Stevens redeems singer-songwriters, his mother

Hipster drivel: Josh Tillman and the evolution of the singer-songwriter

There are many ways to be an asshole with an acoustic guitar: cover “Wonderwall,” for example, or play Dave Matthews. The democratization of music consumption (once, you had to be nobility to hear Mozart) mirrors, I think, the decline of earnest musical talent (see: your Spotify Free usage and the number of milquetoast Coldplay wannabees dotting your Facebook newsfeed). The advent of audio recording meant you no longer had to read sheet music in order to experience Gilbert and Sullivan—but can we call this a happy development if it culminates in Iggy Azalea?
The asshole-with-guitar rarely means to be such a thing. He picked up the instrument either to accommodate for his lack of personality or to lyricize sentiments best left in his diary, yet we heap on him derision rather than pity. Why? Because the storied history of the singer-songwriter progresses from sincere to sweet to sentimental to saccharine. Singer-songwriter as a quote-unquote genre has already had its wunderkind beat poet protestor (Bob Dylan), its self-loathing and conflicted sneerer (also Dylan), its Brill Building cinematic sell-out (Burt Bacharach), its soft-rock schmaltz establishment crooner (James Taylor), its alcoholic roustabout raconteur (Tom Waits), its whimsical psychedelic druggie (Harry Nilsson), and its fuck-it-I’ll-play-harpsichord virtuoso (Van Dyke Parks). Which is all to say: it’s tough being a white guy in show biz these days. A six-string and a broken heart don’t get you as far as they once did.
Maybe the singer-songwriter of today has been reduced to your annoying acoustic first-year floormate, but it wasn’t always so. Let’s remember that before he turned us all into hanky-soaked nostalgists with “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” Randy Newman was an acerbic pianist. Instead of sentiment, he laced his songs with scathing satire. His song “Rednecks,” for instance, sends up the trope of the titular southerners who “can’t tell [their] ass from a hole in ground” while damning white northerners for their hypocrisy and complicity in systemic racism. Far from the middle-of-the-road emoting of Ed Sheeran, Hozier, and your cousin whose cover of “Fearless” was retweeted by Taylor Swift, Randy Newman had edge. Who will deliver us from Sam Smith in 2015?
Enter Josh Tillman, alias Father John Misty, asshole-with-guitar, but not the kind who only knows the chorus to “Wagon Wheel.” Under an abbreviated name, he used to perform mopey folk music, the kind of “sensitive lumberjack” tunes that made Bon Iver famous. After a stint with Fleet Foxes, a band that injected emotional highs into listeners straight through a catheter of pastoralism and four-part harmony, he abandoned white-male melancholia. I remember his Facebook post from the Fleet Foxes page declaring, “into the gaping maw of obscurity I go.”
You know what they say: if you can’t beat ’em, caricature ’em. Tillman’s new project, Father John Misty, is the Adult Swim version of Bon Iver, a Newman-esque satire of the possibility of a singer-songwriter in 2015. He even has his own (anti-)origin story: depressed dude fails at music industry, takes psychedelics, internalizes life’s nihilism, and transforms into shamanic and cynical asshole-with-guitar who knows he’s the asshole-with-guitar. Tillman is the kind of asshole who would laugh at the kid trying to lead the entire camp in a sing-a-long of “Skinny Love,” and then sleep with his mother. Bon Iver sings about losing love and innocence alike; Tillman thinks you can recapture the former with his specialty perfume called “‘Innocence’ by Misty” (it goes for $75.00 on his website).
The funniest part of the Father John Misty joke, then, isn’t the absurdity of a singer-songwriter releasing an album of love songs in 2015—although “I Love You, Honeybear” is full of self-referential asides suggesting Tillman is as bored with singer-songwriters as the rest of us. No, the punch line is that the Father John shaman character isn’t really a character at all. Tillman really is just that bitter, scathing, outrageous, hilarious, and at times, brilliant. He was faking it while drumming for Fleet Foxes, champions of sincerity. Maybe it’s the difference between Tinseltown and Medford, Wisconsin, but Tillman’s only himself when he lets his asshole-with-guitar run free.
“I Love You, Honeybear” plays with performance. The title is tongue in cheek, but only because Tillman knows what it’s like to have been chewed up and spit back out, both by love and by commercial failure. “Save me white Jesus,” he sings over canned laughter on “Bored In The USA,” clearly expecting no salvation from either the Lord or the Boss. Tillman even leaked a version of his album early, with his voice and instrumentation compressed into Super Mario Bros.-style blockiness.
Despite such ironic affectations, there’s a brutal honesty to these songs, which document Tillman’s neuroses, sins, and lexicon. Addressing his honeybear:“I’ve brought my mother’s depression / You’ve got your father’s scorn and a wayward aunt’s schizophrenia.” Addressing a judgmental hookup who “hoovers all [his] drugs”: “She says, like literally, music is the air she breathes / And the malaprops makes me want to fucking scream.” The album is an account of how he met his wife, and surely Tillman makes a loving if troubled husband but the misogynistic womanizer in him is never wholly disowned. That’s the point, though. Tillman is through with hiding, even his nastiest characteristics.
Father John Misty is too clever for his own good—that sharp tongue is bound to puncture his cheek—but he never backs away from who he is, which is a giant asshole with a mariachi guitar. He’s a jerk whose honesty is almost lovable. By serenading us with snark couched in sentiment wrapped up in equal parts schmaltz and cynicism, he delivers this truth to a dying industry: sometimes, it takes sarcasm to be sincere.

Hipster drivel: Pause the existential crises and play this Ivies mix

“It doesn’t get any better than this,” you whisper into your Solo cup. You won’t be saying this during Logic, but at any other point over our weeklong weekend, the refrain may dance across your lips.
Rites of passage, even vomiting after a beer mile, lend themselves to such thinking. First comes the warm blush of camaraderie (or is that the Natty?), then the icy clench of terror (no, that’s the Natty).
That the best four years of our lives is happening this very instant is the arrogant claim of youth, our burden and our freedom. The question “what if this is it?” gives way to “what better way to spend life than embracing who we are, a cavalcade of preening post-adolescents?”
Crises of unearned nostalgia aside, consider Ivies an analogy for college: suspension in a state of liminal sublime. Dazed and confused, agonized and ecstatic, Apollonian and Dionysian, high and imbibed, we are everything all the time in the threshold of existence. It is either the worst state to capture the moment, or the best.
Whatever we’re lusting after—or fleeing to—let’s do it to music. Instead of curating the songs of the year appropriate for an Ivies playlist, I have culled my picks for the best Ivies playlist of all time.
These songs encapsulate, if not necessarily replicate, the feeling of youth lost and won. Most of them are about drinking, some of them veer towards celebration and others towards resignation, but all them toe the same line as we do: between hedonism and nihilism.
Mark Kozelek will obviously accuse me of selling out to “beer commercial lead guitar shit,” to which I’ll gesture toward my Fender and PBR. We are half formed, maybe, but brimming with life nonetheless.
“The Night of Wine and Roses” by Japandroids
This is the sound of a pregame condensed into four minutes, complete with fireworks, melt-your-face drumming and a raucous chorus. If you can shout “woah oh oh” then you can sing along. It comes from an album called “Celebration Rock” (which contains a song called “For the Love of Ivy,” another contender), so lyrics about “downing drinks in a funnel of friends” and “burning our blunts down the end” feel inevitable and appropriate. But really, it’s the opening lines that carry this song to greatness: “Don’t we have anything to live for? / Well of course we do, but until they come true, we’re drinking.”
“This Heart’s on Fire” by Wolf Parade
Japandroids’ fellow Canadians bring us to the dance floor, and command that we leave everything we’ve got on it. Sometimes, it’s the brute force of a hook that sets our souls aflame, and sometimes it’s the friction of sparking libidos. Learn to live on fire, and we’ll burn together. In between the sweat and the tears, maybe we’ll believe the chorus that proclaims, “it’s getting better all the time.”
“First Night” by The Hold Steady
Really any song from these barfly troubadours could have sufficed. There’s “Party Pit,” about a staggering college student (or maybe I’m projecting) who recounts meeting a girl in the mosh pit and boasts “I’m pretty sure we kissed” but ultimately resolves to “walk around and drink some more.” Or “Stuck Between Stations,” about the horror-guised-as-boredom of youthful drinking culture.But neither can compare to the poignancy of a piano ballad about Holly, who’s “not invincible / In fact she’s in the hospital,” and both “inconsolable” and “uncontrollable,” all because “we can’t get as high as we got...on that first night.” We’ll play it as we contemplate our own decay after dusk, cigarettes in our hands.
“The City” by The Dismemberment Plan
Five years before Kelly Clarkson, Travis Morrison shouted “since you been gone” from his rooftop and into the empty streets of some desperate city. “You” probably refers to a partner, but it may as well be Morrison, trying to figure it all out, but never quite feeling himself in his own skin. The scene he describes from his haunted perch sounds like the post-Ivies devastation of campus: barren and silent, even as “something seems to happen somewhere else.” After a night of recklessness or restlessness, we might also turn inward for refuge. And, like Morrison, we’ll be “not unsympathetic” to those of us who’ve left the city, striking out for elsewhere. It’s the collapsing of choice and necessity, a bittersweet refrain as we close the door and exit this threshold of our lives: “all I ever say now is goodbye.”

Hipster drivel

Stevens redeems singer-songwriters, his mother

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Matthew Goodrich

Columnist

April 10, 2015

I have a confession, gentle reader, and I hope the same grace which brings me to admit my sin also inspires you to forgive it. When last we met, I declared the impossibility of the singer-songwriter in 2015. Sincerity is dead, I thought, taking with it our affable acoustic mensches. I spoke too soon. (Even tastemakers are mortal.)

I underestimated a certain musician from Detroit with a penchant for geographic grandiosity. If Father John Misty is the crucifixion of songwriting, then Sufjan Stevens is the resurrection.
To be fair, Stevens is an unlikely martyr. The year 2005 belonged to the baroque absurdity of his record “Illinois,” with its soaring choruses and site-specific splendor. What business does Stevens have in 2015, being five years removed from his last LP (unless you count the disturbing amount of Christmas music he has recorded, which sounded more like the data-driven apocalypse than a flurry of hushed hymnals)? After all the left turns his career has taken, Stevens goes the one unexpected route remaining with “Carrie & Lowell”: making a straightforward folk album.

No, “Carrie & Lowell” is not the fifty-first state. Stevens doesn’t humanize the midwest’s most famous serial killer, nor does he harmonize with gospel choirs in praise of God. These eleven songs are not sweeping declarations of anything, really, except the muted intimacy of childhood. The record is named for Stevens’ mother and stepfather, two parents trying to hold together a family as it disintegrates in the midst of disease and drug addiction. It is as if “Casimir Pulaski Day,” the heart-wrenching opus on “Illinois” about an ambiguously gendered subject’s relationship to faith while dying of leukemia (and doubling as a history lesson in military holidays), was not entirely fiction. On “Carrie & Lowell,” Stevens doesn’t have to weave grand narrative arcs with oblique metaphors in order to convey the desperation of sickness and of love—the pain was inside him all along.

Carrie’s ghost haunts every song on the album. She died in 2012, but Stevens recounts that she had abandoned him long before that, whether she forgets about her toddler at a Blockbuster or takes him on a car ride and drug trip to Oregon. As much as he may wish it, Stevens cannot escape the memory of his mother, whom he both pines for and despises.

“I don’t know where to begin,” he admits on “Death with Dignity,” awash in memories too painful to confront head on. But he attempts a start, regardless: forgiveness.

Yet what happens when death robs us of the chance to forgive? On “All of Me Wants All of You,” Stevens wonders, “shall we beat this or celebrate it,” wondering if it’s better for his mother’s illnesses to end with death or if she should keep fighting. The backdrop, of course, is their troubled relationship—more time to live means more time to be let down as much as it does more time to earn redemption. “I’m just a ghost you walk right through,” he continues, conflating himself with his mother’s apparition and the ephemera of innocence. “Now all of me thinks less of you,” he confesses. But that doesn’t break the bonds of familial love as he sings, “all of me wants all of you.”

The most important lesson we learn from our parents isn’t something they can teach us. It happens slowly, the decay of their superhero status, though Stevens realized it quicker than most. Witnessing the unbearable humanness of mothers—imperfection, ambiguity, mortality—devastates us, threatening even our own eternity. Stevens employs his historic falsetto to make this point: “we’re all gonna die,” and even now “in a manner of speaking” we’re already dead. Our parents’ mortality is our own, even if their mistakes are not.

I’m not sure “Carrie & Lowell” is the best record in Stevens’ discography, but it is the best record of the year. With it, he does more than redeem the singer-songwriter—he redeems his mother, turning it into the redemption of the human race.

Loss stems from love, Stevens reminds us—even as he wishes he could tear his eyes and his arms out to numb his senses. He urges, “Everything I see returns to you somehow,” mother, center of the universe, black hole, “should I tear my heart out now?” And when fireworks blossom on the Fourth of July, a rainbow salute to passing, may we remember what it means to love and be loved.

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