Father John Misty - God's Favorite Customer

The Guardian 80

(Bella Union)

When is the car crash real, and when is it CGI? The issue of honesty has reared up again and again during the course of Josh Tillman’s career as Father John Misty, not least because of his own obfuscation. Last year, he told the Observer his lyrics “are the most true things I will ever say”, but in the same interview he also said the truth about him lay somewhere between believing his songs to be truthful reporting or seeing them as “beta-male, self-aware trickery”.

The interviews Tillman gave to support Pure Comedy last year suggested a man drifting free of his moorings, and God’s Favorite Customer is full of rootless desolation. Hotels are a theme, not as symbols of travel and freedom, but for dissociating one from place, for leaving one adrift. The Palace finds the narrator “living on housekeeping and room service”, but dependent on something more – “it’s only been three weeks and a bag of speed from Jamie the PhD”. He doesn’t want to leave, but knows he needs to be fixed, because “I’m way in over my head”. In Mr Tillman – the album’s most beautiful melody, one that sounds as if it has existed forever – he’s checking in, so divorced from reality that the reception staff have to tell him the other people are not actors on a movie set. “Is there someone we can call?” it concludes, “Perhaps you shouldn’t drink alone?”

Drowned In Sound 70

Four albums in, Father John Misty aka Josh Tillman has proved himself a master of detail, sweating the small stuff to create character-rich vignettes which lampoon and lambast humanity’s failings on both a macro and micro level: ‘What the fuck is going on?’, he asked the audience mid-set at a recent US festival performance, encapsulating the desolate worldview reflected on record.

God's Favorite Customer by FATHER JOHN MISTY

Although musically similar to its predecessors, a throwback to the soft rock of the Seventies, God’s Favourite Customer sees Tillman distill the focuses of his two prior records - the toll of love (I Love You, Honeybear) and political and environmental mess that humanity has caused (Pure Comedy).

Tillman’s trademark wry humour is noticeably pared back here, with the sole exception of ‘Mr Tillman’, a Groundhog Day-esque telling of day after day of debauched behaviour which sees our hero reflecting on proper hotel etiquette over a driving beat and folky harmonies - mattresses are left out in the rain and fellow guests insulted before the episode screeches to a halt, slumped on a bar stool as dark humour gives way to something more serious.

The power of specificity is highlighted poignantly halfway through on ‘The Palace’, a bleak piano-driven number telling the story of an exiled protagonist, living out of a suitcase after one infidelity or binge too many: "It's only been three weeks / and a bag of speed from Jamie the PhD", Tillman laments before mulling over an attempt to care for something (anything) effectively. "Maybe I'll get a pet / Learn how to take care of someone else / Maybe I'll name him Jeff / But I think it might defeat the purpose / Of living on housekeeping and room service".

The centrepiece of the album’s dark core however is ‘Please Don’t Die’, a country-tinged ballad laying bare the challenges of living with depression - both for the one affected and their helpless partner: "One more cryptic message / Thinking that I might end it / Oh god, you must have woken up / To me saying that it's all too much / I'll take it easy with the morbid stuff". By the time we get five tracks in, any notion of humour has been put completely aside, and we’re left with an exposed obsidian centre. It’s brutal and brilliant stuff.

God’s Favourite Customer isn’t quite perfect - it lags in the final furlong as piano ballads are fallen back upon one too many times (the title track, ‘The Songwriter’) and lacks the unified overarching narrative of ...Honeybear - but it continues to showcase one of the finest songwriters of a generation. We need his barbed and brilliant tunes more than ever.