How was your Valentine’s Day? Did you perhaps spend it “naked, getting high on the mattress while the global market crashes,” maybe thinking about “new regimes, old ideas”? A decade removed from its romantically timed release, Father John Misty’s I Love You, Honeybear sounds shockingly prescient in its combination of hedonism and psychic terror. It’s hard to hear Josh Tillman sing in 2015 about getting “a useless education and a subprime loan” without wincing at just how much bleaker things would become in the ensuing years, how quaint his complaints of being “Bored in the USA” seem in our chaotic present.
Of course, Tillman’s been along for that ride with us, court jester and cultural stenographer for the anthropocene: “Where did they find these goons they elected to rule them?” he wondered on 2017’s Pure Comedy; “they’re tacit fascists without knowing it,” he sang on last year’s Mahashmashana. Still, I Love You, Honeybear feels like the pinnacle of Father John Misty’s ethos, the cynic who desperately wants to believe that love can transcend our existential dread. In honor of its 10-year anniversary, Father John Misty has re-released a collection of demos from the album, originally sent out in 2015 as a bonus cassette called I Luv You HB. Stripped of their luxe studio sheen, these songs ache with the vulnerability always lurking in their lyrics, previously masked by grand pianos, backing vocalists, and laugh tracks.
If I Love You, Honeybear sounds like the swell of finding the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, its demos reflect the cautiously giddy energy of a budding romance. Gone are the sweeping strings in the title track and the galloping mariachi band on “Chateau Lobby #4.” In their place, the humble strum of an acoustic guitar and Tillman’s naked vocals, clipping and echoing as he stress-tests his home recording equipment with his feverish vibrato. If the studio album uses extreme transparency to undermine sentimentality, betting that it’s impossible to dance to a line like “mascara, blood, ash, and cum” at a wedding or put a song about “the girl who just almost died in my house” on a prospective lover’s mixtape, the demos reveal just how down bad Tillman was at the time of their conception. When a cough catches in his throat before the final verse of “I Went to the Store One Day” (which, like most of the songs, appears under a different name in demo form), it almost sounds as if he’s taken aback by the sincerity of his grand domestic fantasy.
These recordings provide a peek into these songs’ alternative lives, a document of the trials and errors of Tillman’s creative process. On the demo of “When You're Smiling and Astride Me,” we hear a chorus of children's cheers that doesn’t make it into the final version. It sounds like an early experiment in undermining earnestness through gimmick, one that would manifest later in the canned laughter of “Bored in the USA,” which, by contrast, is conspicuously absent here. Without the bag of tricks to ironically diffuse his lyrics about antidepressants and erectile dysfunction, “Bored in the USA” is reimagined as a kind of folk standard, a post-apocalyptic campfire song to sing as we huddle around a burning trash can for warmth.
The demos are accompanied by two covers that seem to embody the polar extremes of Father John Misty’s decadent project: On the one hand, there’s a rendition of Cass McCombs’ “Nobody’s Nixon,” also included on the original cassette, a portrait of a man who steels himself against grift and betrayal through total isolation: “I’m not your paranoia either/But I tape-record every phone call that I get.” It feels like a natural extension of the anxieties on “Holy Shit” (included here as “‘Past Is a Nightmare I’m Trying to Wake Up From’”), its protagonist choosing to drop out of the “bohemian nightmare” rather than try to fight the notion that “love is just an economy based on resource scarcity.” Then, there’s Tillman’s version of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box,” originally recorded in 2015 and a new addition to the original cassette tracklist. Astrology, sex, death, tar pits—the song preternaturally suggests Father John Misty’s extended psychedelic American West mythology. And though he softens Kurt Cobain’s rage on its verses, crooning sweetly about climbing up an “umbilical noose,” he breaks into an agitated roar for “Hey! Wait!” It sounds like an escape, a libidinal release valve for his typically calculated artistic persona. If I Love You, Honeybear defined the sleek sumptuousness of Father John Misty, these demos and covers reveal a glimpse of the restless and hopelessly romantic Joshua Tillman.
