He’s known for being awkward in interviews, confrontational with audiences and scathing towards duff music critics, so I’m not entirely at ease when we sit down. I don’t even know with whom I’m sitting down. Is it J Tillman, austere minstrel of religiosity and bad times, or his subsequent persona, a fun-lovin’ homosexual shamanic drifter who goes by the name of Father John Misty?

Josh Tillman, who’s both (or neither), settles back into the sofa and contemplates something. He’s handsome, if you like 9ft-tall musicians with a fierce intelligence, model good looks and the beard of a biblical patriarch. He leans forward again and, apropos of nothing, launches into Celine Dion’s That’s The Way It Is. “When you want it the most there’s no easy way out… Love comes to those who believe it,” he sings smoothly, before breaking off to pontificate. “That’s one of the most fucked-up messages I received as a kid. If you’re not loved, it’s because you don’t ‘believe’ enough. It’s an exploitation of the idea of faith.”

The moment is pure Father John Misty. A unique balance of funny and insightful ran lyrically throughout his last album, 2012’s Fear Fun, which was enough to make it interesting. What made it astonishing were the goddamn tunes on the thing. His Laurel Canyon country stomp, overlaid with swoonsome strings, harmonies and retro breeziness had many critics acclaiming it album of the year. He looks set to repeat the trick with I Love You, Honeybear, a new album with even more surprises in it.

The triumph of the Father is sweeter for being entirely unexpected. How did it happen? How did Misty get his groove on? Tillman has described the birth of his new persona as the result of going on a journey, but a journey a little bit different from the X Factor usual. “I got into a van with enough mushrooms to choke a horse and drove down the coast with nowhere to go,” he says. Emerging from a heavygoing depression and looking for enlightenment, he found himself “sitting naked in a tree, hallucinating and scratching my head like an ape. And I confronted the great cosmic joke. I’d wanted to be perceived as this spiritual person, but the reality was me running about with my pants around by my knees.” JT quickly decided, though, that this was a joke he was in on. ‘You wouldn’t know it from this conversation, but I’m actually hilarious,” he says. “That’s my direct line to the sublime, and I needed to use it. In childhood, my humour had always been maligned as satanic.”

He is referring to his early years, growing up in an evangelical household in suburban Maryland where only Christian culture was permitted. “I went to a Pentecostal messianic Jewish cult school where I was taught to exorcise demons from my classmates and speak in tongues, and had these insane engineered psychedelic experiences,” he elaborates. “People were lifting my arms up to worship while kids lay convulsing on the floor, talking about seeing their dead grandparents. It was flat-out insanity, and I should have been writing about that.” Why wasn’t he? “I didn’t want anyone to know about my upbringing. It’s still a major source of pain and confusion. I didn’t get to choose my childhood, and I felt doomed. The further I get from those experiences, the more of a sense of humour about it I have. In a broad sense, I mean. I don’t think it’s hilarious or anything.”

While he didn’t explicitly write about his boyhood, it was informing the man’s music. Through his 20s, J Tillman recorded seven profoundly miserable albums with titles such as Cancer And Delirium and videos that look as if they were recorded in the middle of the night on other people’s porches. They had a fragile beauty but were, nonetheless, songs to stare into canals to. “I had an archetype in my head of what an authentic singer-songwriter sounded like, this southern gothic fantasy. All I ended up with was a bunch of half-baked analogies about the blood and the lamb that didn’t really make any sense,” Tillman confesses. I tell him my girlfriend calls this type of music “white man moan”. He chuckles. “That’s fairly accurate.”

No wonder the opportunity to join an acclaimed band seemed like a magic bullet. Fleet Foxes’ ascent to international stardom is a little surprising in retrospect, given that they were being powered by a drummer who “had very little interest in being a drummer”. Still, Tillman was dating frontman Robin Pecknold’s sister, so when they asked, he answered, and did his best to learn their soaring folk songs. But over his four-year tenure, things deteriorated.

“We all started hating each other. I wasn’t the worst band member – I was actually the funny one. But there were a lot of tears. The worst was the tour we did where I was the opening act. I’d play my sad bastard stuff, be ignored, then go sit at the back. There’s no better illustration of how little worth I had. I walked off stage at Shepherd’s Bush and nobody noticed.”

It’s testament to Tillman’s ferocious integrity, or an index of how crappy he felt, that he quit when the band were at their height. “The job I had before Fleet Foxes was in construction, putting up acoustic panelling. When I left, I thought I was going back to washing dishes. I felt like the cowboy at the end of Dr Strangelove, riding a bomb back down to earth, like ‘Yee-haw!’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fleet Foxes, Josh Tillman is front right. Photograph: PR

Under no illusions that life had anything better in store (“Statistically, how many drummers go on to have any kind of meaningful… anything?”), it was then that the arboreal revelation of Father John occurred. He describes the choice of name as meaningless, an expression of pseudonymous freedom after the forced authenticity of J Tillman. Also, he just liked the way it sounded: “Misty evokes either a beloved childhood horse or a stripper.”

The libidinal release of Father John Misty is a DayGlo illustration of what’s possible when you stop giving a hoot and start being yourself. Take his dancing during recent live shows, the flamboyantly pelvic lovechild of Jagger and Jarvis. Or his Instagram, a hilarious collection of surreal, texture-mapped CGI scenarios with absurd commentary (eg a ponytailed woman eating melon at a buffet, captioned #grateful). Or the fact his official merchandise includes a perfume for women, Innocence by Misty. I ask him to describe his use of these potentially profitable marketing platforms. “Just pure stupidity,” he replies.

Of course, there’s a lot more going on than that. I won’t include our subsequent discussion about image-based culture and its implications for patriarchy because it makes us both sound like pricks. You can see how a smoothie of intellectual detachment, earnestness, straight-talking and irony is a struggle to digest for some. They wonder where, exactly, he’s coming from. Talking to him, I realise it’s all of the above. An urge to disrupt expectations of social media, singer-songwriters or sentimentality is what drives him. It’s the urge to be free.

Fear Fun had freedom by the metric ton. A jocular picaresque of drug misadventure, talking dogs and ass-based skin grafts, it was a bold step into the light. The 11 songs on new album I Love You, Honeybear are every bit as beguiling, but with added emotional candour – essentially a love letter to Tillman’s new wife, film-maker Emma Garr. He’s playing with more musically, while heaping on bright, accessible tunes like chocolate chips in cookie dough. True Affection’s electronic wash reflects the digital distance between modern lovers, while the freewheeling mariachi trumpets in Chateau Lobby #4 (In C For Two Virgins) evoke the LA streets of his own courtship. The latter is simply one of the most openhearted songs in years; even at its cleverest, the album is marked by an unusual compassion. Bored In The USA is a minor key piano lament for a generation’s “useless education and sub-prime loans”, underscored by sarcastic canned laughter. Tillman admits the song “could be perceived as me slapping lazy millennials in the dick” – in fact, it sympathetically digs down into the unsexy specifics of modern despair. Holy Shit tries hard to deny the possibility of human connection; a cynical laundry list of intellectual objections, flattened by the presence of the real thing. “Love is just an institution based on human frailty… What I fail to see is what that’s gotta do with you and me.”

He’s gratified when I reveal how moving I find the album, and how relatable. Our conversation becomes more personal (odd as I’ve spent two hours quizzing him on his traumatic childhood and sex with his wife). We talk about how most cultural notions of romance fall so far short of the real experience of love: its jealousies, terrifying loss of self, the helplessness of it all.

“We build ideas up into sacred objects – the love of a woman, the love of all women… a career in a famous band,” he agrees. “We have to debunk these things, demystify them. I just wanted to write about love without bullshitting myself or anyone else.” Father Misty’s mission: to demystify. Ironically, I think there’s some meaning in that name after all.

Father John Misty’s I Love You, Honeybear is out on Bella Union on 9 Feb



