This Is Just My Vibe

Father John Misty “Mr. Tillman”

1. The verses in “Mr. Tillman” are sung from the perspective of a concierge at a hotel where Father John Misty – a.k.a. Josh Tillman – is staying and behaving like an inebriated paranoid wreck for days on end. It’s played as a dark comedy, and part of the joke is the way the concierge’s polite language puts a sunny spin on Tillman’s disturbing behavior and just barely conceals their impatience with him as the song goes along.

2. Note the contrast of the meter in the verse and the chorus: The concierge’s obsequious dialogue tightly wraps around melody and flows between measures, suggesting a formal and uptight demeanor. The chorus, from Tillman’s perspective, is relaxed and loose. He sounds blissful, oblivious, and delusional.

3. This isn’t the first time Tillman has written a song about himself as a very unsympathetic and unlikeable character. It’s hard to say how much either this or “The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apartment” is about him – probably a fair amount, with some degree of artistic license. He clearly delights in playing with the audience’s perception of him, being a guy who records under a pseudonym/persona and sings songs about a guy who has his real name. He’s inviting you to doubt how “real’ those songs are, which strikes me as a way of covering his ass. Is he a drunken train wreck, like in “Mr. Tillman”? Is he attracted to women who bring out his worst misogynistic impulses, as in “…Our Apartment”? I don’t know the guy. Maybe?

4. It’s interesting to write a song about yourself going on an out-of-control bender and writing it mostly from the perspective of the people who have to look after you and clean up your messes. He’s being treated like a coddled baby – at one point the concierge offers to bring him a Regalo, one of those safety gates for small children, to keep him from hurting himself. On one level, this is like an admission of guilt after the fact for being a burden on other people. But it’s also a judgment on himself, for giving into the rock cliché of being a spoiled baby-man. And then there’s another layer where he’s alienated by his awareness that the concierge in sycophantic and concerned entirely because it’s their job. If his self-destructive behavior is the result of feeling disconnected and lost in a world full of fake people who don’t care about him, this only proves him right to feel that way.

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