The ideal husband
Father John Misty as love’s unreliable narrator
There’s a line at the end of Father John Misty’s tremendous and terrifying album “I Love You, Honeybear” that would seem intended to ease the disturbance in the bellies of those of us who still believe in true love and happy endings. Maybe there’s hope that such things are still possible, even in the jaded world that Misty has created over the last 45 minutes.
“For love to find us, of all people, I never thought it’d be so simple.”
I scanned a couple dozen reviews of the “Honeybear” album to see what critics had to say about that song, “I Went to the Store One Day,” to see if any confirmed my theory about Josh Tillman’s Misty project. None did.
Instead, many quoted that line at face value. So simple: True love prevails!
Or not? Now I’m not sure.
But maybe this song, too, is premised on a delusion. What if love never existed in the first place?
I love you, I hate you
“I Love You, Honeybear” is like a mesmerizing punch to the gut, a thrilling violent drug-addled ride through lust, sarcasm, social decay, delusions and bad manners. And it is an 11-song cycle aiming to upend the expectations we bring to love songs and maybe even to love itself. Tillman himself has said he’s opposed to sentimentality as a exclusive approach.
The alternative he has offered is a deftly ambiguous tale told entirely in the first person (though arguably sometimes also in the second person, sort of) by an unreliable narrator with very little backstory and a mess of a life.
And he’s found his soulmate.
“You see me as I am, it’s true: aimless fake drifter, and the horny manchild mama’s boy to boot,” he sings on “When You’re Smiling and Astride Me.”
And what does he think of her?
“Of the few main things I hate about her, one’s her petty, vogue ideas,” he sings gently. “Someone’s been told too many times they’re beyond their years.”
With that song, “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt.,” the album really begins to dig in and challenge the listener to take sides. Is he just having fun? The song, jangly and upbeat, is pretty damn funny if you’re a fan of that kind of dark humor. On the other hand, it’s rather alarming if you take it seriously.
Or maybe his is just a special, strange kind of love.
Or maybe he’s a psychopath.
Rogue behavior of the past and present
What do we really know about this guy anyway? Should we be casting him in a romcom, or calling the police?
“Why the long face? / Blondie, I’m already taken. / Sorry / I may act like a lunatic / You think I’m fucking crazy, you’re mistaken / Keep moving.”
That from a barstool wailer called “Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow.”
But then he follows up with “Strange Encounter” about the girl who almost died in his house.
“The moment you came to I swore I would change.”
It’s a refrain he sings not once but twice in the song. You may be wondering why he should need to change. After all, “I’m a decent person,” he pleads. “A little aimless.”
But in fact, despite painting an excruciatingly detailed portrait of who this man is in the present, Father John Misty gives very little hint about what came before and why his life ended up in the ditch.
Was he rebelling against rich parents? Did some kid pick on him in middle school? Was he abducted by a band of bohemian artists? Did he win the lottery and waste the money on booze and drugs?
The only hint of a backstory comes, tellingly, in “An Ideal Husband,” a pivotal track that runs though a staggering list of past misdeeds that apparently he fears is going to be exposed by a guy named Julian.
Every woman that I’ve slept with
Every friendship I’ve neglected
Didn’t call when grandma died
I spend my money getting drunk and high
I’ve done things unprotected
Proceeded to drive home wasted
Bought things to win over siblings
I’ve said awful things, such awful things
Suddenly, you start thinking, wow, this guy really is sincere. Like, he’s sincerely FREAKING OUT.
To be honest, when I first heard “An Ideal Husband,” I started freaking out. Panic set in a tiny bit. It’s that stark of a song, its raw emotions building to the climactic moment in which he runs to his lover’s house at dawn and starts shouting at her to let him impregnate her because he’s tired of running.
“WOULDN’T I MAKE THE IDEAL HUSBAND?!”
You and I may disagree on what makes the ideal. That's probably not it.
The lies we tell in love
So what is the point of all this? Is Misty just building up his character to break him down?
I’d argue that the album is about about the lies we tell ourselves, and sometimes tell the ones we love, to preserve love. His is an extreme example, but the tactics are not. And in that, the narrator, though hopelessly flawed, is like all of us.
Can he be redeemed?
I started to wonder if the critics have erred in believing (too much) the myth Tillman starting building up around himself as Misty, about taking drugs in Big Sur from a Canadian shaman and suddenly charting a new path, one that involves an impressive beard and an exhilarating live show. About meeting his future wife at a store parking lot after producing his first solo album, “Fear Fun,” and how they are now inseparable, to the point that the “Honeybear” album has been cast as a warped kind of depiction of their love, or at least inspired by Tillman’s new worldview after finding his life companion.
Maybe it truly is autobiographical, in which case, we’d assume the album ends on a positive note. Tillman actually sounds rather positive in interviews.
But to be fair to the fictional world and character he has created, I disagree that the conclusion to “I Love You, Honeybear” should be taken as a parting gift of uplift to listeners.
“I Went to the Store One Day” purports to recount the story of a man who, surprise, meets a woman at a store.
“I was buying coffee and cigarettes, firewood and bad wine long since gone,” he sings.
The love story immediately gets undercut, however, when he flashes forward a year and reveals he’s in shambles, now jealous, paranoid, stoned and rail thin.
“If this isn’t true love, someone oughta put me in a home.”
So which is it?
When I first listened to the song, I had a very definitive reaction, but now I’m not so sure. The more I listen to it and think about how to interpret it, I’m satisfied by the ambiguity that enwraps it. Any listener could make a very good argument that when the singer runs though the dream life that he hopes is in store for him and his lover that he is being sincere and she, too, is sincere in her love, and even if their dreams don’t materialize they at least have each other, “all because I went to the store one day.”
Or, that’s one last Misty sleight of hand.
This is a stretch, I admit now, but I still cling to my theory: It’s all an illusion.
That was my first interpretation, that there never was any lover. Think about the narrator as if he’s singing the song AFTER they “put me in a home” and has nothing left but the vivid fantasies of an imaginary love and the real memory of this one woman he met, but just in passing, at a store while he was buying cigarettes and wine.
Who could fault him for wanting to believe that fantasy? Forever returning to that one real moment.
“Seen you around, what’s your name?”
