Father John Misty: the millennial Randy Newman
Anyone who says that the golden age of songwriters is slipping away isn’t really looking hard enough. Although some of the biggest names in songwriting aren’t finding their way onto the pop charts, artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Adrienne Lenker are still carrying on the same tradition that everyone from James Taylor to Joni Mitchell to Jackson Browne had started all the way back in the 1970s. But even after half a century has passed, Father John Misty seems to be picking up where Randy Newman seemed to leave off.
Before we do a deep dive into the good Father’s discography, it’s important to look at the kind of songwriter that Newman was. While he was known to be more self-deprecating about his own voice than most critics would have been, it didn’t matter as long as he had the songs to back him up.
And when he did open his mouth, he held back absolutely nothing when tearing into anything that was pissing him off at the time. ‘Short People’ is already a great look at what bigotry makes people look like, and it would have been dangerous enough for someone to release a song like ‘Rednecks’ today, let alone in the golden age of 1970s AM radio gold.
If there was any possibility of getting more blunt, Father John Misty has toed up to that line more than a few times. Even though some of his music sounds absolutely gorgeous on records like Pure Comedy, this is not fun by any metric. Misty is singing about how the world will one day end and writing the kind of lines that would make Werner Herzog tell him to lighten up, and yet it still sounds like one of the greatest songs that 1977 never spat out.
However, if Newman was talking about the terrors of modern cultures in the 1970s, Misty sees everything from a millennial perspective in his respective songs. In every one of his songs, fans get a good look at all of the emotional torment that most people keep under wraps, whether that’s the raw sting of the ‘War on Terror’ or the advances in technology that make people all the more terrified with each passing day.
Although Newman and Misty would have probably benefited from getting a hug more than a few times in their personal lives, it takes more than cynical talk to get people interested in their music. It all has to come from a genuine place, and what both Misty and Newman lack in subtlety, they make up for in their respective eras’ most beautiful love songs.
Even though some of them are still bittersweet tales of romance, there’s no doubt that every one of them will be just as passionate as the cynical tunes. No one can stay in that negative headspace forever, but when talking about romance, there’s a certain way for both of them to twist their words around to make something as relatable as it is heartbreaking.
Despite most folk stars using a handful of chords to get where they need to go, their back catalogue also shows an impressive range of musical theory. Newman’s history working with jazzy players has made his album sophisticated takes on rock and roll, and while Misty had more extravagant arrangements, hearing him making slower tunes on Chloe and the Next 20th Century might be a preview as to where he’s going to be going later down the road.
While there’s a slim chance that Misty will go down the same route Newman went in and start making complete soundtracks to children’s movies, their blunt tunes aren’t written with the intent of making the audience miserable. It might be hard to sit through some of the harsh critiques about humankind, but the more people sit with it, the more they pick up on one simple rule: you have to go through that uneasiness to appreciate the beauty of the world.
