No One Does Ego Death Like Father John Misty
On ‘Mahashmashana,’ Misty’s main-character-syndrome folk-rock uncovers shiny new pearls of wisdom.
People love to hate the singer-songwriter Father John Misty, but in some cases I’m not sure they’ve actually listened to his music. Instead, they hate the idea of Father John Misty, which in certain circles was codified as king-daddy indie troll at the height of the identity politics era, in the mid-to-late 2010s. Ever self-aware, the man himself surmised this phenomenon well when we spoke in 2017: “Basically, I think that the culture needs to deal with this smug, ironic white-guy thing. It’s like liberals have now whittled down and self-perverted to nothing. You’re not allowed to be.” Josh Tillman had earned his place in the millennial prestige cringe-art hall of fame, right next to Lena Dunham, with creepy-satirical lines like “in bed with Taylor Swift, every night inside an Oculus Rift.” But he was also penalized for his omnipresence—for taking up space and taking the piss within an earnest indie rock realm that was finally moving away from cis dudes with strong opinions.
I’d like to say I understand the hatred of Misty’s music, but to me, it’s like hating the most beautiful flower you’ve ever seen because there’s a loud bee buzzing around it. Music isn’t a manual of how to live—it’s a reflection of how we actually live, or at least the ridiculous thoughts experienced while living. I prefer singer-songwriters who say something and work within a rock-as-literature tradition, rather than those who just mumble platitudes about love. Instead of merely expressing his personal feelings, Tillman approaches them on multiple levels: intellectualizing, critiquing, drawing out metaphors both theological and brain-rotted, referencing his own mythology within his storytelling, but also cinematizing the experience through his lush instrumentation and his crooner voice. His sense of melody hits on a more instinctual level, the kind that can carry even the most unlikely hooks—like “honeybear” or “mental health”—repeated ad infinitum.
After the election, I found myself thinking that millennial men aren’t looking so bad now. Sure, they were socialized in the radioactive gender toxicity of the early 2000s, but it turns out that when straight white men grow up believing that they are inherently bad or powerless from jump, you end up with something like Gen-Z dudes going bananas for Trump. What does this have to do with Father John Misty? Well, given the vast political divide in this country, and the fact that the left has far bigger concerns than throwing a performative ugh, this guy at aging white hipsters who vote blue, the times seem better suited for Father John Misty—and Misty seems better suited for the times. It helps that Mahashmashana, his sixth album, is easily his best since 2015’s I Love You, Honeybear.
Like that record about falling in love and getting married, this one aligns with a major progression in Tillman’s life, wherein he made a family of his own and experienced “a few non-elective ego deaths,” as he recently put it during his first interview in years. Mahashmashana feels like a rock opera about a hard mid-life reset, a check-in with one’s own warped sense of reality so that we might question the simulation of being ourselves in this end-times-like world. Those ideas are expressed via a pristine soundtrack of guitar-and-piano-based music from decades past, so well-played by Misty and his band that it’s hard to deny the talent, even if you find this guy repugnant. The album starts with a massive-sounding, nine-minute title track that brings to mind Phil Spector’s production on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, stuffed with sentimental strings and a chord progression that recalls “Isn’t It a Pity.”
The Harrison comparisons run deeper than that. Mahāśmaśāna (महाश्मशान) means “great cremation ground” in Sanskrit, and in the Misty-verse, it connects back to some of the closing lyrics on his 2022 LP—the bizarro American-songbook pastiche Chloë and the Next 20th Century—where he sings, “Come build your burial grounds/On our burial grounds/But you won’t kill death that way.” At the top of Mahashmashana’s credits sheet, it says: “After a decade being born, Josh Tillman is finally busy dying.” Harrison was a Hare Krishna from the late ’60s onward, and Tillman grew up in an unidentified Christian cult, taught to believe he was evil and barred from secular music at home; both sing about existential concerns and higher powers, but one obvious difference is that Tillman’s version of “all things must pass” is more pessimistic. The final verse at the end of Misty’s titular epic isn’t particularly funny or flashy, but it’s now among my favorites in his catalog: “Like there’s no baby in the king cake/Like there’s no figure on the cross/They have gone the way of all flesh/And what was found is lost.” He then sings “yes it is” like a soulful hallelujah, again and again affirming his notion that the work of the mind won’t matter when our bodies fail us.
After that all-encompassing opener, Misty takes it down to the micro. He struggles to remember the name of Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant sci-fi film Under the Skin and boogies like the Black Keys circa 2010 on “She Cleans Up.” (Seriously, this song is like if those cokeheads in Jet were trying to cover Dylan from memory, except none of them particularly liked Dylan—it’s great.) The single “Screamland” recalls a Coldplay ballad-banger, in that it all builds to this BIG catharsis in the chorus, which lands like super-crunchy Auto-Tuned Christian rock. It’s definitely my least favorite track on Mahashmashana, but the image of a young Tillman getting his headbrace wet while standing on a beach gets me every fucking time.
“Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose” teeters between Randy Newman and Radiohead in dark orchestral mode, and features more than one classic Mistyism in the opening verse alone: “She put on Astral Weeks, said, ‘I love jazz,’ and winked at me” and “Around this time, I publicly was treating acid with anxiety.” This song feels like a sequel of sorts to “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment,” from Honeybear, in that they both involve interactions with women that he knows he should remove himself from, and makes snarky comments about their music taste while in the thick of it (essentially, What is it with white girls loving the jazz singer Sarah Vaughn?). When Misty uses his first name in song titles like this, it feels like he’s playing some sarcastic character called Josh Tillman—though I’ve wondered at times if it’s the exact opposite, that he’s actually just telling on himself for being an asshole.
The self-referential stuff is amusing for longtime fans, like how he nods to his first album Fear Fun and its single “Fun Times in Babylon” in closing track “Summer’s Gone,” but it’s not like this keeps him from taking in the full view of culture. Some of my favorite songs on Mahashmashana—an album about “erasing” himself (his words)—involve Misty critiquing outside forces using his signature wit, humor, and vivid imagery. Set in some kind of honky-tonk disco where Stevie Wonder and the world’s greatest saxophonists blow off steam, “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All” eviscerates the music industry by likening it to a rattlesnake Misty backed over with his truck, who in its dying breath says, “Hey, I can sell you a million records… I mean, your image could use an overhaul.” “Mental Health” is in the vein of Weyes Blood, Misty’s compatriot in the microgenre of “old sounds/new ideas” folk-rock—this completely over-the-top and gorgeous song that holds a mirror up to a world (or at least an internet) filled with people who self-diagnose mental illness and self-obsess instead of actually helping themselves or coping with it. This is Tillman’s way of saying, Go touch grass.
I was feeling a bit in my head while working on this review, so I went out for a walk to get a bagel and a matcha at my local vegan coffeeshop. The twentysomething barista was playing Mahashmashana when I went in, “Mental Health” blaring above the din of a Pies for Palestine fundraiser at the front of the small cafe. I thought, I can’t escape this guy, and briefly understood how Misty haters must feel. I went back the next day and the same barista was playing All Things Must Pass. I told her I liked her taste, and we chatted a little about our initial thoughts on Mahashmashana. There was an unspoken self-awareness about putting on the album, that it could spike the latte vibe. She said, “I thought, I’m going to make everyone listen to him.”
