There wasn’t a more painfully honest yet classically romantic album that came out this year better than Father John Misty’s I Love You, Honeybear. Bleak and dry, Father John Misty’s (or his legal name, Josh Tillman) songwriting style features lots of fancy vocabulary you may need to look up to understand while adding in well placed bursts of modern honesty that come together seamlessly. Tillman is the voice of the modern generation of young people who aren’t entertained by pop culture trends. Instead, they critique and judge the superficial things that they encounter in everyday life, while thinking deeply about life, love, and the internal search for happiness.
It can’t be overstated the amount of truly genius lyrics that Tillman rifles off with great poise throughout I Love You, Honeybear. Towards the end of “Holy Shit”, Tillman sings;
“Maybe love is just an economy based on resource scarcity / What I fail to see is what that’s gotta do with you and me”.
In “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apartment”, a hilariously sarcastic song about a lover he’s only into for the sex, Tillman belts;
“We sang “Silent Night” in three parts which was fun / Til she said that she sounds just like Sarah Vaughan / I hate that soulful affectation white girls put on / Why don’t you move to the Delta? / I obliged later on when you begged me to choke ya”.
In the album’s last track, “I Went To The Store One Day”, which details the events leading up to Tillman meeting his current wife and subject of the album, Tillman so beautifully proclaims “I need someone I can trust to protect me from our seven daughters when my body says, “Enough!” / Don’t let me die in a hospital, I’ll save the big one for the last time we make love”. It’s a remarkably beautiful way to end an album with as much commentary on stupidity as beauty and it is clear the enlightened community of Earth has found a new spokesperson in Father John Misty.
This is definitely my favorite album that came out in 2015, which many might find strange for me. I’m a hip-hop head by nature, but I have a soft side for folky, indie rock. My old roommate Paul turned me onto FJM early this year and it just so happened I Love You, Honeybear came out soon after. I certainly didn’t expect a folk rock album to be the music I payed most attention to for an entire year, but that just shows how special I feel FJM’s music really is. In a year when so much felt wrong in our world, I was at least able to reflect on the actions of myself and of others through digesting FJM’s lyrics. That’s why I find I Love You, Honeybear to be a timeless piece of music.
Stream I Love You, Honeybear from Apple Music and Spotify here.
