I Love You, Honeybear Review
Who is Josh Tillman? After padding his C.V. with sometimes-author and blacklisted fifth evangelist on Fear Fun, he might be the guy you don’t take at face value. His new album, I Love You, Honeybear, returns to that question and its implicit dilemma of finding truth in a world of illusion — or to adopt his vocabulary, shit.
We have a soft spot for nebbish self-deprecators who speak truth about the human condition. Tillman writes like one, yet appears too cool and macho for that particular line of work, in a way people who fancy themselves too cool to be cool yet still secretly consider themselves cool hate. Fleet Foxes’ image issues follow him; the original indie woah-oh-ohers were mocked as affected granola-crunchers pretending to sing something real. To make matters worse, Tillman’s a joker, sticking crooked observations into otherwise plaintive balladry.Honeybear is clear proof that he’ll insist on taking digs if it keeps him an open book. Tillman may look cooler than Randy Newman but they’ll both tell you exactly why you’re so stupid for mentioning as much, all without using any names.
Bearing your soul while firmly committing to one-liners is risky business, but Tillman finds more heart in his lovable bastard routine on Honeybear. He calls out those who would easily have him pegged while owning and interpreting his nature on terms no one else will come to. And of course they won’t, because they’re not him.
Naturally, Tillman’s terms are caught up in love. Honeybear is primarily about his wife and the renewed sense of self-worth he’s found in their relationship. After years of playing the subtextually insecure nature playboy, he almost sounds ready to settle down with his true muse and “genius.” Almost. He also sings of a world that encroaches on their love, one that tempts his worst impulses and divorces him from accountability in every sense of the word. As Father John Misty, he tries to make sense of his life between these forces, each song bursting with vulgar confessionals and acerbic epiphanies.
Wrapped in Americana that covers the Parks-ian bandstand and barroom, we witness Misty (or is it Tillman?) cycle through toxic relationships with himself and others under the yoke of human history, feeding his ego as it throttles itself through song. You hear the oblivious asshole’s side of the story on “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt.” and the gushing Romantic mess deny the world for the sake of his ride-or-die on the title track. He’s fighting technological isolationism on top of bum genes on top of goodness knows what else just to meet His Only One and embrace wholesale, as lovers supposedly ought to do.
As Misty muddles fact and fiction on Honeybear, Tillman occasionally jumps out of his music to put an arm around the listener and say, “Christ, what’s this train-wreck going on about?” Late album manifesto “The Ideal Husband” collects the indulgences of his character as a list of half-brags, which becomes a manic sprint from what begin to sound like self-professed flaws. Misty sings while Tillman runs, and what he’s running towards is the only redemption he knows: she who illuminates the big band soul of “When You’re Smiling and Astride Me” and fills its verses with honest-to-goodness sincerity. “That’s how you live free,” he sings. “Truly see and be seen.”
The see-saw between the true John Misty and real Josh Tillman is episodic in nature. Song to song, though mostly line to line, we’re either given a ruse to divert our attention from the writer’s back-story or a bold existential claim straight from the heart. The transformation here is tidal and uncertain, but in the act we get Tillman the artist. In those moments whoever that is becomes beside the point, for he commands the personae he’s struggled (and consumed vast quantities of drugs) to recognize in and around himself. Honeybear’s love songs are grand, brutal and manifold in their spillage. Tillman certainly runs for his life on Honeybear, but also stops to face the incestuous dreams and horny barflies on the hunt for the shadow of the hand he’ll do whatever he can to hold, even if it means self-destruction. He inflates his legend only to sell himself short and, maybe through the eyes of his soul-mate, learn to shed every skin he’s made along the way so he might exist with her. Seared with sarcasm, bruised with bad loving and big words, the most sincere thing about I Love You, Honeybear is how it fuses affectation and the stark raving vulnerable.
To combine those two elements is to mythologize. It’s a deeply human impulse to do so, one that colors every significant performance we give in this world, however great or commonplace. Myths need ugliness to exist, lest nothing would ever really happen and there wouldn’t be much to talk about. By refusing to let himself off the hook at his most caricatured, Tillman’s character threads — however borrowed, raw, or embellished — weave together and come undone. He never truly believes his own shtick building counterpoint in every moment to save himself from his own creation. This give us a person as they live and fail, piling detail atop detail to eventually collapse under the weight of it all into being; a place where he’s the person he is, not the one he believes himself to be from time to time.
We can’t really see or know this person. Plain to see but difficult to look at, we crave self-portraits like Honeybear even as we cry inauthenticity. We’re half right in our uproar, because whose self is being described at this point? The work never seems to be true enough. At least there’s always more to write.
I Love You, Honeybear has a wonderful finish, in which Tillman interrupts himself (or is it Misty?) with softer revelations. Over light nods to his previous act’s Fabergé folk, the global catastrophes that seemed to crush Tillman are removed from his concern on “Holy Shit.” As he spouts the socioeconomic and vaguely intellectual social concepts that keep him from himself and his wife, he has trouble figuring out what any of it has to do with the proverbial “you and me.” It’s honest and a little bit selfish, but so is making the time to find yourself, which eventually means making the time to find and love those who accept, challenge, and unlock every aspect of your being, which could be more people than you realized if you only took the time to find them. You might not formally exist, so why not? Anyway, he continues to cool off through “I Went To The Store One Day,” the beginning of Josh Tillman’s romance with Emma and the final chapter in Father John Misty’s latest adventure. I’ll be cliche and say it’s a beginning either way you slice it, one with sweeter self-conscious jabs and where you don’t have to worry as much about being in on the joke. For now.
