A woman can metamorphosize a man. She can be his wings, his anchor, the key by which he unlocks the world’s beauty. Since meeting his future wife Emma in 2011, Joshua Tillman – better known as Father John Misty – has transformed from a beacon of coy narcissism to a gracefully mordant romantic. In his own words, she is a soul “who inspires in him a vision of a life wherein being truly seen is not synonymous with shame, but possibly true liberation and sublime, unfettered creativity. These ambitions are initially thwarted as jealousy, self-destruction and other charming human character traits emerge.”
I Love You, Honeybear is, quite literally, a collection of songs detailing Tillman’s love for this transformative woman, and the road of excess, indulgence and raunch that lead him to her. It’s a nakedly open documentation on love, true love, its myriad consequence on the spirit, and feels entirely as much. Brimming with orchestral strings and oddities like the occasional mariachi band, ragtime jazz combos, electronic drum solos and beyond (“I’m pretty sure there’s a sitar in there somewhere,“ Tillman muses), the album embraces a lush atmosphere that’s dauntingly, classically romantic. Aiding the symphonic environment are producer Jonathan Wilson and violinist Paul Cartwright, who worked on the majority of the album’s arrangements.
Citing influences including Woody Allen, Kurt Vonnegut, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Muhammad Ali, the lyrical wit on Honeybear is a razor’s edge, a fountain of cerebral whimsy within an embrace of sentiment. Applying a sensual sincerity with a sardonic edge rather than the inverse, the pulsing, rhythmic sexuality of “When You’re Smiling and Astride Me” is thick enough to taste, a caressing serenade within a copulating embrace. “I can hardly believe I’ve found you, and I’m terrified by that,” he sings amid a soulful backing chorus before a beautifully sparse solo. If there’s a confession more naked and vulnerable, it’s yet to be uttered in song.
Walking a tightrope of acerbic wit as the gleaming points of cynicism wait beneath, Honeybear is a lyrical powerhouse in its entirety, with striking polaroids of catharsis (“The moment you came to, I swore I would change”) packed tight alongside foreboding wisdom (“You may think like an animal / if you try that cat and mouse shit you’ll get bitten. Keep moving”).
The record’s finest balance of this is in the gorgeous, piano-driven tragicomedy of “Bored In The U.S.A.,” which resignedly documents the upwardly-mobile hamster wheel we’ve been led to believe comprises our modern existence. All while an audience can be heard nightmarishly guffawing in the distance, adding an air of menacing solitude to the struggle we all face: “Oh, they gave me a useless education / And a subprime loan on a craftsman home / Keep my prescriptions filled, and now I can’t get off… But I can kind of deal / With being bored in the USA.”
Releasing this existentialist burden, “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apartment” is both gorgeous and hilarious, a dedicated backhand to the personified face of a culture drowning in vapid self-satisfaction as we speak. “She says literally music is the air she breathe / and the malaprops make me wanna fucking scream” – laugh break, and twice-rewind – “I wonder if she even knows what that word means / well, it’s literally not that…” He then goes on to dismantle a vapid, self-satisfied halfwit before promising to really tune in for her particularly punishing kink once the day is done and the clothes are scattered on the floor. “I’ll oblige later on when you beg me to choke you…”
In those cold-morning moments of lonely self-ruin amid a lifetime of being desensitized and compromised, we measure our grown-up attempts at romance from the weary-hearted edge of a lifetime of reality, against the color-amplified tapestry of our youth and our many firsts. “Chateau Lobby 4” is a new measuring point for this drunkenness on romancticism, the true sound of love, the palpable energy of romance in a late-60s bohemian-beauty serenade. Within a mariachi horn fade amid a wash of strings, Josh paints the picture of bliss, and the rush of an accelerated falling: “You took off early to go cheat your way through film school / you left a note in your perfect script: stay as long as you like / and I haven’t left your bed since”. And that impossibly perfect chorus…
He defines the ambition of a billion desperate hearts: “People are boring.. but you’re something else completely.” That fucking plague of mediocrity, that shame of sameness is cured, extinguished with a line of enveloping acceptance. Sacred falls peripheral when locked in her gaze, inside her warmth. All is made right.
“My ambition, aside from making an indulgent, soulful, and epic sound worthy of the subject matter, was to address the sensuality of fear,” Tillman explained in an open letter about the album, “the terrifying force of love, the unutterable pleasures of true intimacy, and the destruction of emotional and intellectual prisons in my own voice.”
He has undoubtedly succeeded.
