My last album as J. Tillman, 'Singing Ax,' that was really a premeditated death rattle of the aesthetic precedent I had set. I realized I wasn't creating spontaneously; I was enforcing all these parameters. I was too self-loathing or something, and there was this obvious dissonance between my conversational voice and creative voice.
I would play my Dungeons and Dragons songs and watch people's eyes glaze over, and then I would start joking around between songs, and all of a sudden people were lighting up and engaging.
When I started with music, all I was looking for was to ensure I never had to live the life I grew up with. I wanted a foolproof exemption from pain and boredom. I wanted a life of constant amusement and leisure.
I love the exhilaration of feeling a pull quote come out of your mouth. The words just taste better.
Funny is a good foil. Humor is illuminating, and it also gives you power.
I think that providing obstructions in the live setting is when you get something that actually means something, as opposed to just aping your way through your greatest hits.
Interpretive thinking, as an art form, is dying.
I made a decision as a child that I would never let anyone tell me that I was invalid or inauthentic, or that my experiences were.
J. Tillman was kind of an alter ego. There was a lot I didn't want people to know about my real life. With Father John Misty, I leave everything in: so much so that I lose sleep before these albums come out because there is always a line or two in there where I'm just like, 'This is not going to go down very well.'
I've never taken the steps to be 'successful': I've never had a manager or signed to a publishing house.
People used to see things that disgusted them and say, 'I never want to see that again.' Now we've reached the point where we see things that are disturbing and revolting to us, but we want to see more and more of it.
I try to make myself, and subsequently the audience, as uncomfortable as possible, whether it's completely desecrating a song they thought was one thing, or getting too drunk to really do a very good job.
If music was made by some kind of critical theorist, it would sound like my music.
