Five years ago, when Joshua Tillman had just ‘buried’ his music catalog under the J. Tillman moniker to start performing as Father John Misty, he revealed to the Dallas Observer that he was “just excited to utilize [his] narrative voice". “Leaving LA”, the 13-minute meandering folk epic (or, as the song describes itself, a ‘10-verse chorus-less diatribe’) on Pure Comedy (April 2017) stretches the limits of that now-universally-acclaimed narrative voice to its limits.
The song (which took three years of aesthetic gestation) balances biographical details with wry critiques of contemporary culture. The Los Angeles landscape is populated with ‘billboard queens’, ‘Five-foot chicks with parted lips selling sweatshop jeans’, ‘L.A. phonies and their bullshit bands/ That sound like dollar signs and Amy Grant’, tap water that’s possibly laced with ecstasy and birth control, and stratospheric rent.
The city’s spiritual, ethical and moral shortcomings are merely a backdrop, however, to the grand unfolding - and deflating - of Father John Misty’s myth-making ambitions. After years of toiling in obscurity and near-poverty (‘Nonetheless, I've been practicing my whole life/ Washing dishes, playing drums, and getting by’) he finally gets his hard-earned time in the spotlight, and the chance to satisfy his dreams of ‘garnering all rave reviews’ and being hailed as a ‘national treasure’. His parents each make a rather morbid appearance on the song, alongside a few literary references (Ovid, Oedipus, Cupid and the masks used in Greek tragic plays) that help signal his Serious Artistic Intentions.
All this graveness and severity is balanced out by some astute, ironic and reflexive commentary: an actual GQ cover article - "The Oldest Man in Folk Rock Speaks” - is cited, a foil character sardonically describes him as ‘Another white guy in 2017/ Who takes himself so goddamn seriously’, and he aptly summarizes his fanbase as ‘Manic virginal lust and college dudes’.
The acoustic guitars and occasional accompaniment of strings create a sense of circular progression, leaving little room for a sense of rising action or a climax. Los Angeles is exchanged for New Orleans in ‘total silence’, without any pomp, celebration or grand revelation. If you are left wondering what ‘the point’ of this attention-straining monologue is, Father John Misty provided a deeper explanation of the song’s biographical inspirations, its unmentioned key inspiration (spoiler: his wife Emma Elizabeth Tillman), and a detailed and fully-fleshed answer to what the song boils down to in an interview with :
“You could either think I’m like a dick, or accept that I’m as complicated of a human being as anyone else, and get then inside the world of that song and empathize with me. The song is about the unspoken, and ultimately [...] this giant mess of ego and fear and vanity and want and all that - that would be the substance of my life if I didn’t have Emma. In that way, that song was me coming to grips with what’s actually valuable, with what has value in my life. And for me, it’s Emma. It’s a three-year realization of that. Because you get a little fame, you get a little success - and it’s seductive - and you start to think that you could live on just that”.
The interview ends with him breaking off into a brief shrug and a silent chuckle to himself; the music video ends with him laughing to himself and muttering ‘cool’. When he debuted the song on Lauren Laverne’s BBC Radio 6 show back in February, he punctuated his performance with a similarly wry twist: “That’s the whitest, most acoustic thing you’ve ever seen.” In 2017, that additional dose of self-effacing humor and irony helps the concept of the prophetic folk icon - one that can diagnose our modern malaises with secular mysticism and postmodern wit - go down with a bit more ease.
