

Josh Tillman still doesn’t know what to make of Pure Comedy, his third album as Father John Misty.

“At first blush, the record seems kind of cold,” he says from his home in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. “I don’t know if it’s too cold or intellectual or something.”

Confusion over Father John Misty albums isn’t specific to him, either. Ever since his 2012 folk-rock debut Fear Fun, Tillman has come on strong as one of rock’s more enigmatic songwriters—which often gets lost in Internet-driven echo chambers, where headlines, tweets, and Facebook posts with Misty-isms are simply passed around like things to gawk at.

That’s partly his own doing. Tillman isn’t particularly interested in hiding his feelings and speaks his mind freely, unconcerned with what people may think or say about him. There’s an acute self-awareness in his lyrics—a perfect mix of irony, anxiety, sadness and confusion.

Tillman named his album Pure Comedy, though at its core the album has few substantial laughs. The record won immediate praise for its lush, grandiose numbers that find Tillman dissecting modern society’s most ridiculous tendencies, notions of success and what it means to be entertained nonstop.

But he knows this invites backlash.

“This album’s too easy of a target for a certain intellectual type to resist,” he says. “It can be portrayed as indulgent, preachy and coming from a place of privilege. For me, it is just a very personal record, in that I understand this worldview does not come from some objective place.”

Maybe he’s brought it on himself. But something is clicking. These days, he regularly sells out 3,000-seat theaters and has a top billing at major festivals. When Pure Comedy was on the cusp of release, he performed on Saturday Night Live. At this point, resistance may be futile. But a big question remains: Can Tillman survive Father John Misty’s success?



Tillman was born and raised in Rockville, Md., a suburb outside of Washington, D.C. His parents were strictly religious and put the fear of God in him—literally.

“I spent most of my childhood under the impression that I would not live to be an adult because Jesus was gonna come back any day now,” he recalls. “People talked about death all the time. They talked about the afterlife all the time.”

Secular music wasn’t allowed in the house, but he learned to play drums at an early age and would perform for his congregation.

“I remember this one Sunday morning when I noticed for the first time that if I swell the cymbals, the intensity of worship would increase, and then when I brought it down—or when I played quietly—the intensity would decrease,” he says. “My brother was playing bass, and I remember us looking at each other, like, ‘Can you believe this?’ You know, feeling like we were running some kind of scam.”

Tillman started writing songs in his teen years and, after a year at college in Nyack, N.Y., he relocated to Seattle to start perfecting his craft. He wanted to emulate the introspective nature of artists like Will Oldham, Jason Molina and Damien Jurado, which boiled down to sad songs for sad dudes. One of his standouts of that era was an album called Cancer and Delirium, which sounds like it could be the title of a Father John Misty album, except the music’s completely different.

“I was just wrapped up in identity and wanting to animate this archetype that existed in my mind,” he says of his early work. “I didn’t wanna be myself. I wanted to be like some other guy.”

Jurado got wind of Tillman’s work and invited him on tour as the opening act, giving him a taste of what life was like as a professional musician. Over the course of seven years, he released eight albums under the name J. Tillman. But something wasn’t quite right, a fact that he’d soon come to terms with on a much bigger stage.

In 2008, he started drumming for Fleet Foxes, right as the band broke out with their self-titled debut. (His girlfriend was the group’s manager and also frontman Robin Pecknold’s sister.)

The tours took him to faraway places where he graced some of the world’s grandest stages. Though Tillman continued to release his own material, he jumped from a singular folk singer still struggling with what he was articulating in his music to a member of what was becoming a very successful band.

But this wasn’t what he wanted either. As Fleet Foxes were recording their sophomore album, Helplessness Blues, Tillman started working on a batch of new material—the beginnings of what would become the first Father John Misty songs. Fleet Foxes dropped Helplessness Blues in 2011 and, less than a year later, Tillman exited the band; after a few months, he reemerged as Father John Misty, with the release of Fear Fun in April 2012. Was the moniker a new persona? A stage name? Was he becoming a priest?

“There’s just so much talk about playing some persona and a lot of that is because people just can’t accept that I might be that weird,” he says. “That those might just actually be my instincts. People want honesty-themed honesty. They want beautiful-themed beauty. It has to be in these sepia tones, it has to be naturalistic. And, you know, that’s just not me. There are a handful of singersongwriters working today, who go by their own name, that I can tell you have way more of a persona or alter ego than I do.”

Tillman is constantly thinking of songs. Lines for lyrics, melodies, you name it—they’re likely swirling around in his head at any given moment. Years of songwriting will do that to a person, and he equates it to his own, personal language.

“The more you use it, and the more native it becomes, the more you start to think in song,” he says. “I speak that language way better than I speak the English language at this point. I have lyrics rattling in my head all day. There’s something very soothing to me about shoehorning words into meters and syncopation.”

He admits that sometimes his first instincts can get him into trouble. Recently, he caused a stir with the Pure Comedy song “Total Entertainment Forever,” a takedown of media-fueled 24/7 entertainment consumption that opens with the line “Bedding Taylor Swift, every night inside the Occulus Rift.” On the album’s closer, “In Twenty Years or So,” he ends with the line “There’s nothing to fear,” which he says is much more than just a prophetic sentiment. It’s part of that Father John Misty language— you just have to listen closely.

“The melody that comes to mind is actually the melodic representation of that idea,” he says. “And so the melody just comes out because that’s what not fearing sounds like.”

“Whether it’s his album art, music videos, a documentary film—on stage and off stage— Josh has a clear vision of what he wants to convey,” says Grant James, who has directed several Father John Misty videos and was a fly on the wall during his Pure Comedy recording sessions. “The album was written well before the events of last year, and the songs began to take on a more serious meaning and tone as they were being recorded. It was almost like these songs were a premonition and bearing witness to the process—that energy was felt through all stages of the album recording, mixing and mastering. The weight of the songs took on a bigger meaning and I could tell that the album was going to connect with people on a grand scale as well as on a personal level.”



At the center of Pure Comedy is the song “Leaving LA,” a 13-minute opus about a songwriter who has found fame and success—something he’s always dreamed of—but now he’s convinced it’s fleeting. So he’s packing it in, getting out of Dodge. The song is a rare moment where Father John Misty is (somewhat) stripped-down. It’s just an acoustic guitar, some lush-sounding strings and little hyper-aware vignettes of Tillman’s thought process.

He recorded the album version on the first take, at one in the morning.

“I remember finishing the song and feeling pretty self-conscious,” he says. “I made some little self-deprecating joke in the moments after I finished the take and was thinking, ‘This is just too much.’ But I was kind of exhilarated by that prospect.” However, after some distance from that night, from that moment, he sees “Leaving LA” as crucial to what Father John Misty is all about. “That really is the Rosetta Stone of understanding what it is that I do,” he says. “I have a weird skill set, I have this beautiful voice and these weird comedic instincts and this dry sense of humor. When you throw those things all together, it’s a weird effect. And that song is straining the relationship between those three components of myself in a wild way.”

For most of his life, Tillman has suffered from depression. In recent interviews, he’s stated that he helps cope by microdosing LSD. His depression can have a crippling effect on his songwriting, although, at times, he can use those same feelings to fuel his music. If there’s a sense of despair looming over him, then he can use those feelings as a tool.

“Despair can be a real motivator,” he says.

Focusing on external things like his wife, friends and making music helps keep his depression in check. In the last month, as the touring for Pure Comedy has started up, he’s become more sober than he’s been in the last year and a half, too.

“In 2016, I was completely out of control,” he says. “I had really lost perspective. I was wearing some weird-ass clothes. I don’t know what was going on. You could kind of say that my life was on the rocks for most of 2016. But I’m in the clear now, at least for a little while.”

At certain points in his life, like when he was playing with Fleet Foxes or when his 2015 album I Love You, Honeybear was met with critical success, he thought his depression would fade away. But that’s not how it works.

It’s hard for Tillman to put what it feels like into words— he admits it’s “totally irrational,” but offers this one explanation: “Your consciousness is only as healthy as you invest in it yourself.”

Tillman really wants to bring Pure Comedy to a live setting that underscores the album’s cathartic abilities in as genuine a way as possible. And surprisingly, when he’s onstage, he’s not self-conscious when faced with thousands of music fans staring at him. It’s actually the opposite.

“Performance is about transcendence, so that includes transcending your own limitations—your irrational mind,” he says. (He seems to have made some peace with Fleet Foxes as well, celebrating their recent LP with a tweet: “Congratulations to my friends today, an incredible album and a group of people I love and miss.”)

It’s only a fragment of a seemingly endless quest that he continues to find himself on, in a world driven by information, consumption, entertainment and irony. He knows he can’t escape at least one thing—that he’s a part of it, for better or worse. It’s conflict and conflicted feelings, but at least he has an outlet.

“I made a decision somewhere along the line that I was going to find meaning in writing,” he says. “And so that’s the meaning I’ve created and, when I engage it fearlessly, then I have a lot of meaning. There are ways in this whole experience that have made me unspeakably miserable. At any time, I can go on the Internet and read the most horrible things you can imagine. In some ways, you can’t be a huge failure without, in some ways, being a huge success.”