I’m unpopular around these parts. I think the records Dan Bejar has made as DESTROYER aren’t very good after YOUR BLUES. I vomit in stupefied awe as mostly male critics praise him, album after album, for the same song after the same song, same! That said, THIEF, STREETHAWK and THIS NIGHT were/are great. That song, STRIKE…? “Why…do you work…in place of bearing witness… to your own inclusion…and strike?” Bejar loves a twofer when it comes to his lyrics and that’s one of his best. What came later out of him might be cool but it has nothing to teach me. It might have something to teach you. That’s fine. And if you can teach me what he still has to teach me, I’m ready to learn.
Not that Carl Newman of the New Pornographers is getting better either. Few men are. I like the energy of the present and whomever’s holding the torch, I try to look into their flame. Right now, it’s mostly women holding the torches. That’s fine with me. SYMPATHY IS A KNIFE is my second-most-played song of 2024, right after 360. I don’t see anything by The National making the cut this year. As my friend Bruce said, I’m tired of that Daddy-Daughter dance.
But this is now and that was then. Way back then. I felt like Josh Tillman was carrying some wild light when in 2012 he left Fleet Foxes, the best band for a picnic ever, to become a far stranger thing he called “Father John Misty.” FEAR FUN was a great debut album of great new kinds of songs. Misty had picked up some pieces of, it seemed to me, Gram Parsons and Van Dyke Parks and Harry Nilsson and had actually gotten some real life down on record. Not that the songs were diary entries. They were songs: confusing things you had to wade through sometimes but with tunes and the life he’d gotten down wasn’t just his, it was a life that belonged at least to everyone who liked it. FEAR FUN was impersonal in the good way, impersonal like GUERNICA, and as it leaned there in your ear, propped up by what the publicists had told you about the religious upbringing in Father John’s rear-view mirror, it felt appropriately, in all three senses of the word, fresh. Just listen to FUNTIMES IN BABYLON: the climate paranoia (way before its time), the vague sense of American antique shop road-trip frippery, the dog-tired but ready-to-go-again drug-positivity: it’s Preston Sturges meets Nathanael West by way of the Haight and Esalen and, like HOTEL CALIFORNIA, it’s so paradoxically preachy! Taken with all the publicity, the song goes down easy, like a spiritual Sour Patch suicide pill.
Fun times in Babylon That's what I'm counting on Before the dam goes up at the foot of the sea Before the new wing of the prison ribbon ceremony Before the star of the morning comes looking for me I would like to abuse my lungs Smoke everything inside with every girl I've ever loved Ride around the wreckage on a horse knee-deep in mud Look out Hollywood, here I come Fun times in Babylon Momma they've just begun Before they put me to work in a government camp Before they do my face up like a corpse and say "get up and dance" Before the beast comes looking for last year's rent I would like to abuse my lungs Smoked everything inside with every girl I've ever loved Ride around my wreckage on a horse knee-deep in mud Look out Hollywood, here I come Look out Hollywood, here I come Look out Hollywood, here I come
I loved it and it sounded, back then, new. His new collection of oldies entitled GREATISH HITS, however, should have been called GRATING HITS. Most of what came after FEAR FUN seemed to be spewing from someone who hadn’t had any genuinely new ideas, quite, who was high on his own mold-speckled supply. Am I glad Mr. Tillman found love? Sure. Am I glad he saw through his own fame even as he was disenjoying it; that there was no refractory period between his regrets? Sure. And here and there were some actual songs that didn’t have the same Tin Pan Alley chords, that weren’t long, self-fascinated sermons about humility so convinced of their own inestimable value that they cancelled themselves out in the soul of the listener, as well as the ear. Here’s the thing: being smart and talented is only enough the first time! After that, you have to be smarter and better, because not to be wouldn’t be smart! You have to GROW. And if you can’t grow, shut down, wait for spring. I don’t care what they tell you in bed or after the show, baby, you can. No one cares.
But the good news (or as they used to say, “the gospel”) seems to be that Father John Misty is about to put out a good record. I sort of felt it coming at the end of his last one, CHLOË AND THE NEXT 20TH CENTURY. The closer THE NEXT 20TH CENTURY contained an instRumental interlude the likes of which Misty had never attempted, followed by this stunning prophecy —
The wheel is turning From night into day Everything's in transition Everything must change But none of us here Will ever see the promised land None of us here will be there for Childhood's end I see ya You student debtors In the watchtower overhead Searchin' for headlights in the driveway Crying, "Dad, look what they did" Just look Even their romance made us masters and slaves And now things keep getting worse while staying so eerily the same Come build your burial grounds On our burial grounds But you won't kill death that way I don't know bout you But I'll take the love songs And give you the future in exchange I don't know 'bout you But I'll take the love songs If this century's here to stay I don't know 'bout you But I'll take the love songs And the great distance that they came
— and maybe it’s good to remember that some scholars say Old Testament prophets didn’t predict the future, they named what was already latent in the present. Amen! And I have such respect for that couplet in there —
Just look Even their romance made us masters and slaves And now things keep getting worse while staying so eerily the same
— and that way he sings “Just look” in such a fake way, you can tell he means it. (If you think THE GLASS MENAGERIE is Tennessee Williams’ best play and you still don’t even like THE GLASS MENAGERIE, you know what I mean.)
Sometimes the most obviously constructed things are also the most natural.
Anyway. I’m not a music critic. There’s no accounting for taste. So I won’t try to convince you. But there’s something of an altar call about SCREAMLAND, the first single from FJM’s forthcoming album MAHASHMASHANA. It’s simple and it sounds unironic and the song has a chorus. And check out this lyric…
The optimist Swears hope dies last And shoots the lamplight clean from the brakeman's hand It's always the darkest right before the end And you could say that no one here really believes In the future, in perfection, that things aren't what they seem Like a sucker with a scratcher, like a fuck-up with a dream Stabbing at the ashtray like it might give up the truth Like it might finally confess who else you're nearly faithful to Stay young Get numb Keep dreaming Screamland
…that sounds like someone who’s genuinely concerned about his own failings and the failures of others, who genuinely wants to do better, who’s no longer content to just sell records of how he disappointed himself for a song.