A strange thing happens three quarters of the way through Bored in the USA, the first single from former Fleet Foxes drummer Joshua Tillman’s new album under his Father John Misty alias.
The song begins life as a downbeat piano ballad. The lyrics find Tillman in the midst of the kind of existential crisis that has plagued confessional singer-songwriters for decades, gloomily ruminating on the mindlessness of modern-day life, the pointless acquisition of objects and the multifarious ways in which the daily reality of a relationship fails to live up to an idealised notion of love: “I’ve got a lifetime to consider all the ways I grow more disappointing to you as beauty warps and fades, and I suspect you feel the same.”
It works in the way ballads by confessional singer-songwriters usually work: the tune reels the listener in, anyone similarly mired in gloom and confusion nods along to the words, seeing themselves reflected. But then, just after the first chorus, a canned-laughter track appears: every time Tillman enumerates one of latterday America’s problems — the sub-prime mortgage crisis, an over-reliance on prescription drugs, the failure of the education system — the virtual audience bust a gut.
I Love You, Honeybear is billed as “a concept album about Josh Tillman”, on which heartfelt paeans to true love, inspired by Tillman’s recent marriage — “I can hardly believe I found you and I’m terrified by that,” he sings on When You’re Smiling and Astride Me — jostle for space with songs apparently written in character, including The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt., a savage evisceration of an “insufferable” female acquaintance.
From the chaotic bombast of the title track and The Ideal Husband to the spluttering synthpop on True Affection, all these songs would sound fantastic even if the lyrics bored you stiff. For all the layers of irony on I Love You, Honeybear, the biggest irony of all might be that such an ostensibly knotty and confusing album’s real strength lies in something as prosaic and transparent as its author’s ability to write a beautiful melody — whoever he is.
