Father John Misty live review: Total entertainment forever via a few shades of the insufferable
Where do you even start with a man like Father John Misty? About an hour before the show, this question was mused over at the dinner table. “Four years ago, I would’ve been really excited about this,” my girlfriend and +1 for the night passively proclaimed. “Not that I’m not excited or anything but…” she quickly squeezed in as a clarifier.
Alas, the drummed-up enthusiasm was flaky, and the slight ennui was undeniable. Curiously, not too much has happened in the world of Father John during the four years in question. Certainly, his latest album was far from his best—a point that he virtually conceded himself mid-concert with an almost self-flagellating apology for the record which he called “Disney, Fantasia type stuff” and said it was the product of “searching hard” during the pandemic lockdown.
However, I can’t say that it was Chloë and the Next 20th Century that was to blame for the lingering lethargy before the show—the album still has some fantastic moments, after all. And it wasn’t just because it was a rainy Monday either. No, it seemed more niche than that. Ultimately, it perhaps came down to a reassessment of the candidly confessional ‘I’m a flawed man’ figure during that four-year span of societal soul-searching.
And it was just about the most interesting moment of the concert when Misty seemed to reflect on this very thing himself. After trying to force some feeling into ‘The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt.’ – a song during which he sings about his utter disdain for a female suiter in a potentially troubling manner – he entered some spiel about a student who contacted him and said that she was writing an academic paper on the song being about the “pitfalls of partying”. He countered this.
Father John jokingly stressed that “our narrator” is actually singing about a woman who is “probably totally fine”, but he projects his own crippling fears and anxiety about his “inability to perform sexually and emotionally” onto her in a barrage of externalised self-pity. With this candid explanation, his “beloved partying” is spared the rod, and so is Josh Tillman, the man behind all of this, who is now an artist aside the grisly details of the song, simply creating characters fit for the times.
This is perhaps why curiosity eclipses traditional pre-gig excitement at a Father John Misty concert: the man is an utter enigma. He swans onto the stage like Casanova incarnate; he shaved his hair two years ago, but he still sensually rubs it throughout as though he’s relishing that fresh stubbly feeling; he orates like a cult leader; he carefully drapes himself over the microphone the way that one might dotingly hang their favourite blazer on the back of a chair; and he’s simply not there—like a character actor playing the part of the damaged artist lost somewhere in his role.
And yet he’s written some of the best songs of the last decade, songs that clicked into gear towards the back end of the concert when he suddenly was there, the sound was finally fine-tuned, and he was sending out his little masterpieces with gorgeous vocals, bumping into brilliant lines with storytelling that placed the audience in his palm, and rattling off captivating prefaces like the superb ‘Buddy’s Rendezvous’ being about a father meeting his daughter in a diner on the day he’s released from prison and offering her some rather shoddy advice (arguably the highlight of the set). There is a sincere artist behind this and not just a self-manufactured Jim Morrison + Leonard Cohen lovechild channelling Thomas Pynchon into what he describes himself as “fake jazz”.
It’s in these glinting moments when he serenely croons crackers – like “Everythin’ you want / What’s the fun in gettin’ everythin’ you want? / I wouldn’t know, but look, baby, you should try / Forget that lefty shit your mom drilled in your mind” – when you scratch out notes equating him to the male singer-songwriter version of Alan Partridge, forget the fact the motionless band might not have been at their tightest and that his superb singing is slightly hamstrung by poor mic control, and simply laugh at his surface vanity, chuckle at the fact he’s rather pretentiously called the concert ‘An evening with’, play along with his laugh out loud ‘I’m a cool French songwriter dancing’ moves, take in his uber-confidently delivered witty and interesting anecdotes, bask in his beauteous tunes, and celebrate the fact he has sort of hybridised the writer and the rock star.
Because that’s the thrill of Father John Misty, you can’t quite fathom him, and that’s enough to captivate you until he sweeps you off your feet with a gleaming gem. Take him as he is: total entertainment forever, seasoned with a few flashes of insufferableness, but he knows that too, he knows everything about this act he has carefully honed for our enjoyment… and occasionally his own when he finally gets into it and lulls you into a swoon for a very singular, swaggering star.
