The Fat Angel Sings

Father John Misty and his new album, “I Love You, Honeybear“, is out next week.  New York radio station WFUV has posted a video of a  session featuring the man himself and his beautiful voice ,Father John Misty performing three songs from the record: “Chateau Lobby #4 (In C for Two Virgins)”, “Strange Encounters”, and “Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow”. This is truly a wonderful session and just gives an insight into the new album. “I Love You, Honeybear’, a self-described “concept record about a guy called Josh Tillman”, which is a terminal smartarse’s way of saying it’s a confessional – and what a revelation it turns out to be.

 “I Love You, Honeybear” is out February 9th in Europe via Bella Union

Written around the time Tillman got hitched to this girlfriend, it’s a hugely ambitious, caustically funny album about the redemptive possibilities of love,  Songs like ‘The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apartment’ (“I love the kind of woman who can walk over a man/I mean like a goddamn marching band”) and ‘The Ideal Husband’ suggest a man whose soul needs, saving,

With a very Harry Nilsson-esque and a brilliant title ‘Nothing Good Ever Happens At The Goddamn Thirsty Crow’, the ambition pays off beautifully. But he saves the best for a piano ballad, previous single ‘Bored In The USA’, which undercuts the lyric’s narcissism (“Is this the part where I get all I ever wanted?”) with a canned-laughter track – an exquisite touch, and a song Randy Newman would kill to have written, What saves our narrator is – you guessed it – the love of a good woman, and closer ‘I Went To The Store One Day’ finds him finally flirting with happiness, a concept the “aimless, fake drifter” in him always figured was for squares (“For love to find us of all people/I never thought it’d be so simple”).