The party is over and the guests have departed; light is streaming, streaming through the curtains, and there’s no one, no one at home. All except your not-so-humble narrator, ‘God’s Favorite Customer’ himself, and he’s not quite sure what happened either. If 2015’s ‘I Love You Honeybear’ felt like an endless embrace of love, lust, and ego, and follow up ‘Pure Comedy’ embarked on an ambitious probing of the human condition in the post-truth era, then Father John Misty’s latest effort feels like the aftermath; all stumbled reminiscence, a tongue that tastes of bourbon cocktails and cigarettes attempting to garble through the events of the night before, except the words – unexpectedly – just won’t come. ‘Pure Comedy’ dazzled in its complexity, whereas ‘God’s Favourite Customer’ shocks in its simplicity, a concerted back-to-basics effort drawn up over two months in a New York hotel room that operates within a far smaller, more concise, and at times more claustrophobic palette than before. That soft-rock sound is still in place – from the dogged harmonica of ‘Please Don’t Die’ to the tumbling piano of the title track – but it feels inverted, reflecting a much darker, more solemn mood. Things aren’t right, we learn. Endlessly restless, ‘God’s Favourite Customer’ primarily takes place in hotel rooms and receptions, checking in and checking out in a transitory environment, one without love, comfort or roots. He’s lost, without hope of getting back; ‘The Palace’ opens with a speed delivery, but ends: “Last night I texted your iPhone, said ‘I’m ready to come home’ / I’m in over my head, I’m in over my head…” If ‘…Honeybear’ was sexually luminescent then ‘God’s Favourite Customer’ is dogged by impotence and separation, unfulfilled lust that collapses into self-loathing. ‘Disappointing Diamonds Are The Rarest Of Them All’ he croons on the album’s centrepiece, before adding with a swipe: “The loves that lasts forever really can’t be that special…” Before, we were invited to join the lines in an eternally seductive parade; now the lines have been broken, and the endless divide is all we can see. Misty’s mind is manic, flitting from topic to topic, but always fixated on what he’s lost. If love is the drug then this is the withdrawal. Still, though, he continues. The title song focuses on the desire to be loved, and to love in turn, with Misty focusing on simple truths, on the bottom line, before singing: “I’m in the business of living, yeah, that’s something I’d say…” ‘The Songwriter’ inverts the roles of the relationship, with Josh Tillman fixating on the importance of being there for someone, how damaging it can be when they disappear; and ultimately if Misty himself could take that secondary role, understanding and appreciating another perspective. It’s not all navel-gazing profundity, though; ‘God’s Favourite Customer’ boasts more than it’s fair share of off-the-cuff humour, the kind of shoulder-shrug genius only Father John Misty can provide. ‘The Palace’ revels in these shifts of mood, culminating in the wonderfully self-deprecating: “Last night I wrote a poem, man I must have been in the poem zone…” Pain and suffering pass, we learn, while individuality is something to be both feared and cherished, Father John Misty’s chief accomplishment, but also his burden. It’s a solitude both heroic and hateful, with closer ‘We’re Only People (And There’s Not Much Anyone Can Do About That)’ offering an urge towards communion that opens in lush soft-rock bedlam before ending only with Tilmann’s voice, cracking with the weight of it all. “I think the end of it all may look a lot like the beginning,” he muses, before adding: “Why not me? Why not you? Why not now?” It’s a record riddled with questions, while refusing to offer answers. In remaining tight-lipped, this taciturn new aspect to Father John Misty might be his most genuinely sincere, and his most profound.<doc-sep>It’s time to take Father John Misty seriously. The Fleet Foxes drummer-turned-folk rock prophet has become something of hipster punchline, best known for his stoned interviews, sardonic presence on social media and cultish fan base of earnest twentysomethings who take his songs at gospel. (“I’m basically a meme at this point,” he confessed to the Los Angeles Times last year.) But much like the similarly egocentric Kanye West, Josh Tillman’s output under stage name Father John Misty consistently outshines his headline-making antics, and four albums in, he’s never been better than on God’s Favorite Customer (★★★★ out of four), out Friday. REVIEW: Father John Misty finds 'Pure Comedy' in Taylor Swift, politics INTERVIEW: Father John Misty on touring, Trump and why he likes Taylor Swift While last year’s cynical Pure Comedy bemoaned life in the digital age with razor-sharp wit, God’s Favorite Customer is less performative and more introspective, yielding some of Tillman’s rawest, most honest music yet. Existential dread permeates the album’s lean 10 tracks: “I’m treading water as I bleed to death,” he cries on world-weary opener Hangout at the Gallows, repeatedly questioning his reason for living. He mulls suicide, drunken benders and loss on the bluntly titled Please Don’t Die, while the divine title track is a haunting rumination on loneliness and faith. The Songwriter is an affectionate tribute to his wife, photographer Emma Tillman, as he imagines if their roles were reversed over soft piano: “What would it sound like if you were the songwriter and loving me was your unsung masterpiece?” Of course, it wouldn't be a Father John Misty album without a generous helping of his trademark humor. Mr. Tillman hilariously sends up his fast-living rock-star persona, taking on the perspective of a frazzled hotel concierge attempting to meet his outrageous demands. Evocative imagery paints his matter-of-fact lyrics, as he casually compares a deep romantic love to a rotting carcass and a pervert in a crowded bus on the anthemic Disappointing Diamonds Are the Rarest of Them All. But for all his apparent smugness and self-absorption, God's Favorite Customer suggests that Tillman has finally made peace with the world he so bracingly lampoons. Album closer We're Only People (And There's Not Much Anyone Can Do About That) finds him humbled — a word rarely associated with the singer — and reminiscing about lost connections, sending good vibes until they meet again. "Friends, all my friends, I hope you’re somewhere smiling," he croons. Listening to him bare his soul with a knowing smirk and a wink, it's impossible not to.<doc-sep>The magnificent ego of Father John Misty makes his music seem really important. The music is not really that important, of course, but when you hear that smooth and gentle soft-rock with his olden croon centered so perfectly on every pitch, it seems like it is, in the way that narcissists or the canon of classic rock seem important. This outsized persona bursting forth from singer-songwriter Josh Tillman is full of self-mythology descended straight from Bob Dylan, dripping with a painted-on significance: His greatest passion is his thoughts. The autofiction of his songwriting imparts its own patina of truth, something that seems unassailable if you subscribe to the man, the voice, the facial hair. He strolls through his own songs like a melancholy king finding every opportunity to catch his reflection. His ego may keep some folks at arm’s length, but it is also precisely what makes his music fascinating. If the maxim is “write what you know,” then it is certain that Tillman knows himself a little too well. All this helps build a kind of lore around him, the Misty mythos: He is the former drummer for the sylvan Fleet Foxes, the rogue at house parties, the online satirist, the ham at live shows, the scamp who writes generic pop songs as a lark or as a hired gun, the ingester of mushrooms, the beefer with Ryan Adams, and of course the husband to his wife, Emma, to whom his cosmic romance was detailed with great overture on his 2015 album I Love You, Honeybear. This is only part of the vast Father John Misty universe Tillman has created, with its many footnotes and appendices. His fourth album, God’s Favorite Customer, is Tillman trying to destroy it all. The record is comparatively small and vulnerable, as hook-filled as it is heartrending, the kind of back-to-basics turn that almost seems a bit too calculated after the density of last year’s Pure Comedy. Written over a period of two emotionally fraught months holed up in a New York hotel room, Tillman sounds more wise than clever. Instead of the romantic bombast of I Love You, Honeybear, now it’s love songs without ornaments, written from the perspective of someone looking up at the world, not down on it. Finally, the real lessons of his psychedelic trips of the past are taking hold: Father John Misty wants to destroy his ego, get out of his head, and be here for someone else. Which is not easily done. Tillman sometimes handles naked sentiment as if holding a screaming infant, but witnessing his arduous journey from a louche cynic to a man stripped absolutely bare makes for rapt listening. It’s his own modern-day Orpheus myth, where hell is a lonely penthouse strewn with empty bottles and unremembered evenings. Lead single “Mr. Tillman” imagines as much, a genuinely hilarious back-and-forth between a blacked-out Tillman and an incredibly patient hotel concierge. Still in the darkness of the hotel, the bathrobed piano ballad “Palace” contains a line delivered with such melodrama that it still makes me laugh dozens of times in: “Last night I wrote a poem/Man, I must’ve been in the poem zone.” Outside of his hotel room, the snide commentary slowly melts away. Part of Tillman’s humble quest is guided by the record’s charmingly lysergic California studio sound. Sometimes there’s a flourish of sax or glockenspiel, sometimes they swell into a big glam-pop sound, and sometimes they feature Mark Ronson playing bass. But mostly, Tillman uses simple arrangements and a muted drum kit sound which could only be described as “tasteful,” keeping things to a lean and tuneful 38 minutes. It’s a risky move because, now more than ever, the songs rely heavily on Tillman’s voice and narrative to see them through. Present within these songs are grace and generosity—two words I could not imagine summoning to describe Father John Misty’s music a year ago. It knocks you off balance. He has the ear of Jeff Lynne and the vowels of Elton John as he casts his words into the sky and lets them hang there to be marveled at, plainspoken and myth-free. There are no Misty prerequisites required in order to be shot through the heart with the ballads of “Please Don’t Die” and closer “We’re Only People (And There’s Not Much Anyone Can Do About That).” They are lonesome songs, honest because of their nature not because of their pretext. Tillman used to write what he knew; now it’s as though he’s writing what he’s just learned, racing to capture a newborn emotion before it curdles into self-conscious drek. And while God’s Favorite Customer tips slightly into self-pity at times, it’s a passing feeling on an album that peeks behind the many cynical shields of Josh Tillman. Through the wringer and reborn on the other side, the world he sketches seems brighter now, bigger, and more sensitive to the touch. It brings his songs forward out of the warrens of his head and into the sacred space between listener and writer. He’s still writing about himself, but now his songs are interrogations, apologies, and discoveries: On the gorgeous and spacious track called “The Songwriter,” he sings slowly to his wife Emma, something incorrigibly selfish and selfless at the same time: What would it sound like if you were the songwriter And you made your living off of me? Would you detail your near constant consternation With the way my very presence makes your muses up and flee? That is the crux of Father John Misty, this tension, between believing in himself and believing in others. God’s Favorite Customer is ultimately about trust, what you can afford to lose to be fully there for someone else—and just how difficult and terrifying that can be. You wonder, though, whether or not this too will all be folded into part of the Misty universe. The Hotel Album. The One Where He Got Real. Can you really trust someone like this? Retreating to a hotel room to write an album assisted by a cocktail of drugs and heartbreak is not exactly an original rock’n’roll proposition.<doc-sep>The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now. In late April, I saw Father John Misty and his exemplary backing band play a stunning hour-long set at the Homecoming Festival in Cincinnati. It was also a little strange, because the artist otherwise known as Josh Tillman hardly spoke between songs. There were no rants about Trump, or the cult of celebrity, or the soul-deadening effects of the internet, or anything else resembling the viral moments that have become fixtures of #FJMcontent on music news websites in recent years. He just played one beautiful, wry tune after another, including several tracks from his forthcoming record, God’s Favorite Customer. I enjoyed the performance tremendously, though the critic in me immediately went into pundit mode. Clearly, Tillman was over-correcting in the aftermath of 2017’s Pure Comedy, his 76-minute broadside about the state of the world that garnered mostly positive reviews, and yet left a faintly negative impression in the wake of a sometimes playful, more often confrontational press cycle. “This guy is a little too much,” seemed to be the prevailing sentiment. But now that he wasn’t talking, either on stage or off — he’s mostly sworn off interviews to promote God’s Favorite Customer — I immediately psychoanalyzed the man on stage as a reactionary. Fine, I won’t say anything, I imagined Tillman thinking. See how you people enjoy your boring, humorless indie stars now. People have played this parlor game with Tillman ever since he adopted the Father John Misty persona six years ago. Admittedly, I like thinking about Father John Misty more than just about anyone in music right now. He’s a great artist, and also a genuinely interesting entertainer, and there’s nobody in contemporary indie rock nearly as good at both of those things. But even people who can’t stand him tend to assign motives and machinations to even seemingly innocuous gestures, and Tillman knows this. “People think I’m toying with them, playing 12-dimensional chess,” he told The New Yorker‘s Nick Paumgarten last year. He was reacting to a Pitchfork column by Greil Marcus in which the venerated music critic claimed that Tillman adopted his swaggering, shamanistic avatar in order “to appear as if touched by God” and “laugh at you” for not getting it. What was strange about the “touched by God” criticism is that it seemed to disregard Tillman’s songs. How could anyone listen to “Nancy From Now On,” “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt.,” or “Things It Would Have Been Helpful To Know Before The Revolution” and believe that Tillman was putting himself above anyone? These are songs that explore the least likable parts of humanity, all of the misanthropic pettiness, raw-nerve vulnerability, and child-like neediness that we all carry in us somewhere and know we can never openly express. While it’s true that online trolls adopt avatars as a kind of hustle, Father John Misty clearly has been an instrument for Tillman to be more honest about himself, not less. It takes courage to do an inventory of these undesirable feelings in your art, but it also requires a little space and maybe an act of misdirection. Hence the wild interviews, bombastic concerts, and “debauched libertine” facade — it creates the room Tillman needs to speak, with naked earnestness, about the one theme that most obsesses him, which is the need for human connection, no matter how impermanent, as a remedy for existential fear. When I finally heard God’s Favorite Customer, I realized how misguided my insta-punditry at the Homecoming Festival had been. Sure, it’s possible that Tillman is still a little burnt out just one year after Pure Comedy‘s wall-to-wall media campaign. But this brittle, ravaged, thoroughly heartbroken record makes a convincing counter-argument that Tillman simply can’t talk about these songs, because reliving the pain that God’s Favorite Customer contains, over and over again, would simply be too potent. He’s not playing 12-dimensional chess. This is as simple as checkers, where the only goal is to not get completely wiped out.<doc-sep>
Father John Misty God's Favorite Customer Published May 29, 2018 8 Josh Tillman returns as Father John Misty on God's Favorite Customer, blurring the lines between artist and alter-ego and trading humour for heartbreak on a concise record that's as sombre as it is satisfying. "I'm treading water as I bleed to death" Tillman sings on the opener "Hangout at the Gallows," setting the tone for his most raw effort as Father John Misty yet — it's an emotionally wounded, ambitious attempt to capture a man at his most desperate, all in under 40 minutes.God's Favorite Customer is certainly a continuation of the Misty character, but rather than trying to build on the lofty highs reached on Pure Comedy, Tillman takes his progress for a joyride straight into a pole, letting us ogle the gruesome details as he bleeds out in the driver's seat. Where Pure Comedy was wrought with witty social commentary, soaring above lush arrangements, this album often takes a dive into morbid melancholy. When Tillman reaches into his falsetto to sing "I'm in over my head" on "The Palace," his fragile quiver is unmistakeably genuine.Sonically, God's Favorite Customer follows Tillman's usual blend of piano- and guitar-driven folk-rock balladry with masterful production. Even in the dense mixes, every instrument punches through, heard without becoming overbearing.There's enough variety mixed in to keep the instrumentals fresh, with luxurious string passages, warm organ swells, overdriven guitar riffs, some harmonica and even a fuzzed-out synth tone.Perhaps the album is a little less grand and a little less fun than its predecessors; that's to be expected from a man who spent two months living in a hotel when he penned the record. The lead single "Mr. Tillman" features a delicate piano line that follows the vocal melody and uses Tillman's layered voice as a backing instrument while introducing us to the hotel that's referenced across the ten tracks. Tillman is clearly notorious at the hotel from previous stays, and he somehow manages to make a song about checking in catchy as hell.The album then takes a hopeless turn on the visceral and downtrodden "Just Dumb Enough to Try," where Tillman's brutally honest lyrics offer no silver lining, ridiculing himself for believing he'll "get out with my skin and start my life again." It's a low point he returns to over and over, with no solace in sight.Although the album is relatively free of Tillman's signature sarcasm and cynicism, he still manages to raise his head from his manic depression to deliver a few memorable quips. Like on "The Palace," a sparse, slow-burning piano ballad that paints the clearest portrait of Tillman's extended hotel stay, where he proclaims "Last night I wrote a poem / Man I must've been in the poem zone" and "Maybe I'll get a pet, learn how to take care of somebody else / Maybe I'll name him Jeff. "Tillman truly bares all on "The Songwriter," which might be the most vulnerable moment in his discography. He seems to sing directly to his wife over barren piano chords, asking aloud how'd she'd portray him to the masses if she were the one writing songs. It's heart-wrenching, but he seems to reach a previously unrealized understanding, which may end up being his lone shot at redemption on God's Favorite Customer.Tillman's latest record may not quite reach the mountainous heights of Pure Comedy, although there's an argument to be made that it digs itself just as deep in the opposite direction. As Tillman muses on "Disappointing Diamonds Are the Rarest of Them All," "Does everybody have to be the greatest story ever told?" Perhaps that's the best case he makes for God's Favorite Customer. Not every record needs to topple the last with even more epic instrumentation and colossal wit. Sometimes it's better to crash and burn in a hotel room for two months. ( Sub Pop