To be sure, the music has layers it’s streaked with worry and dark humor, particularly regarding the ways we use entertainment and technology as numbing agents. Musician Father John Misty explains how having the resources behind his recent album “Pure Comedy” makes all the difference. Instead, his eagerness to share a mind-altering substance - if that’s what it was - felt like part of a larger effort to let others in on the unique way he views the world.

So of course this guy would offer acid to a stranger who’d just walked into his house with a notebook and recorder.Įxcept Tillman didn’t actually seem to be stunting (or at least he didn’t yet). And it only increased with 2015’s acclaimed “I Love You, Honeybear,” on which he took up the fraught idea of privileged male sensitivity. Tillman, as well as a stint playing drums in the rustic indie-rock band Fleet Foxes - and reinvent himself as a convivial (if polarizing) chronicler of society’s growing absurdity.Ĭheerful provocation has been central to his act since 2012, when he released “Fear Fun,” his debut as Father John Misty. It was after ingesting mushrooms for the first time that Tillman says he experienced a moment of clarity that led him to cast off his old accomplishments - eight albums of depressive folk music recorded under the name J. Psychedelic drugs figure prominently in the Father John Misty story.

Poison cat in the kettle song