Music [3]

Bluebottle wrote:

Oh, I just love the kind of woman who can walk over a man
I mean like a god damn marching band
She says, like literally, music is the air she breathes
And the malaprops make me want to fucking scream
I wonder if she even knows what that word means
Well, it's literally not that

Of the few main things I hate about her, one's her petty, vogue ideas
Someone's been told too many times they're beyond their years
By every half-wit of distinction she keeps around
And now every insufferable convo
Features her patiently explaining the cosmos
Of which she's in the middle

Oh my God, I swear this never happens
Lately, I can't stop the wheels from spinning
I feel so unconvincing
When I fumble with your buttons

She blames her excess on my influence but gladly Hoovers all my drugs
I found her naked with the best friend in the tub
We sang "Silent Night" in three parts which was fun
Til she said that she sounds just like Sarah Vaughan
I hate that soulful affectation white girls put on
Why don't you move to the Delta?
I obliged later on when you begged me to choke ya

What sort of love song can exist in this day and age? In a time when the best ballads tend to be about heartbreak rather than heartache; while words like love and desire have been packaged off and distributed by the likes of One Direction and Bruno Mars. One wonders what memes would have been made of Leonard Cohen if he’d have released I’m Your Man today. And yet here comes Father John Misty; with an album titled I Love You Honeybear, and an album cover like a pop artist’s valentines card. It’s a collection of songs dedicated to his new wife, and not in a Marvin Gaye or Robin Thicke way; he believes he’s found his soulmate. It’s a record made in 2015 by a man shamelessly in love – yet it’s not ‘cringey’ at all.

Josh Tillman is not new to the music scene; in fact under his own name he’s released 6 albums of dark and introspective folk music, and for a time was the drummer for troubled indie-folk gods Fleet Foxes. Then with a loss of musical direction he headed up the sunset strip in a van with a bunch of mushrooms looking for inspiration, and found it in a rebrand; the Father John Misty alias, which strangely yielded humour and his most personal material yet. I Love You Honeybear is his best work, and rightly seems to be shooting him to indie superstardom. Instrumentally the album is packed to the rafters with beautiful arrangements; the sound of 70’s Americana performed in a smoky boudoir, with stomping drums, jazz piano and the odd inspired blast of Spanish horn. The most overtly instrumental display is When You’re Smiling And Astride Me, a luscious piece of Philadelphia soul, with a gospel choir exalting in sultry waves and Tillman taking a back step, crooning immaculately over the crests. Vocally then, Father John Misty confirms what we already knew; he’s fantastic; remarkably dextrous and filled with soul.

The main takeaway from the LP though is its lyrics; detailing incredible honesty and poetry. Tillman follows in the footsteps of Springsteen and Cohen, and while he’s less evasive than either  artist, his every word bristles with an underlying romanticism; which perhaps explains how he can get away with the overtly sappy displays in each of these tracks. The Cohen-referencing ‘Chateau Lobby #4′ is the riskiest on the album as it puts the most out there, but in perfect Springsteen fashion Tillman focusses on small moments to convey a grander romance, crooning ‘you left a note in your perfect script: “stay as long as you want”/and I haven’t left your bed since.’ ‘The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apartment’ is a self-deferential tale of his own hypocrisy, humorously painting the picture of a tedious hipster who says ‘like literally, music is the air she breathes’ only to later end up in bed together. ‘Ideal Husband’ is the album’s most thrilling cut; Tillman at his most vocally aggressive, spitting diatribe about his own failings and past mistakes. By giving so much air time to the realities of love, which people often bemoan the absence of in sentimental writing, the music’s poetry evokes genuine emotion rather than just eye rolls. When he says ‘I can hardly believe I’ve found you and I’m terrified by that’ you can’t question his sincerity.

That’s not to say it’s a flawless work of art from start to finish. The standout failure is ‘True Affection'; a sonic train-wreck with a generic synthpop rhythm and the cheapest sounding drum loops available on DJ-freeware. Tillman wails over a rhythm which seems to have little relation to his singing, amounting quite simply in a tuneless mess, ill-fitting of the tone of every other song. It’s a shame because there’s no room for stumbles on a record with an embarrassment of fantastic tracks. ‘Bored in the U.S.A.’ is one of those, and the only one where romance is set aside and Tillman’s obvious political insight is allowed to run wild. It was his enchanting performance of the song on Letterman in November which led to such anticipation for the album and indeed it was the sort of moment one could see being replayed in history classes of the future: Tillman standing from a piano which is revealed to be playing itself, to a soundtrack of fake studio laughter, wondering ‘is this the part where I get all I ever wanted? Who said that? Can I get my money back?’ just as America itself faces its own international decline. It might not happen, but it was that manner of exquisite opportunism.

Of equal stature is the intensely smart Holy Shit, a song which pits the previous track’s politics against the rest of the album’s romance and lets the sparks fly. Not only does it feature the very best vocal melodies, but also its best poetry. ‘Maybe love is just an economy based of resource scarcity…’ is the LP’s standout lyric. The song explores the ideas of the individual in a romantic relationship; through Tillman spit-balling an endless spiel of witticisms and interests of the liberal left; with the voice of his lover interjecting, longing to be devoted as much time as these personal passions of his, or, as the song says much better; ‘love is just an institution based on human frailty, but what I fail to see is what that’s got to do with you and me.’ It’s through an album of what at times comes across as a love letter, and at others pure catharsis, that Tillman allows himself the grace of the final song; a happy ending of sorts, which starts off as reminiscing the moment he and his wife first met and then jets off into the future, where he leaves a space in the song for memories they’ll look back on that are yet to be made. The final lyric of the album comes from that first moment; “Hey I’ve seen you around, what’s your name?” And so comes to an end the best singer-songwriter album since Benji, and a near-perfect guide on how to wear your heart on your sleeve, with your head held high.

Early last November, a handsome, bearded songwriter going by the name Father John Misty appeared on "Letterman" to perform a ballad called "Bored in the USA". Blazer pressed, shirt-collar open and eyes shut tight in concentration, Misty, whose birth name is Josh Tillman, sat at his grand piano, that great totem of solitude and opulence, wringing out lyrics so alienated you wondered how he made it out of his yurt, let alone to the spotlit world of late-night TV.

After a line about his own irrelevance ("By this afternoon I'll live in debt/ By tomorrow, be replaced by children"), Tillman turned away from the piano and took center stage. Magically, the piano played on without him. Strings swelled, lights glowed with multicolored gels, Tillman put one fist to his hip and pouted like a glam doll—it was all an act, and why should we have expected anything else? As the song plowed into its bridge—"They gave me a useless education/ And a subprime loan/ On a craftsman home!"—laughter filled the room. Canned, of course: How could anyone laugh at someone so miserable, and about such shallow, middle-class problems? The audience took a second to decide whether or not they should clap.

"Bored" is one of 11 songs on I Love You, Honeybear, an album by turns passionate and disillusioned, tender and angry, so cynical it's repulsive and so openhearted it hurts. Misty is at root a folksinger: Someone who uses natural-sounding arrangements and first-person songwriting to give the audience the impression that he's revealing the depths of his soul, which in a fucked-up way, he is. Because he sings sweetly, you imagine him to be sensitive; because he plays the acoustic guitar, you imagine him to be closer to a naked, more old-fashioned way of life, one in which we might frolic in the grass unafraid. This is an artist whose origin story starts on top of a literal mountain, abetted by psilocybin mushrooms—the story of a seeker in earnest, the kind that sounds even more credible when told by someone who has a beard or used to be in Fleet Foxes. Tillman is both.

Not all the jokes on Honeybear are as funny as "Bored in the USA" and several don't even register as jokes. Tillman often seems to play a failed, bitter version of what you might expect him to be from his headshots—an Andy Kaufmanesque hustler whose seams don't just show, but are constantly in danger of splitting. What should be the sweet story of a one-night stand ("The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment") turns into a vicious, nitpicky list of his conquest’s faults, while a bar night ("Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow") becomes a tirade against a guy trying to hit on Tillman’s wife. "Why the long face, jerkoff?" he spits. "Your chance has been taken/ Good one." For someone fond of glockenspiels, Tillman says the word "fuck" a lot.

Tillman is a wordy writer. At times, the music on Honeybear almost acts as a palliative to his lyrics, blunting the edges and keeping the mood friendly enough to get you from one excoriating piece of satire to the next. Fans of the Beatles and Sufjan Stevens will find that songs from Honeybear sit comfortably in their Spotify "Mountain Drive" playlists; fans of stand-up comedy will find the album as thorough, sad and bitterly cathartic as any good hour-long special. For all his poetic undercurrents, Tillman is a showman that way: He knows how to get his message across in a form people can clap to.

Honeybear is conflicted music that leaves me with conflicted feelings. Tillman is funny, but his humor is driven by meanness and self-loathing; he’s sweet, but he can’t manage to say anything nice without smothering it in jokes, like a dog compulsively trying to cover up its own shit. He opens the album by forecasting the apocalypse but most of the time comes off as the kind of mystic who gives up and embraces the debauchery, the patrician in some yoga sex ring, a bimbo Nero who fiddles while Los Angeles burns and occasionally gets sidetracked gloating about how hot his wife is. Yes, he gets high, but he never really leaves the dirty, dirty ground.

In the end, his sincerity is a sharper weapon than his humor. Honeybear’s last couple of songs in particular—"Holy Shit" and "I Went to the Store One Day"—arrive at the strange clarity people sometimes feel in the wake of drug trips, where life’s simplest lessons are suddenly presented to you, quiet and nude: Love people, stay open, be real. Admittedly there are an infinite number of barriers to these ideas, not least of which nobody seems to agree what the words "love," "open," and "real" actually mean, but my guess is that Tillman would acknowledge that failing isn’t as important as never trying at all.

Despite attempts to draw lines between himself and his persona, the story of Honeybear is at least in part a story of Tillman’s own recent marriage, which seems to have slowed his pace and made him reconsider questions of intimacy and closeness, the way marriage can do. The album ends with what were apparently his first words to his wife: "Seen you around. What’s your name?"—a question asked without editorializing. A few lines earlier, he had us at the brink of their deaths. "Insert here," he sings plaintively, "a sentiment re: Our golden years." I’ve chewed on that moment for a while now, feeling alternately as though it was a cop out and as though his point might be that trying to compress his and his wife's future into one line would be corny and disrespectful. At least I know he means it when he says he isn’t sure what to say.

Time has made Josh Tillman bolder, and the older he's gotten, the more introspective and baffling his songs have become. When he debuted the piano ballad "Bored in the U.S.A." on Letterman late last year, the former Fleet Foxes drummer hinted at the introspective incisiveness of his sophomore LP: "Save me white Jesus... / Oh, they gave me a useless education / A subprime loan / A craftsman home," he sang as pre-recorded studio laughter fluttered in the background.

Tillman's debut in the Father John Misty guise — 2012's Fear Fun — was a compelling wander through a carefully tilled garden of psych-folk, with detours to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery and the singer's fanatically fragmented dreamland. Conversely, the encore, I Love You, Honeybear, is littered with carefully wired bombs meant to blow up in the face of those seeking straightforward love songs. For an album so reverent of its romantic gestures, the LP often spits serious venom. "She says, like, 'literally,' music is the air she breathes / And the malaprops make me wanna fuckin' scream / I wonder if she even knows what that word means," he deadpans on the fourth-wall-breaking "The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment." It's grimly funny stuff, Disney schmaltz by way of John Oliver, a mindfuck that slashes expectations just as it conforms to them.

In the same breath, though, the recently married Tillman can't manage to surpress the cheerful twinkle in his eye. Goopy doesn't even begin to touch the sincerity of a song like "Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)," which unearths the mushmouthed romantic within. "You left a note in your perfect script / 'Stay as long as you want' / And I haven't left your bed since," he sings in 2015's most down-to-earth relationship scene thus far. On "Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow," he paints the picture of his (newly realized) perfect woman: "She blackens pages like a Russian romantic / Gets down more often than a blow-up doll."

hat's not to say I Love You, Honeybear is all diamonds and rosé. On "The Ideal Husband," Tillman lets free a torrent of self-flagellating confessions: "Every woman that I've slept with / Every friendship I've neglected / Didn't call when grandma died / I spend my money getting drunk and high." His tall tales are mostly positive, if wry; "I just love the kind of woman who can walk over a man / I mean, like a goddamned marching band," he sings on the aforementioned "Apartment." This stream-of-consciousness enthusiasm buoys the album as he wraps his songs in a lovestuck, string-laden bow, complete with quivering banjos. I Love You, Honeybear only falters in occasional moments of fatigue from the barrage of intricate wordplay ("I came by at seven in the morning / I said 'Baby, I'm finally succumbing'") and ambitious aural settings. But if Tillman's this brilliantly pointed as a paramour, we're scared to hear the breakup album.

And so comes to an end the best singer-songwriter album since Benji, and a near-perfect guide on how to wear your heart on your sleeve, with your head held high.

Bluebottle wrote:

Oh Carissa, when I first saw you, you were a lovely child
And the last time I saw you, you were fifteen and pregnant and running wild
I remember wondering, could there be a light at the end of your tunnel?
But I left Ohio then and pretty much forgotten all about you
I guess you were there some years ago at a family funeral
But you were one of so many relatives I didn't know which one was you

Yesterday morning I woke up to so many, 330 area code calls
I called my mom back and she was in tears and asked had I spoke to my father
Carissa burned to death last night in a freak accident fire
In her yard in Bruster her daughter came home from a party and found her
Same way as my uncle who was her grandfather
An aerosol can blew up in the trash, goddamn, what were the odds?
She was just getting ready to go to her midnight shift as an RN is Rosworth
And she vanished up in flames like that but there had to be more to her life's worth
Everyone's grieving out of their minds, making arrangements and taking drugs
But I'm flying out there tomorrow because I need to give and get some hugs
Cause I got questions that I'd like to get answered
I may never get them, but Carissa gotta know how did it happen

Carissa was thirty-five, you don't just raise two kids and take out your trash and die
She was my second cousin, I didn't know her well at all but it don't mean that
I wasn't meant to find some poetry to make some sense of this, to find a deeper meaning
In a senseless tragedy, oh Carissa I'll sing your name across every sea

Were you doing someone else's chores for them?
Were you just killing time, finding things to do all by your lonesome?
Was it even you who mistakenly put flammables in the trash
Was it your kids just being kids, and so, oh, the guilt they will carry around forever
Well I'm going out there to get a look at the landscapes,
To get a look at those I'm connected by blood and see how it all may have shaped me
Well I'm going out there though I'm not really needed
I'm just so broken up about it, how is it that this sad history repeated?
I'll return to Ohio, to the place I was born
Gonna see where I hung with my cousins and played with them in the snow
Fist in their palms, gonna see how they've grown
Visit some greats and say hey I've missed you
Gonna find out as much as I can about my little second cousin Carissa
Gonna go to Ohio, where I was born
Got a 10:45 AM flight, I'm leaving tomorrow morning
Gonna see my aunts and my uncles, my parents and sisters
Mostly I'm going to pay my respects to my little second cousin Carissa
Going to Ohio where I feel I belong
Ask those who know the most about Carissa for it was her life and death that I'm helplessly drawn.

Carissa was thirty-five, raised kids since she was fifteen years old and suddenly died
Next to an old river, fire pit, oh there's gotta be more than that to it
She was only my second cousin but it don't mean that I'm not here for her or that
I wasn't meant to give her life poetry, make sure her name is known across every city

Wondering whether Kanye West thinks you're a real artist? Well, YACHT have created Kanye.am, a website that tells you whether to keep strumming that uke or give up on art school.

"I built this site the day after the Grammys but forgot to tell anyone about it," YACHT wrote on Tumblr. "It’s a magic 8-ball, ask Kanye if you’re real artist and load it. Then refresh if you want a different answer." The site incorporates Kanye's own quotes into its answers. ("No, but we'll still go play basketball and stuff." "No. I'm going to talk in third person like I'm a crazy person — but it's very hard for Kanye West to not be very true and vocal to what he feels.")

Kanye, if you'll remember, had a lot to say about "real artistry" following the Grammys, where he nearly interrupted Beck's acceptance of the Album of the Year award. "If the Grammys want real artists to keep coming back, they need to stop playing with us," he told E! "We ain't gonna play with them no more. 'Flawless,' Beyoncé video. Beck needs to respect artistry and he should have given his award to Beyoncé, and at this point, we tired of it."

He continued, "When you keep on diminishing art and not respecting the craft and smacking people in their face after they deliver monumental feats of music, you're disrespectful to inspiration."

Eldorion wrote:Not sure I agree with your generalizations about other forms of popular music, but country definitely has a lot going for it, and it does have probably the strongest storytelling tradition of the major popular genres.