Why did Father John Misty leave Fleet Foxes?
It’s one of the most puzzling bits of pre-fame convergence in all of indie rock: the brief four-year span where Josh Tillman, better known under his stage moniker Father John Misty, was a member of indie-folk giants Fleet Foxes. Not that Fleet Foxes, or even Tillman himself, were unknown when they got together. But as both acts have separately found sustained success, the all-too-short time when both together seemed almost like a strange fever dream nowadays.
Tillman first joined Fleet Foxes in 2008, by which point the singer had been putting out records for more than half a decade under his birth name. Tillman took over the drum stool from original band member Nicholas Peterson, who had played on the band’s 2008 self-titled debut, and contributed to the band’s follow-up, 2011’s Helplessness Blues. All the while, he continued to put out LPs under the name J. Tillman in between commitments with Fleet Foxes.
But after the supporting tour for Helplessness Blues ended, Tillman left the band and quickly reinvented himself as Father John Misty. It was perceived to be an amicable split at the time, with Tillman simply wanting to focus on his solo career. However, in the years since, both Tillman and Fleet Foxes leader Robin Pecknold have confirmed that there was significantly more tension involved than what had been suggested initially.
“We all started hating each other,” Tillman told The Guardian in 2015. “I wasn’t the worst band member – I was actually the funny one. But there were a lot of tears. The worst was the tour we did where I was the opening act. I’d play my sad bastard stuff, be ignored, then go sit at the back. There’s no better illustration of how little worth I had. I walked off stage at Shepherd’s Bush, and nobody noticed.”
Tillman claims that he “had very little interest in being a drummer,” but agreed to join the band because he was dating Pecknold’s sister at the time. Pecknold confirmed that the band’s disillusionment in a 2020 Reddit AMA, stating that Tillman had actually wanted to leave the band before the supporting tour for Helplessness Blues.
“[Josh] ‘quit’ the band after recording drums for Helplessness, got into narcotics and made his first Father John Misty album while I was making Helplessness in Seattle,” Pecknold explained. “Then Sub Pop offered to put out his album, but only if he delayed it for a year or so and toured Helplessness with us.”
Adding: “Which we all weakly agreed to going through with, but it quickly became obvious he’d rather have just been doing that project instead, and I would have rathered that as well. So that tour, I had to endure being around a lot of substance abuse, sabotaged shows, just general ill-treatment, shit-talking, all while paying him for songs he didn’t have anything to do with. It sucked”.
The back and forth was picked up as a mini-feud in recent years, but Tillman had seemingly buried the hatchet in 2017 when he praised the band’s then-recent record Crack-Up in a Twitter Q+A where he called Fleet Foxes “a group of people I love and miss.” Since Tillman’s departure, Fleet Foxes have yet to officially replace his role as drummer, with figures like The Walkmen’s Matt Barrick and Grizzly Bear’s Christopher Bear contributing to the band in an unofficial capacity.
