The time Father John Misty did mushrooms with Kid Cudi
Josh Tillman, better known by his stage name, Father John Misty, has been known to conjure up lush baroque-pop tunes, as well as churning out Velvet Underground-inspired covers of Taylor Swift in his time. A multi-faceted talent, he was a drummer for Fleet Foxes during their first tour – leaving the band to focus on his solo project under the mantle Father John Misty.
Most famous for his romantic musings and a preoccupation with Christianity, he has also served as a record producer and writer on albums by big-name artists like Lady Gaga, Post Malone, and Lana Del Rey – the latter of which he just opened for at Hyde Park’s BST.
His deft talent for lyricism and expansive beats caught the attention of Kid Cudi in 2013 when he heard an album of his playing in a vintage boutique store in Hollywood that happened to be owned by a friend of Tillman. Cudi asked her whose music was playing, and he sampled ‘Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings’ from the debut of Father John Misty’s 2011 record Fear Fun.
After a brief email exchange with Kid Cudi’s management, Tillman went into the studio with the rap artist for a day to put down some backing vocals. He also penned ‘Young Lady’ for Cudi, which appear on his third album, Indicud.
On the collaborative process, Tillman revealed they didn’t “converse much,” while adding: “I get along really well with rappers because rappers like to pontificate, and I really like to pontificate.”
That penchant for pontificating was on display most famously in a disastrous set at the XPoNential Music Festival in 2016, when he neglected to perform hits from I Love You, Honeybear and Fear Fun in lieu of lecturing the audience on the numbing role of entertainment on the American psyche.
Although Tillman and Cudi may not have spoken much in the lead-up to working together, they ended up bonding by tripping on mushrooms, which Tillman explained Cudi thought would be “hilarious” to do.
“He thought it would be very funny,” said Tillman. “We were goofing around. The studio is in Burbank – this weird sterile modern recording studio – and we were just laughing our asses off.”
He said the funniest part of the story was walking into the studio to see Kid Cudi holding up a brown bag, and saying: “Yo, I heard you were coming into the studio today, and I was like, ‘I gotta get some mushrooms. I’m gonna do some mushrooms with Misty’.”
As Tillman puts it: “It really was us sitting around and geeking out to music and bullshitting. We just stood around and pontificated and laughed hysterically.”
