Father John Misty is the nom de soft rock of one Joshua Tillman, a.k.a. J. Tillman, ex-drummer for Fleet Foxes and author of eight largely ignored and invariably joyless solo albums of pious folk rectitude. Those LPs remain a well-kept secret. And then one day in 2010, he blew up his life. Killed off J. Tillman, quit the Fleet Foxes, let his raging id off the short leash it had been kept on since his tormented childhood trapped in a fundamentalist Christian house of pain. Instead of muting his wicked sense of humor and bottomless appetite for the absurd, he turned it up to 11. He changed his stage name to Father John Misty. Threw his guitar and a family-size sack of magic mushrooms into the van, and set the controls for the heart of Babylon. Fear Fun (Sub Pop), Father John Misty’s debut, came out a year ago, and after 12 months of trippin’-balls touring, inclusion on innumerable year-end best-of lists and a lot of swooning word of mouth on social media, the album has become the sleeper hit of the year. Tillman will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our recent print cover story on him.
Tillman: I was going to write an entry on “Nothingness,” which I thought would be a clever and refreshing foil to all of this commodity-as-selfhood business. Obviously, it came out a little poetic-by-way-of-obtuse, a change in tone I may have some license to employ, given the fairly caustic nature of the preceding entries, but I’m just not going to leave myself vulnerable to the rolling eyes of MAGNET’s online readership. It was pretty good, there was a bit about it being impossible to regret a moment of nothingness, and how you can own without buying. It kind of borrowed heavily from Bukowski’s “The Genius Of The Crowd” now that I think about it. The bogus parable idiom. I had something about nothingness making innocence less embarrassing, which definitely would not have gone over very well.
Pizzanista: the best slice in L.A., and they don’t freeze their dough, which is rarer than you might think.
Video after the jump.
