father john misty

When discussing ‘Father John Misty’, Tillman paraphrases Philip Roth: ’It’s all of me and 
none of me, if you can’t see that, you won’t get it’. What I call it is totally arbitrary, but I
 like the name. You’ve got to have a name. I never got to choose mine."

He goes on, “‘People who make records are afforded this assumption by the culture that 
their music is coming from an exclusively personal place, but more often than not what 
you hear are actually the affectations of an ’alter-ego’ or a cartoon of an emotionally 
heightened persona,” says Josh Tillman, who has been recording/releasing solo albums 
since 2003 and who recently left Seattle’s Fleet Foxes after playing drums from 2008-2011. 
“That kind of emotional quotient isn’t sustainable if your concern is portraying a human-
being made up of more than just chest-beating pathos. I see a lot of rampant, sexless, 
male-fantasy everywhere in the music around me. I didn’t want any alter-egos, any 
vagaries, fantasy, escapism, any over-wrought sentimentality. I like humor and sex and 
mischief. So when you think about it, it’s kind of mischievous to write about yourself in a 
plain-spoken, kind of explicitly obvious way and call it something like ‘Misty’. I mean, I 
may as well have called it ‘Steve’”.