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.
