33. Father John Misty - “Leaving LA”
Father John Misty has always been slowly slipping into an ever-growing abyss of self-deprecation. Only we all knew he was never going to go down alone – he’s too jaded, witty, and smug for that. If he’s going down, then he’s taking everything he despises with him. The gravity of his persona is going to swallow all of it into his orbit as he careens out of control and burns up in an incisive and smoldering conflagration of self-loathsome honesty.
This thirteen-minute epic is that long-awaited crescendo given life. It’s the final slow-motion scene where everything we’ve been anticipating is at last realized. Father John Misty lays bare his soul, stripping away the veneer of pretension and the facade of affectation, to leave us with Josh Tillman. The man removed from any sense of myth or legend – a human being, life-sized and aching, longing for something other than his self-mythology to keep him warm.
It’s a beautiful thing to witness. To gain a glimpse of a soul that’s been through the gauntlet of fame and still maintains its humanity. If anything he’s made it out with a sharpened sense of humanity and he finally possesses the courage (or maybe just finally lacks the strength to keep denying himself the urge) to reverse the lens of his insight and focus it fully upon himself.
Now I understand that some might interpret this otherwise, and rather than seeing it as an attempt to strip away the pretension, they might see it as his most pretentious song yet. We all have our own lenses of subjectivity through which we make sense of life. Meaning that where I see honesty and catharsis, there are those who will inevitably see a sparse and repetitive thirteen minute bout of autobiographical narcissism. However, art is about subjectivity. It’s about trying to honestly depict an experience that transcends understanding, and in doing so, helping others notice their own unvocalized (or perhaps even unrealized) experiences.
Father John Misty may be speaking about himself, but I believe he touches upon something universal. Not only does he bare his soul in a way that will inevitably be unpopular and unmarketable (which is honorable and inspirational in and of itself), but he shows that despite our positionality we all share something in common (albeit to different degrees). We’re all caught within something beyond our control. Whether that something is personal, such as our memories and decisions, or something unfathomable, like the power and force of a society that surrounds and contorts us, in the end there is no escaping determinism. We can run away. We can plan. We can hope. We can dream. However, in the end its all the same. Even in honesty were trapped. We’re cogs kept spinning in a machine that’s ultimately outside of our control, indifferent to our will, and beyond our volition.
