Father John Misty, Robyn, Perfume Genius
Pitchfork #72 - 70
#72 Father John Misty, I Love You, Honeybear (2015)
Rating: 2
Father John Misty is a stage name for Josh Tillman. Josh grew up in an evangelical family in Maryland. He moved to Seattle at 21 to hit the local music scene. In 2008 he joined Fleet Foxes as the drummer, playing on their best-known and Grammy-nominated “folk” record Helplessness Blues, before leaving the band in 2012. That’s when Josh created his Father John Misty solo career. This is his second studio album.
His sound is orchestral, with sweeping vocals. Lush production but simple melodies. On this album, each track tells one of two real-life personal stories: 1) what it’s like to be in love with his fiancée Emma, and 2) what it was like to sleep around before then. It’s sort of like a crooner meets a The Atlantic article about how it’s hard to keep a family together in this crazy world. He called this a “concept album”
e.g. Here’s an Emma song, “I Love You, Honeybear”:
My love, you're the one I wanna watch the ship go down with
The future can't be real, I barely know how long a moment is
Unless we're naked, getting high on the mattress
While the global market crashes
Here’s a before-Emma song, “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt”
And now every insufferable convo
Features her patiently explaining the cosmos
Of which she's in the middle
The track he says he wrote ON their wedding day frets about “Age-old gender roles / Infotainment, capital / Golden boughs and mercury / Bohemian nightmare /
Dust-bowl chic.” He named that track “Holy Shit”
The music isn't remarkable, it’s more a platter on which to serve the lyrics, the emotional pleas and cultural criticism. His voice is authentic if a little vamp-y. “Bored in the USA” is a spare piano and string ballad that casts a harsh light on the American dream - it includes real canned laughter after sad phrases to sharpen our reactions.
My general impression is of a guy who has frustrations and cynical wit, but also some practicality and the realization that there are great things, and great things are still great. He says he’s had problems with drug use and PTSD. He seems to have been pretty spun out for a while after the 2016 election. He seems like a self-indulgent but charismatic guy. The vibe is a little lounge-y but the melodies are real and authentic. I feel like I know the guy a little better now. And I like challenging lyrics.
Pitchfork writers:
Across the album, he cooes sickly sweet comes-ons to his wife, Emma, knowing the private rituals of companionship seem delusional from the outside; he spits vitriol at a dull woman he meets at a party before deciding to go home with her anyway; he languishes in his personal crises like a pig rolling around in the mud. The music is sensual, the vibe languid. Through everything—the muck and desolation of existing on this stupid planet—Tillman tilts towards love, because real life gave him no other choice
#71 Robyn, Honey (2018)
Rating: 3
If you know only a few things about Robyn, I bet it’s a selection of these: That weird but charming single long-take solo dance routine video for “Call Your Girlfriend” (and those big shoes she wore!); that she’s Swedish; she’s “Dancing on My Own;” she’s pretty popular with LGBTQ+; and her music makes people spontaneously flash dance in subway stations.
Robyn’s career has three phases so far. Phase One: the teenage glitter pop days. Did you know Robyn had a US Top 10 hit way back in 1997, recorded at the age of 16? It’s called “Do You Know (What It Takes)” The song is indistinguishable from Britney’s “…Baby One More Time” and that’s no accident. It was produced by Max Martin, who would eventually become the Swedish king of pop via his work with Britney and your favorite boy bands. He also produced the other Top 10 hit on Robyn’s debut, “Show Me Love,” which is indistinguishable from “I Want It That Way.”
Jive Records tried to sign Robyn before Britney, but she refused. So Robyn isn’t just the “IKEA Britney.” The head of Jive Records said he signed Britney because “she’s the American Robyn.”
That was 25 years ago!
Phase Two: the Body Talk phase. After becoming disenchanted with the pop song factory business, at 24, Robyn became an independent. Her second and third albums weren’t released in the USA, partly because the second had two songs about her real-life abortion. But 2010 was huge - she released THREE albums, the Body Talk trilogy that included all the breakup dance songs and cool confident dance videos you remember.
After a couple years of fame explosion and brutal worldwide tours, things got bad. She had a nasty breakup with her longtime boyfriend and collaborator Max, the guy who directed that cool “Call Your Girlfriend” video. And then her favorite producer and friend Christian Falk died of pancreatic cancer. She just took a long break. She was very sad.
Phase Three: that’s this record, Honey. She said she doesn’t call it a “return.” She has changed. She says being sad sucks, but it teaches you about yourself, it’s a spiritual experience.
“I feel like I almost became another person, like the goal wasn’t for me to come back — I really feel like I rearranged my insides in a way. I didn’t know what I even had to go back to. I felt like a lot of things that I believed before were not true anymore.” - NYT, Sept 21, 2018
It’s evolved a little from the Body Talk electro-pop, with more dance and R&B influences. The opening song “Missing U” is about the void after Max and Christian. “Because It’s In the Music” is a swingin’ bop. “Between the Lines” is down the middle club house music. “Honey” is the star track, appearing in a 2017 episode of Girls. This album isn’t really about the lyrics. Here’s “Beach2k20”:
(So you wanna go out?)
To this cute place on the beach
They do really nice food
(How you gonna get there?)
I mean, it's right on the beach
Come through, it'll be cool
(Should we call someone?)
Hmm, okay
Pitchfork writers:
Following up 2010’s beloved Body Talk was always going to be a daunting task. So for her first album in eight years, Robyn skipped floor-filling pop anthems in favor of the tender electro-pop therapy we didn’t know we needed, meeting real-life heartbreak and loss first with mourning, then with acceptance and celebration.
#70 Perfume Genius, No Shape (2017)
Rating: 3
Perfume Genius is a man named Michael Hadreas. He grew up in Seattle, always a born performer, but suffered through school bullies after coming out at the age of 15. Music was his solace, as he keyed into what The Guardian calls “the holy triumvirate of ‘90s female angst,” which was Alanis Morissette, PJ Harvey, and Liz Phair. Oh, and he also keyed into alcohol and drugs.
At 21, Michael got a boyfriend and moved to Brooklyn. He said he was pursuing his dream, foolishly -
“I’d been waiting a long time to be a drug-addict artist,” he states. “Part of me glamourised it for sure, and the reality of it ended up being different, but I thought that’s what you did. I didn’t have a lot of examples for how I felt, or any end game. Most of the books I read were about junkies and hustlers” - The Guardian, May 8, 2017
The drugs did get worse in NYC. He worked at a bar. He partied. He says “everything but heroin,” whatever that is. He moved back to Seattle, went to rehab, turned sober, and then started for real on the songwriting.
His first two albums were born of the hardship. Spare and minimal poetry, gorgeous piano ballads with painful lyrics about his personal trauma — the bullying, the loneliness, the harassment:
My work came back from class / With notes attached
Of a place and time / Or how my body kept him up at night
Then he met his boyfriend Alan, his first real sober relationship.
This fourth album, No Shape, is different - less about the pain of the past, more about, well, the music! I like his damn sensible quote about it:
“I was thinking of a pop star like Bruce Springsteen, about how they write, and the confidence they have that when they give people music, everyone’s like: ‘Yes!’” he explains. “People don’t ask: ‘What’s your relationship with your sister?’ They just say thank you for this music. So I thought: ‘What if I made an album with that sort of energy?’ - The Guardian
This album has a different producer, Blake Mills, who had worked with Ed Sheeran, John Legend, Fiona Apple, and Alabama Shakes. It’s the next level of pop layering, and sounds like more studio money. But it’s still him. It’s experimental. It’s plaintive, slow tempo. But it’s much more confident. And he’s in love.
The first track, “Otherside” starts a lot like the early albums (you’re inside the piano, he’s whispery) but booms with a sudden huge orchestral hit that says HELLO!
I like his voice, it has a definite 70’s, almost yacht-rock sound sometimes, bringing Gerry Rafferty tones and harmonies to “Slip Away” But, like, sober? Sometimes I hear a little Spiritualized, sometimes Sufjan Stevens. No matter, his voice is gentle and authentic.
Don't hold back, I want to break free
God is singing through your body
And I'm carried by the sound
Every drum, every single beat
They were born from your body
And I'm carried by the sound
It’s full of different sounds - a string quartet, a choir, jazz drums. Like Michael wanted to write a feeling, not just a story. “Valley” is an orchestral waltz. Michael’s voice is a downright instrument in “Braid,” and last-track “Alan” is a sweet shivery synth ode to his beloved boyfriend. Simple words, with the powerful aura of love:
Did you notice / We sleep through the night
Did you notice, babe / Everything is alright
You need me / Rest easy
I'm here
How weird
Pitchfork writers:
Hadreas exalts love in its many forms: sensual, mundane, and defiant, allowing his skyward voice and lavish compositions to elevate the familiar into the realm of myth. During the chorus of “Just Like Love,” the titular three words sound sung by a field of wildflowers swaying in the wind. Hadreas knows that comparing things to love is a timeworn exercise in melodrama, and yet when you’re in its grasp, there is nothing too grand to describe it.