I ALMOST killed Father John Misty. It happened at a music festival in 2015. He was standing there with my friends – handsome, charismatic and composedly high on mushrooms, cocaine and MDMA – telling a story about how he took acid at a Taylor Swift show in Melbourne the night before and experienced something “holy”. I had a bottle of amyl in my pocket with his name on it.

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IT’S two years later on the Splendour In The Grass tour and we’re in a mid-century furnished room at Sydney’s Old Clare Hotel discussing another near-death experience. It happened in the JCPenney department store when he was eight, and frames the second verse of the sprawling ballad ‘ Leaving LA ‘ from third album Pure Comedy.

We’re talking exclusively about this song today because in many ways it wraps the entire Father John Misty story into 13 minutes – his transition from austere balladeer and Fleet Foxes drummer Josh Tillman to the fantastical alter-ego he conjured after leaving Seattle for Los Angeles in a shroom-induced haze.

For better or worse that “self-destructive act of myth-making” is the reason he’s here today, but he also grapples with it. He’s acutely aware of everything everyone has ever said about him, and internalises those opinions, both good and bad. If “don’t read the comments” is the first rule of the Internet, he’s the cautionary tale of what happens when someone does the opposite every damn day.

He’s been called “pretentious” (by the critic Greil Marcus); just another boring white dude courting controversy (by everyone with a Twitter account and a keyboard) after he sang lyrics about “bedding Taylor Swift” on Saturday Night Live earlier this year; and the “most self-important asshole on earth” (by Ryan Adams).

But this is not the Josh Tillman I first met at Meredith, or the man I’m interviewing today. He’s a warm, funny, and generous interviewee; a charismatic and complicated man that still wrestles with depression, his difficult childhood in an evangelical Christian community, substance abuse issues, and an overwhelming desire to be understood.

And yet when he sashays into the hotel room with a Paloma cocktail and lights up a cigarette in the non-smoking room I just put a $250 deposit on, I wonder where the line between Father John Misty and Josh Tillman begins and ends. My first reaction is to open the window, but it’s glued shut for the exact reason I’m trying to open it. “It’s OK,” he says, taking another puff from the American Spirit cigarette he just pulled out from a fresh deck. “I smoke in every hotel room.” Later I will google, “How to remove cigarette smells from hotel rooms”, just to be safe.

“The first time I took mushrooms I had this realisation that I should just be myself,” he later explains. “Sometimes it means being superficial. Sometimes that means being obscenely vulnerable. Sometimes it means being funny. And sometimes it means being banal.”