If you’ve ever wondered what it would sound like if Slavoj Žižek hosted Drivetime Radio, you missed your chance. Josh Tillman, better known as Father John Misty, spent a disarmingly candid and frequently hilarious 40 minutes on WFPK with Kyle Meredith, doing everything short of throwing open a confessional booth and lighting incense.
“Good morning Louisville,” he said with the weariness of a man promoting a tour stop he’d rather not. “My show is only half sold out… otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I’ll be here until we get to 2,000 tickets” he deadpanned.
Despite the shtick, the new record was going well. “The shows are going great,” he said, momentarily dropping the act. “I’m really just surprised at the diversity of people… and the continued response to the record. That it’s meant something.”
Tillman has always danced on the knife-edge between sincerity and irony, and he knows it. When Meredith brings up how specific and personal his songs feel, Tillman riffs on the “counterintuitive law” of music. “For some reason, the more personal something is, the more universal appeal it has,” he said. “If you aim straight for authenticity, you end up with something totally pretentious. Like, ‘oh he’s from such-and-such a place and his music evokes the affectations of a time we deemed more authentic than the one we live in.’”
Naturally, he brought it all back to Dylan. “On paper, you couldn’t find a more unoriginal artist. He was just lifting blues tropes wholesale. But the guy’s an original.”
From there, it was a full-blown TED Talk on cultural appropriation, narcissism, digital addiction, Jungian psychosexual shame spirals, and the Bee Gees. Yes, the Bee Gees. He played “I Lay Down and Die” and waxed poetic about Cucumber Castle like it was Revolver. “These guys were just on their own planet,” he said. “Beatles-level sophistication. The Saturday Night Fever thing was just… unprotected sex. It doesn’t exist anymore.”
But the most riveting moment came when Meredith asked about “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment” — a song and video Tillman admits is “messy and ugly.” “I had to include the ugliness for it to be real,” he said. “People think it’s just this laundry list of petty grievances, but ultimately, it’s me. If you really feel like you’re better than someone, why are you still in their bed the next morning?”
The video, in which he brings himself home and makes out with himself, is what he calls “playing chicken with the listener.” He’s been accused of justifying the song’s misogyny with “a bunch of hot air,” but says it’s about male powerlessness, not conquest. “The chorus is about impotence,” he said. “You lash out when you're powerless.”
Then it got darker. “A narcissist is someone with no working concept of who they are,” he said. “They’re constantly seeking their own image in the external world. I was wrapped up in that for years. If I could get laid tonight, that meant I was someone people liked.”
He compared social media to spiritual diabetes. “You need this IV drip of affirmation of who you are,” he said. “You have to cultivate your own understanding of who you are… or you're just a spiritual junkie refreshing the feed.”
“The Memo,” a song Tillman released and pulled almost instantly, is then brought up. “It was about how entertainment has a corrosive effect on consciousness,” he explained. “There’s a line: ‘Your hunger will only cease if you come binge on radiant blandness at the disposable feast.’ You can spend your life that way.”
And of course, the infamous Taylor Swift/Ryan Adams cover-that-wasn't scandal came up — when Tillman trolled the entire internet by releasing covers of Ryan Adams’ covers of Swift’s 1989 in the style of the Velvet Underground. “It took me an hour,” he said. “I hadn’t even heard the originals. I was walking by my tour manager’s office, printed the lyrics, and went full Reed.”
Then he took them down. Not because of legal threats, but because of the sheer absurdity of how the story ballooned. “By the time I got back to the bus, it was the top trend on Facebook,” he said. “There were emails from Taylor Swift’s people asking why I took it down. People projected this David vs. Goliath narrative onto it. It was insane.”
So, in classic Tillman fashion, he issued a fake statement involving Lou Reed visiting him in a dream — and watched, incredulously, as media outlets printed it. “It was pure creativity,” he said. “And the media printed it like gospel. They’ll print anything.”
The kicker? He doesn’t even enjoy irony anymore. “Irony lets people keep living the way they’re living by making a joke out of it. It gives them permission. ‘Haha, I made fun of this, so I can keep doing it.’ And I don’t want to be that guy.”
He followed that up by performing “Bored in the USA” — a dirge of spiritual rot dressed up as a sitcom theme — live on air.
And then he left. One man, one beard, one existential meltdown at a time.
“I hope this doesn’t scare you away from doing these things again,” Meredith said.
“Eh,” Tillman shrugged. “I didn’t enjoy having the Eye of Sauron turned on me.”
At least until the next irony detour.
Listen to the full interview above, and then check out their previous interview that the two were talking about:
And the one before that:
And the one before that:
