Father John Misty chose not to close his 2022 album Chloë and the Next 20th Century with the lines, “And now things keep getting worse while staying so eerily the same/ Come build your burial grounds on our burial grounds.” He does sing them towards the end of the final track, which stretches over seven minutes and ends on a more conversational and familiarly hopeful note: “I don’t know ‘bout you/ But I’ll take the love songs and the great distance that they came.” In a rare interview with Blackbird Spyplane, Josh Tillman aptly described the album, which swung for a big-band jazz sound and back to Hollywood’s golden age, as an “outlier” in his discography. But ‘The Next 20th Century’ – in its apocalyptic scope, grand orchestration, and big-picture writing capturing the brooding mundanity of cultural decay – was not only evocative of the singer-songwriter’s earlier work, but also, it turns out, a bridge to his new album, Mahashmashana, whose title riffs on the Sanskrit word for the “great cremation ground” encountered before death. “All is silent,” he sings after pronouncing it. Of course, it’s the same for everyone.
Tillman also said in that interview that, with Chloë, “I didn’t really know what I was doing, or why I was doing it,” which was part of what made it satisfying – and a strangely charming entry in his catalog. Its follow-up, by contrast, seems extremely aware of itself, even if as a writer he’s still struggling to find a way out or towards transcendence. In classic FJM fashion, Mahashmashana is maximalist in both its self-indulgence and musical structure, its lyrics mixing wry humour, imagination, and longing that’s deep-seated and well-hidden. At the same time, it’s touching and selfless – or at least luxuriating in a space where, in Tillman’s own words, “the self is receding” – in ways Tillman’s songwriting has rarely been. It accumulates every facet of his persona – sardonic, romantic, even optimistic – and justifies every sprawling gesture through sharpened lyrics and genuine uncertainty. The dry critique of ‘Mental Health’ may sound cut from the Pure Comedy sessions (“Maybe we’re all far too well,” he sighs), but later comes ‘Being You’, where, faced with “a spitting image of someone that I knew/ Just a perfect parody I can barely do,” he can’t help but take on the role of the therapist: “Can you tell me how it feels?”
Just like describing a collapsing world, reckoning with the self can be strange and hallucinogenic – through the lens of Father John Misty, it’s less the outcome of mindfulness than, well, having lost your mind. In rendering this realization, ‘Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose’ isn’t hypnotic so much as drug-addled, bending reality in ways that feel equivalent to its destruction. Like ‘Being You’, it toes the line between dissociation, delusion even, and revelation. “A perfect lie can live forever/ The truth don’t fare as well,” he acknowledges on the title track, but the latter is still the destination. On songs like the breath-taking ‘Screamland’, he seems to muster his entire will to fight against; BJ Burton’s mixing even specifically recalls the fractured hope he conjured on Low’s HEY WHAT. BJ Burton’s mixing even specifically recalls the fractured hope he conjured on Low’s HEY WHAT. Maybe it’s why the groovier tracks take up more time than they typically would: ‘She Cleans Up’ spins karmic cycles into a rollicking dance, while the existential musings of ‘I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All’ unravel with the off-handed panache of its title. Yet ‘Screamland’ abruptly cuts off after repeated pleas to “Keep dreaming” instead of letting it succumb to the fade-out treatment, as if to startle us awake.
“After a millennia of good times, God said ‘Hey now, let’s have a dream’,” Tillman sings on ‘I Guess’. The narrator has his own, but finds himself helpless and subservient even to the thing we’re told can supplant religion: “I followed my dreams/ And my dreams said to crawl.” His conclusion on ‘Mental Health’? “This dream we’re born inside/ Feels awful real sometimes/ But it’s all in your mind.” Is that meant to be a relief, a curse, another form of condescension? I don’t know if Tillman believes in any kind of spirituality, but even if he does, Father John Misty wouldn’t present it totally earnestly, even with this title. And he doesn’t. On the opening track, he makes “Yes, it is” sound like some kind of redemption, yet the affirmation is only a cynical twist of ‘Amazing Grace’: “What was found is lost.” Even Drew Erickson’s orchestral arrangement, so fittingly elegant on most of the album, swells to a near shrill, then evaporates (?). Maybe that’s what happens to the dream; maybe it was never real to begin with. But maybe, Tillman figures, that’s what gets us closer to the truth – the kind we might, perhaps foolishly and against our will, call wisdom.