Description
I Love You, Honeybearis a concept album about a guy namedJosh Tillmanwho spends quite a bit of time banging his head against walls, cultivating weak ties with strangers and generally avoiding intimacy at all costs. This all serves to fuel a version of himself that hisself-loathing narcissismcan deal with. We see him engaging in all manner ofregrettable behavior.
In a parking lot somewhere he meetsEmma, who inspires in him a vision of a life wherein being truly seen is not synonymous with shame, but possiblytrue liberationandsublime,unfettered creativity. These ambitions are initially thwarted asjealousy, self-destruction and other charming human character traitsemerge. Josh Tillman confesses as much all throughout.
The album progresses, sometimes chronologically, sometimes not, between two polarities: the first of which is the belief thatthe best love can be is finding someone who is miserable in the same way you areand the end point being thatlove isn’t for anyone who isn’t interested in finding a companion to undertake total transformation with. I won’t give away the ending, butsex, violence, profanity and excavations of the male psycheabound.
My ambition, aside from making an indulgent, soulful, and epic sound worthy of the subject matter, was to address the sensuality of fear, the terrifying force of love, the unutterable pleasures of true intimacy, and the destruction of emotional and intellectual prisons in my own voice. Blammo.
This material demanded a new way of being made, and it took a lot of time before the process revealed itself. The massive, deranged shmaltz I heard in my head, and knew had to be the sound of this record, originated a few years ago while Emma and I were hallucinating in Joshua Tree; the same week I wrote the title track. I chased that sound for the entire year and half we were recording. The means by which it was achieved bore a striking resemblance to the travails, abandon and transformation of learning how to love and be loved; see and be seen. There: I said it. Blammo. -Josh Tillman (A.K.A. Father John Misty)
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