Josh Tillman is a deep thinker and troubled soul playing at being a callow every–dude.
It is this contradiction, the shadows lingering about the corners of his too–bright smile, that make the artist otherwise known as Father John Misty such a compelling weirdo.
With last year’s break–out album, I Love You, Honeybear, the one time drummer with Fleet Foxes presented to the world a fully–rounded alter–ego – by turns heartfelt and lusty, yet tinged with existential anxiousness. Also, the tunes are really, really good – which obviously helps if you happen to stumble upon him when he performs at Longitude later in the month.
He wrote Honeybear in the afterglow of marriage (to film–maker Emma Elizabeth). That experience was channeled into the record – as were his hang–ups about life–long commitment. The result is a masterpiece of emotional disorientation, as Tillman by turns embraces and chafes against the restrictions of long–term romantic attachment. He wants to have his cake and throw it up.
“We’re all the same,” he said last year, explaining why he had chosen to write a “realistic” relationship record. “We all have these universal experiences. Most love songs leave people cold by describing some fantasy that those of us who aren’t totally willing to delude ourselves are locked out of.”
Throughout the tone is wry, though with the occasional self flagellating moment. Naturally charming, Tillman has spent his adulthood fighting against what he believes to be his tendency towards shallowness. He looks back on his days with Fleet Foxes, when he was the attention–craving joker on stage, with a certain amount of regret, for instance (he quit the band in 2012 after it became clear he would not have input as a songwriter).
“My clowning around at those concerts was misinterpreted as me having a knee–slapping good time,” he told this writer last year. “For me, humour is something I have to be careful with. I have this line in the new album, ‘I’m telling people jokes to shut them up’. That’s not a trait I particularly like in myself. It is something I am working hard to curtail. I had fun up there on stage – all the while part of me was thinking ‘why can’t I just shut the fuck up?’”
Music aside, Tillman is obviously a fascinating character. Certainly his life story feels like something from a gritty prestige drama. He is the son of evangelical Christians who took every word of the Bible literally, raising their son to believe that hellfire and damnation were real things.
“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 has said of the experience “People were lifting my arms up to worship while kids lay convulsing on the floor, talking about seeing their dead grandparents.”
The realisation that it was all just make–believe had a profound impact – driving a wedge between Tillman and his parents and shaping his artistic world view on an ongoing basis. “We all cherish our first betrayal,” he told this writer. “It’s like the first time you have sex or something. It makes me who I am. There’s no better way of putting it, really.”

Father John Misty plays Longitude on Sunday.