Where is father john misty from

Life is album cycles—at least, for a recording artist, in a life without seasons or weekends or kids. An album cycle is the period from the completion of recording, through the rollout and the press campaign, to the last gig on the tour.

This must have been a wonderful place. The performances were polished, even though he had consumed an unholy cocktail of chemicals. Later, each time he or his band and crew mentioned that night in my presence they made that universal wide-eyed oh-boy expression of recollected intemperance. As ever, his pitch was perfect and his look was sharp—his hair swept back above his forehead, in a borderline pompadour, and his trademark beard replaced by a mustache.

He did his customary wriggly dance moves: Jaggerish swivels and poses that come off as and actually seem to be both ironic and sincere. He was pretzeled in back, a tall man in a small car. From time to time, he cracked his knuckles. He has a droll, almost effete way of speaking, which he moderates by making fun of himself or of the whole construct of giving interviews. Pronouncement, caveat, thrust, parry.

Its origins go back two album cycles, to , when he and his wife, Emma, a filmmaker and photographer, were newly married and living in Echo Park, Los Angeles, in a two-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot adobe house on top of a hill, abutting Elysian Park—urban rustics, living half outdoors.

So he went back out on the road with just Emma and the comedian Kate Berlant. Tillman had got a little carried away with the rock-and-roll life style.

I thought, I need to take a year off. They found a rambling old house in the Bywater, for the same monthly rent as their Echo Park hut. Tillman fell into a depression, wandering around the house in his bathrobe, doing little besides reading and the crossword.

Emma was writing a screenplay, at least, and taking pictures. After six months, they bought a piano at a junk shop for five hundred dollars, and Tillman taught himself to play. Messing around, he soon found that he was writing songs again.

It felt like the edge of the country, the edge of the world. His previous records had been written in real time. Tillman was single-minded even about the cover art. He sent an e-mail to Ed Steed , his favorite cartoonist. Thought, I know what this is going to be. It was funny, sexy, great. When he swivels away, another camera shot reveals it to be a player piano. Steed also checked out the earlier J.

Tillman stuff. Self-important, gloomy. Tillman stuff much more deserving of that criticism. Tillman belongs to the school of thought that believes Trump is a symptom, the leader we deserve.

The world is the way it is because this is the way we want it to be. One can certainly strive to keep both assertions in mind at the same time. In July, a day after Trump accepted the Republican nomination, Tillman, coming off an all-nighter, took the stage at a festival in Camden, New Jersey, and launched into a harangue about the politico-entertainment complex.

The ensuing Twitter bombardment went on for days, with Tillman popping up now and then to lay down some covering fire, until a certain fatigue set in. Tillman was offended by any suggestion that his behavior was a cynical ploy for attention, that it was anything other than an honest meltdown, albeit an artful one. We were in the livery cab, en route to Nyack College, an evangelical school twenty miles north of Manhattan.

Tillman was reared in a strict and turbulent evangelical Christian household, in Rockville, Maryland, and, in many respects, his career is an elaborate, improvised rebellion against it. His mother, Barbara, grew up mostly in Ethiopia, the daughter of missionaries. His father, I. They met at a Christian youth group, in Maryland, when they were in junior high, after I. He speaks with his parents every few years. He has always been game, anyway, to talk about the household ban on secular pop music.

When the boys were in high school, their father removed the car stereo, to keep them from listening on their drives to and from school. Josh remembers his father instructing him to smash a Red Hot Chili Peppers album to bits. Josh had come across the band on a pizzeria jukebox. There was always worship music. It laid the groundwork and still informs the act.

His father played acoustic guitar, and his mother sang. He was encouraged to take up the drums, to burn off excess energy. Zach picked up the bass. The Tillman boys sang and played in church. There was speaking in tongues, laying on of hands, baptism by fire, slaying of the spirit—his first psychedelic experiences, in a way. He was told that he was possessed by demons. But, if he was possessed by anything, it was anxiety and fear of drama at home.

He needed a cigarette. We slipped into the chapel as it was filling up with students and slid into a pew in back. We were soon surrounded by athletes, mostly women. Softball uniforms, lacrosse sticks. The ones with the pierced noses and dyed hair, the leather jacket or the studded belt. Christianity is an adaptable avatar for these social movements.

Tillman paused. Students were hugging. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options. Jay L. Mikael Wood. Follow Us twitter instagram email facebook. More From the Los Angeles Times. Music In only concert, an ambitious Kendrick Lamar reestablishes his generational greatness. In that moment, satire died. I feel like the boy who cried wolf.

All this scepticism and cynicism that I have felt my whole life became so literal. Given this alarming new context, Tillman is now working out how to translate Pure Comedy to the stage.

The show started with six Father John Mistys dancing around a bonfire. Now he is changing tack. Pure communication. Look at my last album cycle, which started with me with a fresh haircut, yukking it up on David Letterman, and ended with me bedraggled, out of my mind with despair and panic, yelling at an audience about entertainment. I would rather take that guy out into these shows than the guy at the beginning.

Creatively, Tillman is on a roll. He has already written his fourth album and sketched out his fifth. Throughout our two-and-a-half-hour conversation, Tillman is constantly pausing, doubling back, amending, apologising, except when he talks about songwriting. Then he sounds unstoppable. Music is the place where his whirring brain can find optimism, clarity and faith.

The music is the times I can get my head above the water and make something out of it. All I can do is quote my own lyrics. Those are the most true things I will ever say. Everything else will just be bullshit. These are the songs that never end: 10 of music's most rewarding long cuts.