless. That was my mission. This was like 2006 or something. I was walking around Seattle in khakis and running shoes.”
Blackbird Spyplane: You’ve since re-embraced vibes. You’re on the record rocking a Lemaire overcoat in a 2017 New Yorker profile, which is very cool. What kinds of clothes are you into these days?
Father John Misty: “I’ve still got that coat, it’s nice. Yeah, my vibelessness phase was brief — I couldn’t hack it. I ran screaming for a deep V. Lately, any day you see me, I’m wearing an A-Shirt, and I’ve been buying the J. Crew giant chinos in bulk. Those just get destroyed by cooking and weeding and whatever else, so I like to have a steady supply. If it’s hot out, I’ve got this one blue Levi’s orange-tab workshirt, and if it’s a cooler day, I have on this suede Ralph Lauren shirt. It’s probably what they’re going to bury me in.
“I’m also usually holding a walking stick (below right) that my dad fashioned for me a few years ago. The landscape is largely vertical where I live, so this thing is great. I feel a little twitchy if I’m not twirling it around. I’ll take it and stroll down to my neighbor’s yurt to smoke an illicit rollie.”
Blackbird Spyplane: That’s really nice — walking around with your dad by your side, steadying you on the trails.
Father John Misty: “But the thing that gets the most comments is, there’s this shoe company called Softstar that makes the crunchiest barefoot leather shoe — it kind of looks like a dance shoe (below left). I get compliments on these everywhere. They hit just right with the giant chinos.”
Blackbird Spyplane: We call that going D.O.D. Mode — Dogs on Dainty. As far as locking in the uniform, that comes up in a lot of conversations I have with people who care about clothes a lot and dream of getting to a place where they can stop. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there, and I don’t think I want to. I enjoy clothes too much to wanna just lock in and throw away the key.
Father John Misty: “Make no mistake, Jonah, I look good. Also I should say, recently I was plucked out of nowhere by Gabriella Hearst to be dressed, so I’m wearing a lot of her clothes on stage these days.”
Blackbird Spyplane: That’s a different mode. The stage wants something else from you besides big gardening chinos and a workshirt.
Father John Misty: “You know, this story is crazy — and I actually signed an NDA where I can’t talk about it — but a few years ago I went and had coffee with David Lynch. I kind of dressed up a little bit for the occasion, put on a blazer and stuff, and he was like, ‘You look nice. I like to look like a bum!’”
Blackbird Spyplane: Incredible.
Father John Misty: “Hahaha. It was great. And those are my two modes.”
Mahashmashana comes out November 22nd on Sub Pop. Some great singles are out now, including “She Cleans Up,” and “Screamland.” Father John Misty is on Instagram here.
Enjoy our list of the world’s 35 slappiest shops, where Spyfriends have added a ton of favorites in the comments.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from incense to jeans — is here.
Hell yeah. Been waiting for this since you alluded to the Rolling Stone thing. One of our best living lyricists, IMO. "I followed my dreams, and my dreams said to crawl." Fuck.
“Make no mistake, Jonah, I look good.”
Loved everything about this interview.
Also need to find some Softstars.