Music Monday // Father John Misty

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Inevitably there are a few albums that become the soundtrack of a summer and for me, Father John Misty‘s Fear Fun is one of them this year. I was introduced to this album by the same friend who first played Foxygen for me and I’ve been listening to at least one track from it a day ever since. We recently bought tickets to his Toronto concert, so he’ll be playing an even bigger role in our summer shenanigans come August.

You might better known him as Joshua Tillman, a long-time member of Fleet Foxes and Saxon Shore. But with his new moniker, and Fear Fun’s West Coast folk rock rhythms, its elegant weaving of witty themes with somber ones, and Tillman’s thought-provoking lyrics, he really seems to have stepped into his own with this latest solo endeavour. Somehow he’s mysterious yet relatable, somber yet playful, dark yet witty, and it’s completely captivating

This quote about finding his own voice and writing the album made me chuckle…

“I got into my van with enough mushrooms to choke a horse and started driving down the coast with nowhere to go. After a few weeks, I was writing a novel, which is where I finally found my narrative voice…. It was a while before that voice started manifesting in a musical way, but once I settled in the Laurel Canyon spider-shack where I’m living now, I spent months demoing all these weird-ass songs about weird-ass experiences almost in real-time, and kind of had this musical ‘Oh-there-I-am’ moment, identical to how I felt when I was writing the book.”

Here are a couple of my favourite tracks of off Fear Fun to get you started and if you dig them, I definitely recommend checking out the whole album.

P.S. I’m sorry if this is showing up in your reader a couple of days late…I noticed it never loaded in GR for me so I’m re-publishing it to see if that solves the problem.