There was always worship music. It laid the groundwork and still informs the act. His father played acoustic guitar, and his mother sang. He was encouraged to take up the drums, to burn off excess energy. Zach picked up the bass. The Tillman boys sang and played in church. “I remember swelling the cymbals, watching people get more and more agitated by the spirit,” Tillman said. “My brother and I looked at each other, exchanging that ‘Can you believe this?’ look. At that age, you’re so binary with the recognition of hypocrisy, so we were, like, This is a total scam.”

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Josh’s education was an odyssey of religious and secular schools, notably five years in a small non-accredited Messianic Pentecostal Jewish school. There was speaking in tongues, laying on of hands, baptism by fire, slaying of the spirit—his first psychedelic experiences, in a way. He was told that he was possessed by demons. But, if he was possessed by anything, it was anxiety and fear of drama at home. “When I was a kid, like fourteen, I mastered the art of shutting down completely,” he told me. “I was terrified.”

He didn’t give any thought to college. “I sort of assumed I was just going to pack up a bindle sack and start roaming the earth,” he said. “My parents went crazy with rage.” A member of their church was on the board at Nyack College, and helped get Tillman a spot.

“Oh my God, these poor children,” Tillman said when we reached the Nyack campus. He needed a cigarette. “We don’t want to be busted,” he said, and so he crossed the road, wandered down a suburban lane, and, half hidden by a stand of bamboo, sucked down a couple of American Spirits—a long, lean gent in an overcoat, with a roué’s mustache, smoking in the shadows near the missionary college.

He hadn’t told anyone he was coming. We slipped into the chapel as it was filling up with students and slid into a pew in back. We were soon surrounded by athletes, mostly women. Softball uniforms, lacrosse sticks. “More multicultural than when I was here, but it’s basically the same ‘Breakfast Club’ demographic,” he observed. “The ones you really gotta look out for are the fetishists of the individual. The ones with the pierced noses and dyed hair, the leather jacket or the studded belt. They’ve made the concession to rebellion. They’re the ones who go on to become pastors. They’re the real little monsters.” He kept going, in a kind of stage whisper, “Here’s the thing that drove me insane: what is it about Christianity, or this version of it, that is so compatible with late-era capitalism, the cult of the self, the commercial-humanist idea of individuality? Christianity is an adaptable avatar for these social movements. It’s very good at resembling the scenery.”

Tillman paused. Students were hugging. “That being said, there is no analogue for this in the secular world. The electricity in the air, the pre-service buzz, is a total narcotic to me.”

On a stage at the front of the chapel were some unattended instruments: a guitar, a drum kit, two pianos, and a row of music stands. “What you’re about to hear is going to sound an awful lot like Coldplay,” he said. “A lot of indie rock skews closely to worship music. This style of worship music operates on a ten-year cultural lag.”

Eight musicians began to play. “Ooh, kind of a Steely Dan vibe,” Tillman said. He sang along for a while, supplying a high harmony. The singer was playing one of those electric keyboards that hang from your shoulder like a guitar. “Dude, he is leading worship with a fucking keytar.”

Tillman arrived at Nyack in 1999. “I was here when 9/11 happened,” he said. “The soccer field was full of students gnashing their teeth and asking God for forgiveness for a culture of homosexuality. That began a crazy year here, wild stuff. A whole lot of prophesying. It was widely believed that in May the spirit of God was going to fall on America. The day came, and there were a hundred people in the field, waiting for the national revival.”

The keytarist was improvising a prayer: “We praise you, God, there’s no one like you. We want you to invade our lives, God, and to be yourself.”

“This is heartbreaking,” Tillman said. “Ten years ago, I would’ve had a panic attack, coming here. Well, actually, ten years ago a friend took me to church and I did have a panic attack.”

A junior from the Youth & Family Studies Department stood to deliver a PowerPoint sermon called “Satisfaction in Christ.” “Boring,” Tillman said, after a few minutes. He stood to leave. “When you live in this psychotic cloud of nonsense, the only way to combat it is with clear thinking.”

“I can’t even tell you how unhappy I was at this place,” he said outside. “Sex was not even within the realm of the possible. I was a virgin till I was twenty-two.

“I’m a very bizarre mix of variables,” he went on. “People see a caricature of a white know-it-all. But I’m not overeducated. I’m not some kind of blueblood. I didn’t grow up in some bohemian enclave with an artsy outlet. There were zero examples. Anything you hear me say about religion in my songs is incredibly hard-won. I have license to be even more judgmental about it than I am. And it’s not purely conceptual. This is me. And there’s nothing ‘cool’ about it. There is something weirdly, cellularly conservative in me. You can only run so far.”

When Tillman dropped out of Nyack, in 2002, he hitched a ride to Seattle with a drummer he knew. He lived in the drummer’s brother’s basement. He donated plasma, worked construction, and washed dishes. Seattle was soon to be the epicenter of an indie-folk renaissance—Neil Young acolytes in ponchos and heavy sweaters, with monkish beards and mulled wine. The singing was pretty, the sentiment serious, the mood gentle, if a touch druidic—a post-grunge overcorrection, maybe. Soon, Tillman was writing his own disconsolate songs, recording them at night before taking the dawn shift at a local bakery. A demo tape reached Damien Jurado, a singer-songwriter with a small but reverent following, who asked Tillman to join him on tour. There followed a series of J. Tillman records—eight in all, in about as many years—on a series of labels, plus occasional tours with other bands. His brother, Zach, had moved to Seattle, too, and they lived together for a while in the University District and played on each other’s recordings and at each other’s gigs. People knew about J. Tillman, he had admirers, but despite the persistence nothing quite took. “That stuff, it was a huge inspiration to me, but it’s not getting anyone’s dick hard,” Zach told me. “He’d play these sets of sparse, dry material, and then between songs he’d light the room up with his humor, and then he’d sink back into the music.”

In 2008, Fleet Foxes, an ascendant Seattle pop-folk troupe characterized by high harmonies, heavy reverb, and delicate, layered orchestration, asked Tillman to sign on as their new drummer. He had the voice and the beard for it. The band was about to release its first album. He quit the construction job and toured with them, as the record garnered year’s-best acclaim. Here was industry success: a global audience, a thriving partnership, real money, and even love, of a kind. (Aja Pecknold, the band’s manager and the older sister of the band’s leader, Robin Pecknold, had become his girlfriend.) But, as work commenced on the next album, “Helplessness Blues,” the collaboration began to fray. Tillman was still making his own music and chafing at the supporting role. “We all started hating each other,” he told the Guardian. “A lot of people have complicated relationships with Robin,” he told me. “I don’t wanna talk about it.” Pecknold, for his part, recently told Rolling Stone that he hasn’t listened to Tillman’s music—“like, intentionally.”