A cold wind blew through Boston’s Seaport district early Friday evening, September 23, 2022, as Father John Misty and his opener, Suki Waterhouse, prepared to take the stage. An outdoor venue, the Leader Bank Pavilion lay exposed to the gusts from Hurricane Fiona making landfall up the coast in Canada. Still, the fans streamed in, nearly filling the 5,000-seat venue. Most wore hoodies and ski caps, while others lined up at a kiosk dispensing blankets. Just twenty-four hours after the autumnal equinox, New England’s summer had left the building.
To counteract the cold, the performers would have to bring the heat. At 8 pm Waterhouse, the British, actress, model, and now touring singer, took the stage to spare yet earnest applause as folks found their seats. Grungy guitar licks from her black-clad band and a smear of blue lights marked her entrance, her blonde hair waving with the fog streaming across the stage. “It’s all bullshit on the internet” she sang in her first number, a mellow groove condemning online rumor mills, before thanking the crowd for coming to see her “for the first time with a windbreaker on stage.”
As the seats filled out, the Waterhouse superfans began to make themselves known. Red lights lit Waterhouse from behind during “Devil I Know,” a minor key rock number with sultry shades of Lana Del Ray. Some fans were now standing, screaming We love you Suki as her silver rings glinted against the microphone. A few concertgoers even sobbed during a slower torch ballad, which led into a syrupy and atmospheric cover of Mazzy Star’s “Fade into You,” Waterhouse’s vocals billowing and breathy. “This is my first tour,” she told the crowd, by way of thanks. Of Father John Misty, she said, “He’s just father. Father is father. He’s the greatest.” At the end of her set, she played her viral hit “Good Looking” and sang about her “good looking boy” before the crying faces and upheld phones of her ardent fans. After her performance, at the merchandise table, her gear was flying faster than Father John Misty’s own.
Not that there was fear of Father John Misty being upstaged. Twenty minutes later the house lights dimmed again and Father John Misty’s nine-piece backing band moved through the darkness, opening with the swelling chords of “I Love You, Honeybear.” After a few bars of this title track to his 2015 album, Father John Misty appeared from stage right, tall and slender in black shoes and slacks, a black jacket over white tee shirt. His hair was trim and he wore a black beard as he crisscrossed the stage, sliding and thrusting to the sultry, sardonic tune. “Don’t ever doubt this, my steadfast conviction,” he wailed, his big voice filling the tent, “My love, you’re the one I want to watch the ships go down with.” He lifted the microphone stand as he made his sexy jive steps, inviting the whole audience to be “garden-variety oblivious” with him in the unfolding apocalypse. From that opening on, they were hooked.
A grand, jazzy ending gave way to “Total Entertainment Forever,” from 2017’s Pure Comedy. Father John Misty grabbed his acoustic guitar and strummed the off-kilter chords while predicting, “In the New Age we’ll all be entertained / Rich or poor / The channels are all the same.” While “Honeybear” celebrated interpersonal love amid global collapse, this song imagined the hedonism a “New Age” might hold for humanity. “Not bad for a race of demented monkeys / From a cave to a city to a permanent party / Come on” Father John Misty bellowed as he slung his guitar around his torso and gestured to the crowd. The band pounded on their instruments, the brass section chiming in with abbreviated fills. Everybody cheered.
Next, the backlights came on low and red, the drums bashing out a steady rhythm. “Je-e-e-e-e-sus Christ, girl” Father John Misty intoned, long and low, the signature opening to “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” from 2012’s Fear Fun. In this plangent tune about taking a date to his grandfather’s “several funerals,” the singer cries, “Someone’s got to help me dig.” He delivered these vocals imploringly as if asking for volunteers from the crowd, which by now was on its feet, warmed-up and chanting along. The brass trio provided the link to the next tune, “Chloë,” Father John Misty gliding around the stage and singing in the jazzy style that characterizes much of his latest album, 2022’s Chloë and the Next 20th Century.
The band’s traipsing shuffle provided a bright platform for Father John Misty’s copious wordplay. That the song ended away from the home key as Chloë “took a leap into the autumn leaves” suited the fever dream to come, “Mr. Tillman,” from 2018’s God’s Favorite Customer. Here the interlude featured a shredded guitar before resolving into the blithe whistling and bragging about “feeling good, damn, I’m feeling so fine / I’m living on a cloud above an island in my mind.” This while other characters in the song “aren’t exactly thrilled,” evoking a studied cluelessness Father John Misty would both indulge and lambaste throughout this raucous, provocative show.
Five songs in and Father John Misty had pulled from each of his five albums, which represent a strong and growing body of work for this singer-songwriter whose real name is Josh Tillman. These albums contain voluminous lyrics of striking ingenuity; catchy melodies that contrast the dark moods of his songs; and a general sense of world-weary sarcasm that imbues his stage show, too. And damn, can he belt out a song. Each time he comes through Boston, it seems, not only does his songbook grow, but his command of the stage does too.
“I spent that whole song trying to figure out why my pants were so hot,” remarked Father John Misty after “Mr. Tillman.” He’d forgotten about the hand warmers he’d put in there, he said. The audience cheered at the mention of his hot pants and kept it up through “Nancy from Now On,” with a thumping drum on the “run boy” outro. In the pleading, dire ballad, “Strange Encounter,” about reviving a person who’s taken too many drugs, Father John Misty cried, “The moment you came to I swore I would change / Though neither one of us would leave unscathed.” The confessional storytelling only enhanced his connection to the audience, even while the soothsaying persona put an alluring distance between the writer, the performer, and the speaker of the songs.
“Enjoying the repertoire so far?” the performer asked to a roar of applause. “Great.” Even the banter was cheeky, self-referential, though Father John Misty took an earnest turn when he asked the crowd if anyone had recently lost a pet. Someone near the front of the stage had a lost a goat named Joey. Taking this in, Father John Misty kicked out his hip and said, “Sir, you are goddamned adorable. From my lips to god’s ears, this one goes out to Joey the goat.” Another of the jazzy new numbers, “Goodbye Mr. Blue” recounts the passing of a Turkish Angora amid its owners’ breakup. “Mr. Blue died in my arms / Nothing they could do / Don’t the last time come too soon?” The bass and slide guitar complemented Father John’s Misty’s soulful vocals in this uncharacteristically sincere tune that’s as much about losing a cat as losing a relationship.
For two more songs, Father John Misty peddled his new material, crooning through the slow and sensual “Funny Girl,” before launching into the folk-rocky “Q4,” which takes its licks at the publishing industry. “It was just the thing for their Q4,” he sang over glockenspiel keyboard, “The film adaptation was a total mess.” A throwback to I Love You, Honeybear, “Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow” found Father John Misty at the height of his power. “This might be the most petulant, immature thing I’ve ever written,” he’d said and chuckled before launching into the crowd favorite. “But goddamn is it fun to sing.” The band built slow and patient as the singer hurled insults at anyone naive enough to think they could pick him or his partner up at a bar: “If you try that cat-and-mouse shit you’ll get bitten,” he growled, as if he meant it: “Keep moving.”
If the crowd had forgotten how cold they were, the opening lines of “Things It Would’ve Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution” gave them a reminder: “It got too hot / And so we overthrew system.” This slow jam provided the singer space to imagine another version of the end of civilization. “We’re all still pretty good at eating on the run,” he quipped, and then reminded the crowd, with “Ballad of the Dying Man,” how “In no time at all / This will be the distant past.” His vocals rose an octave or two, soaring through pavilion. The crowd was engrossed in the textures of his words, his delivery, this setlist comprised from all his albums.
Father John Misty must’ve felt the connection, because with a smirk he asked, “I’m not going to lose you guys if I take a tambourine number, will I?” The self-consciousness, the faux concern was right on point. Tambourine in hand, he wailed out “Fun times in Babylon” in syllables long and descending enough for the listener to doubt any fun would be had there at all. The music was slow and eerie, like a warped carnival ride, as Father John Misty concluded, “Look out, Hollywood, here I come.” This sarcasm succumbed to “When You’re Smiling and Astride Me,” which comes as close to an unbridled love song as one might find in his catalogue. In this number, Father John Misty fell to his knees and wailed, thrusting his hips while the crowd chanted oh, oh, oh.
After that erotic display, as if to cut the tension, Father John Misty picked up a guitar and asked his band if they could still feel their frozen hands. His own guitar playing, he joked, was “only slightly worse than it usually sounds,” before leading the band into a pulsing, pumping rendition of “Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins).” The lead trumpet pierced through the arrangement that led into the existential anthem, “Pure Comedy,” where the singer mused, “The comedy of man starts like this / Our brains are much too big for our mother’s hips.” From the absurdity of our births, he cut against religion, politics, the human ideal of being “at the center of everything.” It’s a song that stuns an audience not only in its observational wisdom but in its performer’s ability to memorize and recite the torrent of language. On brand, in the end, Father John Misty dryly admitted, “I hate to say it, but each other’s all we got.”
At the end of this tragicomedy built on personal shortcoming and collective doom, Father John Misty closed his set with the thumping, high-powered “Ideal Husband.” The song’s climax found him on his knees again pleading with his lover at “seven in the morning,” saying “Let’s put a baby in the oven / Wouldn’t I make the ideal husband?” No you wouldn’t, is the expected answer, though judging by the roars of the crowd, plenty would make an exception.
After a brief break, even the encore tradition itself was subject to Father John Misty’s satire. “We come back out here whether you cheer or not,” he told the fans, but “thank you for participating in the fraudulent theater.” He played another new, jazzy tune, “Buddy’s Rendezvous,” before folks started dancing in the aisles for the honkytonk number, “I’m Writing a Novel,” ending with a big Nashville flourish. Finally, “Date Night,” from God’s Favorite Customer, was just loud and discordant enough to close the evening, Father John Misty dancing and clapping, taking a swipe at his own material as he remarked near the end, “This song needs more verses.” And so he left the crowd, if not wanting, at least needing more as they rushed toward the exits and back to whatever warm environs they could find, the whole of them grinning and uplifted by the sardonic, sexy, vulnerable persona of Father John Misty.
Photos by Peter Kwong
One Response
The goats name is Zoey, not Joey. That gentleman up front is my dad, and Zoey was my family’s goat. Thanks Father John Misty for sending her love!!!