Father John Misty / I Love You, Honeybear

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Artist

Father John Misty

Album Title:

I Love You, Honeybear

Album Cover:

Primary Genre

Rock

Format

Released

02/10/2015

Label

Sub Pop Records

Catalog No

SP 1115

Bar Code No

0 98787 11152 1

Packaging

Jewelcase

Tracks

1.	I Love You, Honeybear (4:39)
2.	Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins) (2:51)
3.	True Affection (3:57)
4.	The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt. (3:36)
5.	When You're Smiling And Astride Me (4:34)
6.	Nothing Good Ever Happens At The Godddamn Thirsty Crow (4:34)
7.	Strange Encounter (4:20)
8.	The Ideal Husband (3:35)
9.	Bored In The USA (4:22)
10.	Holy Shit (4:01)
11.	I Went To The Store One Day (4:26)

Date Acquired

02/11/2015

Personal Rating

Acquired from

FYE Burnsville

Purchase Price

9.99

Web Links

All Music Guide Entry:
Discogs Entry:

Notes

foobar2000 1.3.6 / Dynamic Range Meter 1.1.1
log date: 2015-02-13 02:24:40

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Analyzed: Father John Misty / I Love You, Honeybear
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DR Peak RMS Duration Track
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DR6 -0.48 dB -9.44 dB 4:39 01-I Love You, Honeybear
DR8 0.00 dB -9.37 dB 2:51 02-Chateau Lobby #4 (In C for Two Virgins)
DR7 -0.13 dB -9.34 dB 3:57 03-True Affection
DR7 -0.52 dB -9.54 dB 3:36 04-The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment
DR7 -0.27 dB -9.84 dB 4:34 05-When You're Smiling and Astride Me
DR8 0.00 dB -10.95 dB 4:34 06-Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow
DR6 0.00 dB -8.04 dB 4:20 07-Strange Encounter
DR6 0.00 dB -6.94 dB 3:35 08-The Ideal Husband
DR10 0.00 dB -14.78 dB 4:22 09-Bored in the USA
DR7 0.00 dB -10.99 dB 4:01 10-Holy Shit
DR12 -0.40 dB -16.24 dB 4:26 11-I Went to the Store One Day
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Number of tracks: 11
Official DR value: DR8

Samplerate: 44100 Hz
Channels: 2
Bits per sample: 16
Bitrate: 666 kbps
Codec: FLAC
================================================================================

Reviews

All Music Guide Review:

Review by James Christopher Monger
On 2012's Fear Fun, Josh Tillman introduced audiences to Father John Misty, a jaded and erudite, faux-bohemian retro-pop confectioner with a strong surrealist bent and an aptitude for capturing the American zeitgeist via wry couplets concerning the culturally and morally ambiguous wasteland of southern California. That penchant for gutter-highbrow confessionalism still looms large on his second long player, the lyrically and musically bold, and often quite beautiful, I Love You, Honeybear, but the drug-addled, disaffected Laurel Canyon drifter who served as the cruise director on Fear Fun has been replaced by a man trying to come to terms with the discombobulating effects of love, especially as it applies to his nihilistic alter-ego, which is mercilessly stripped of that ego throughout the 11-song set. The newly married Tillman is not incapable of self-effacing satire (witness the exhaustive "Exercises for Listening" instructional pamphlet, which is worth the price of the album alone), but he peppers those bone-wry moments ("I wanna take you in the kitchen/Lift up your wedding dress someone was probably murdered in," from the dizzying, weepy strings and cavernous percussion-laden title cut) with instances of real soulful brevity ("For love to find us of all people/I'd never thought it'd be so simple," from the exquisite, sparse, heartfelt closer "I Went to the Store One Day") -- the ballsy "Ideal Husband," a frantic laundry list of past digressions, best supports both predilections. Produced with great care once again by Jonathan Wilson, Honeybear has the architecture of its predecessor, but features braver melodic choices, and at a pure pop level, is the far more challenging LP of the two, but it rewards the listener constantly, whether it's delivering the yin and the yang via electro-pop tomfoolery ("True Affection"), '70s soul-pop schmaltz ("When You're Smiling and Astride Me"), or straight-up Randy Newman-inspired socio/political balladry ("Bored in the USA"), the latter of which even manages to incorporate a laugh track. Whether Tillman is maturing into the Father John Misty persona or vice versa is still up for debate, but there's no denying his growth as an artist, and I Love You, Honeybear, despite the occasional double entendre, is as powerful a statement about love in the vacuous, social media-obsessed early 21st century as it is a denouement of the detached hipster charlatan.

StereoGum Review:

Father John Misty left a successful band and invented a whole new persona just so he could get away from the idea of cliche. And then he fell in love, the biggest cliche of all. FJM is, of course, Josh Tillman, a young man who escaped a fundamentalist Christian upbringing in suburban Maryland to spend his ’20s working low-paying jobs and releasing sincere, downtrodden folk album after sincere, downtrodden folk album. Somewhere in there, he joined Fleet Foxes as the band’s drummer. For a moment, he felt like he was saved. But then he began to feel like he was doing just another mechanical job and not being true to himself. So he split from the band, moved to Laurel Canyon by himself and reinvented himself as a louche, slithering Leisure Suit Larry take on the ’70s singer-songwriter archetype. There was a psychedelic-shaman element to all of this; all the (very good) FJM profiles this week have noted that he came up with the idea for his artistic rebirth while on an ayahuasca trip. But the motivating force behind FJM’s 2012 re-debut album Fear Fun — or the one that lingered with me the most, anyway — was the acidic self-awareness of it all. He couldn’t just be a man with an acoustic guitar expressing himself; he had to sneer at the entire institution of men with acoustic guitars expressing themselves: “I’m writing a novel because it’s never been done before.” But around the same time he made Fear Fun, Tillman met a woman named Emma in the parking lot of a hippie-ish Laurel Canyon grocery store. They got married. And now he’s left with the question of how to address something as life-changing as the act of falling in love — something that’s been so corrupted by hack songwriting — and make that experience feel vivid and alive and new. Somehow, he did it. I Love You, Honeybear is an uncomfortable wriggle of an album, one packed with sardonic doublespeak and bad faith. But it’s also a deeply felt, beautifully realized piece of work about what happens when two people build a life together.
So: I Love You, Honeybear is an album about falling in love, but it’s also an album about how lame and predictable it is to make an album about falling in love. That self-suspicion radiates from every single aspect of the record, right down to the title. “Honeybear” is a pet name that Tillman and his wife have reportedly never, ever used with each other. It’s a made-up and purposefully vacuous, and yet Tillman sings the word “Honeybear” with what sounds like real feeling. Like the Magnetic Fields on 69 Love Songs, he fakes that cliche so real it is beyond fake. The first song on the album is also the title track, and after Tillman gets done tenderly cooing that pet name, this is the first lyric he offers: “Mascara, blood, ash, and cum / On the Rorschach sheets where we make love.” That’s about as concrete and physical and descriptive as you can get, and Tillman doesn’t let up from there.
Part of the magic of the album is the way Tillman dives into the difficult things about falling in love — the misgivings, the jealousy, the creeping feeling that you do not deserve any of this bliss — with as much relish as he uses for the great stuff. “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt” isn’t a love song; it’s a loath song, about all the little petty details that you find yourself hating, and then hating yourself for hating: “She says, ’Like, literally, music is the air [she] breathe[s] / And the malaprops make me want to fucking scream / I wonder if she even knows what that word means / Well, it’s ’literally’ not that.” (Punctuation decisions are Tillman’s own, via the lyric sheet.) “Nothing Good Ever Happens At The Goddam Thirsty Crow” ends with Tillman happily and cruelly rebuffing women who come on to him at a bar, and it ends with him worrying over whether his wife is doing the same when he’s away on tour. “The Ideal Husband” is constructed as a song about Tillman’s anxiety that his “files” will become public knowledge, but it’s really just a list of reasons why he finds himself unworthy, why he’s not sure he’ll make a good husband: “Telling people jokes to shut them up / Resenting people that I loved.” And sometimes his worries go beyond just himself; first single “Bored In The USA” is a maybe-too-broad catalog of reasons why modern life is bullshit, why our collective everyday concerns are petty enough that they’re choking the capacity for love right out of us. Just the way Tillman reads the line “the golden era of TV” on “Holy Shit” is as withering as anything, say, Jello Biafra ever did.
All of this is bleakly funny. Tillman, as you can tell from those excerpted lyrics, is one hell of a writer, bitter and descriptive and mean and unflinching. He’s also entirely willing to come across as a miserable asshole, which makes the wide-open parts feel more genuine. And when Tillman does sing about a moment of no-joke personal connection, it can be enough to just level you. “I Went To The Store One Day” is the song that ends the album, and it’s a soft and pretty and almost unguarded reverie about the moment he met his wife in that grocery-store parking lot. The song means more because it comes after all this darkness and defensiveness and irony: “For love to find us of all people / I never thought it’d be so simple.” He imagines a future: Seven daughters, dying of a heart attack during their last fuck. (There’s a lot of talk about fucking on the album in general, which is sort of refreshing when you consider how often that very important aspect gets glossed over in musical love-narratives.) But even here, Tillman isn’t quite ready to let go of his cleverness, his willingness to overthink everything to death. Actual lyric: “[Insert here: / A sentiment re: Our Golden Years].” (Again, all punctuation is Tillman’s. And the lyric sheet, including Tillman’s list of instructions on how to hear every song on the album, is reason enough to pay money for I Love You, Honeybear.) But even with all the overthinking, Tillman knows to end things by pulling all that back, offering just an acoustic guitar and his voice for the last few lines: “All ’cause I went to the store one day / ’I’ve seen you around / What’s your name?’.”
So I Love You, Honeybear is an elegantly written album with a lovely and complicated narrative, but that would mean jack squat if Tillman didn’t find compelling ways to put all this to music. He does. Does he ever. I Love You, Honeybear is, on the surface level, an absolutely gorgeous album, and I suspect that plenty of people are going to enjoy it without even digging into the lyrics. Tillman started messing around with California folk-rock history on Fear Fun, and he goes deeper here. His songs are layered and confident and recorded with ridiculous pristine clarity. The songs burst with strings and woodwinds and psych-rock guitars and pianos and organs, all of them arranged in ways that delight in grandeur without ever looking at that grandeur as an end in itself. And Tillman has also grown as a pure singer, to the point where I’d trust him to belt out a torch song during the opening credits of a Bond movie. He’s got a sort of white-soul-singer virtuosity, and he can hit big high notes, and draw them out, without drawing flashing signs that point to every big note. Even in the quiet moments, he finds ways to shine. “Born In The USA” half-quotes Donny Hathaway’s “A Song For You” in its first line, and Tillman pulls it off, which cannot be easy. In Sean Fennessey’s Grantland profile of Tillman, Tillman says, “Emma, at one point, said to me, ’You just can’t be afraid to let these songs be beautiful.’ And that was, to me, [when] I realized that the album was a different beast and it had to be approached differently.” He figured out that puzzle. He made something beautiful.
That’s the real amazing thing about I Love You, Honeybear: It achieves beauty without ever forgetting the complications that come with that beauty. Tillman can sing about sex and anxiety and death-fear with sweeping cinematic panache. He can make low feelings sound high, and he can make high feelings sound like grand romantic visions. Here’s his idea of a profession of love, from “Chateau Lobby #4 [In C For Two Virgins]“: “I haven’t hated / All the same things as somebody else / Since I remember / What’s going on for, uh, what are you doing with your whole life / How about forever?” There are plenty of warts there, but he sells that line, and its sentiment, like he’s falling to his knees with a rose clamped between his teeth. He’s done amazing things on this album. I can’t wait until he makes a record about fatherhood.

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