Ahead of Father John Misty's Ninth Street show, celebrating 7 magical music moments

Columbia indie-rock lovers will be treated to fire-and-ice feelings Sunday evening when mercurial crooner Father John Misty meets the soulful uplift of The Head and the Heart for a show outside The Blue Note.

Misty, born Josh Tillman, is the sort of artist who demands a response. He wrings a sublime, almost aching beauty from every chord, often while caustically counting the ways we've all been conned and are all complicit in American excess.

Digging through Misty's records is to hear those traits — musical elegance and barbed prophecy — cry out for each other, blur until they become one and the same.

An artist like Misty also inspires very particular devotion. Fans clutch favorite records tight, dissect favorite songs like secular scripture. But ahead of Sunday night's show, we go a little more granular. Here are seven great moments within the Misty catalog, seven pieces of evidence for his complicated and welcome brilliance.

Setting the tone

Although it doesn't come till track three, the opening to "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings" sets the true tone for 2012's "Fear Fun" — the debut Father John Misty record — and nearly everything else to come.

Huge, distorted drums serve as building blocks for a warped, bowing Wall of Sound. And Misty's opening salvo ("Jesus Christ, girl / What are people gonna think?") sums up how both the lovers and leavers respond to his take on pop music.

A party in 'Tee Pees 1-12'

However dour or distant Father John Misty can seem, a thorough listen leaves no doubt: the man is having a blast. You certainly hear that on the country rave-up "Tee Pees 1-12" from "Fear Fun," which kicks off with handclaps and woozy fiddle.

But the chef's kiss moment comes on the chorus as Misty doot-doots his way through a drug trip like the staggered, staggering descendant of 1960s and '70s songwriters he is.

Canned laughter, canned heat

Forever kicking against the goads of modern over-entertainment — Misty's whole catalog sounds like a companion to David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" — the artist drops some forced, sitcom-style laughter into "Bored in the USA" from 2015's "I Love You, Honeybear."

The canned collective titter, the sort that gives lie to the phrase "filmed before a live studio audience," arrives as the piano-and-strings dirge bends toward trenchant commentary.

Squeezed around a verse that starts with the couplet "Oh, they gave me a useless education / And a subprime loan on a Craftsman home" — and stretched into a chorus praying to "President Jesus" — the laughs underline our bewilderment inside the American experience.

Replaying the laugh track during a now-legendary David Letterman performance, Misty and Co. met awkward applause, making the song's point for him: We can't see — or don't want to believe — how much the joke's on us.

Father John Misty, cosmic cowboy

For all his satiric stabs and black-hole gazing, Father John Misty closes "Pure Comedy," the title track from his 2017 record with a lyric that is downright beautiful, or at least keeps us listening with something resembling hope.

After running through cultural gods, revealing them all as punchlines, he sings of a tendency to numb away our humanity. Then Misty offers us this — read it as a last middle finger to religion if you will, or a dark-timeline altar call to huddle close:

"Just random matter suspended in the dark / I hate to say it, but each other's all we got."

Asking the two questions you avoid in polite company

There are so many moments to love on "Hangout at the Gallows," from 2018's "God's Favorite Customer." The way the song seems to start in media res; or the sheer poetic power of the lyric "Whose bright idea was it to sharpen the knives? / Just twenty minutes 'fore the boat capsized?"

Forever dodging the expectations of polite company, Misty transgresses further by asking two questions you never broach.

"What's your politics? What's your religion?" he sings, drawing out the beginning of "religion" in an almost metaphysical way, then landing the question mark as if it's an exclamation point, the listener already damned before they reply.

Mr. Tillman gets meta

"Mr. Tillman," also from "God's Favorite Customer," is far from the first time Father John Misty played it fast and cool with his birth name; for one, "The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt." is among the most evocative tracks on "Honeybear."

Here, the singer adopts the character of a beleaguered hotel clerk dealing with, well, him: "Mr. Tillman / good to see you again / There's a few outstanding charges just before we check you in."

This narrator works through the ledger, then conveys a few all-too-plausible messages ("Jason Isbell's here as well and he seemed a little worried about you"). But the longer he sings, the more listeners are left to wonder if Mr. Misty has entered a "Hotel California" of the soul, his inner dialogue directed into the microphone.

A timeless and tender tune

So often gesturing toward the sad-eyed AM radio sounds of bards like Harry Nilsson or even country crooner Glen Campbell, Father John Misty delivers his own "Gentle on My Mind" with "Goodbye Mr. Blue" on 2021's "Chloë and the Next 20th Century." Relatively speaking, of course.

A gorgeous union of acoustic guitar, pedal steel and string section frame Misty's sweetly-hummed tune about the cat keeping a couple together and the singer's creeping sense of inevitable loss.

Father John Misty plays with The Head and the Heart and Miya Folick at 6 p.m. Sunday outside The Blue Note. Tickets are $50-$55. Visit https://thebluenote.com/ for details.

Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. He's on Twitter @aarikdanielsen.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: 7 Father John Misty moments to ring in Sunday's show at The Blue Note