When Father John Misty released Pure Comedy in April, we heard the simultaneous knuckle crack of every music writer in America: At last, art of the Trump era! The searing indictment of our times we pre-ordered on Amazon!!

And Pure Comedy, the third record of former Fleet Fox (and sardonic Laurel Canyon lyricist) Josh Tillman, ended up sounding…pretty much exactly like we'd hoped it would. FJM's wallop “Where did they find these goons they elected to rule them?” arrives in the second verse of the first song. And while you might expect to settle in for a two-Advil screamer of a lecture from there, Pure Comedy is actually much funnier and more interesting—the unspooling of a giant brain (or at least “a Horatian worldview,” as Tillman describes it) over some shaggy '70s in-joke piano, winking full Elton. It's a hotel-bar act in which the slender-bendy quaver of the good Father rises to say: We're SOL, species. But! Let us give thanks that our toxic primordial stew hath begotten the shimmering crush of an E to an E7 to a big fat open A. And isn't that aural splendor worth all the pain? Maybe?

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“I've seen a lot, like, ‘This album is basically a Twitter rant,’ ” Tillman says, in a flavor Baskin-Robbins would call Didactic Deadpan. “No—a Twitter rant is a Twitter rant.” In fact, it's context he frets most about: This album was written in 2015, mastered pre-election 2016, and is intent on giving humanity, not just Trump, a grill-top char. So what is the proper framework in which to enjoy Pure Comedy, an album most critics have not called a Twitter rant so much as, quote, “a masterwork”? Josh?

“Well, the things that people take really seriously are usually really funny to me, and the things that people find really funny are usually deeply bad to me. Not that things are the opposite of how they appear—but that they are more multi-varied than they appear, you know? Wow. I've already chased everyone away from this page.

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“That said, I think that a song should be a place where you can silence your critical mind—but life's not always funny. There's real pain in the world, and misery! And you shouldn't laugh! And a song—I use gospel music so that I can believe in God for three minutes. Because I like believing in God for three minutes, even though it doesn't jibe with my practical, day-to-day life. So a song is not a think piece. It's not a blog post.

“It's as close to a magical space as you can get.

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“And with this record, these just sound like normal songs to me! That may be hard for people to believe. But to me, listening back, these don't sound like political or topical—they just sound like nice songs. You can put ‘laughs incredulously’ in brackets. Because one thing that doesn't come across, in particular, is that I'm typically laughing after everything that I say. That part of me, that perceives my own absurdity, is lost. It just comes across in this bone-dry way that can be pretty unappealing, which is the way something looks when it's just, like, pure data. You know?! Even the way that I just said the word ‘data.’ With a little wink, or a smirk. When it's in print, it looks like I have a lab coat on.

“You should put ‘Tillman chortles.’ ”

And he really does.

This piece appeared in the June 2017 issue with the title “The Loony of Father Tunes John Misty.”