Just a few hours after the release of the new song “Ballad of the Dying Man,” Father John Misty’s talk with Zane Lowe aired on Beats 1 earlier today. It was Josh Tillman’s first interview discussing his new album Pure Comedy, out April 7 (via Sub Pop/Bella Union). They talked about the new record, as well as his 2016 single “Real Love Baby,” his collaboration with Lady Gaga, that time last summer he cut a festival set short to lecture the audience about evil, and more.
Tillman revealed that “Real Love Baby” was originally written for Lady Gaga. “I was writing a bunch of songs for [Lady] Gaga and that was one of them. It just sounded so good with me singing it I just couldn’t part with it,” he said, adding that working with Gaga “was way more immersive than” contributing to Beyoncé’s “Hold Up.” With Gaga, “We were hanging. It was, like, 5 in the morning, someone handing me an acoustic guitar and I’m just like, ‘What are hands.’ We had so much fun. Mark [Ronson]—just watching him produce, it was amazing.”
Elsewhere, Tillman revisited his notorious performance at the XPoNential festival in New Jersey last summer, which took place right after Donald Trump was named the Republican nominee for President. Tillman cut his set short after delivering a lengthy speech. At one point, he told the crowd, “Maybe just take a moment to be really fucking profoundly sad.”
Speaking with Lowe, Tillman said he was “deep in the world of this album” at the time. He explained:
Just watching this thing go down, I guess what disturbed me—I was at a bar watching [Trump] get the [Republican] nomination. I’m looking around at my peers and people my age. People of my persuasion—generally the same kind of beliefs and whatever, and everybody’s just kind of like “meehhh,” making jokes and being pretty passive and that’s when I was like, “We’re fucked, we’re really fucked.” This is not something you react to by... I mean I wouldn't say out in the streets and knocking mailboxes over or whatever.
Lowe interjected, "But take it seriously."
Tillman continued:
It became very clear that there was almost this Manifest Destiny: Since we’re the ones with the right ideas, the world is bound to reflect our values because we’re right about the world, we’re right about the way things go, or whatever. A lot of people took issue, like, “Why are you lecturing, like, a liberal, an audience of people who are probably, like, liberals about this?” Because we’re complicit. That’s the thing that I was trying to communicate, and I think communicating with this album and a lot of what I’ve said around the album and whatever. Things are the way they are because this is how we want them on some level. It can’t be any other way. Otherwise you’re just going to be waiting for the other side to come around to your worldview. I was asking myself in what ways am I complicit? How did I make this happen? In what ways am I complicit? I think that got lost because people don’t necessarily ask themselves that question.
Tillman also said that he wrote “Pure Comedy” prior to the election, but he found that “putting the inauguration footage in [the music video] was kind of irresistible.” As for his process, he told Lowe that he “went real monastic” while making the record: “The state of mind that I was in when I was writing this stuff, I mean, I stopped drinking, I stopped smoking, I stopped doing drugs and eating meat.”
Revisit Pitchfork’s 2015 interview with Father John Misty.
Here’s “Ballad of the Dying Man”:
via Matthew Strauss
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