Father John Misty’s Chloë and the Next 20th Century: Doomed Love Songs For the Pseudo-Nostalgic
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The post Father John Misty’s Chloë and the Next 20th Century: Doomed Love Songs For the Pseudo-Nostalgic appeared first on Consequence.
“What’s ‘deeply funny’ mean anyhow?” Father John Misty asks on “Q4,” a single from Chloë and the Next 20th Century. The song is the album’s clearest, most cutting satire, but this question feels earnest, the stakes intimate to the singer — as a performer and person seeking connection in a modern wasteland.
Over five albums, singer-songwriter Josh Tillman has been a craftsman of story-songs delivered via absurdist personae, scaffolding ironic provocation with heartfelt croons and soaring folk-inspired instrumentation. On Chloë, singer-songwriter Josh Tillman returns with his first new material since 2018’s taciturn God’s Favorite Customer. Written and recorded in fall/winter 2020, the album sees Tillman continuing to collaborate with multi-instrumentatlist/producer Jonathan Wilson and engineer Dave Cerminara.
The eleven tracks often sound like mini film scores, featuring arrangements by Drew Erickson and plenty of strings, brass and woodwinds. Tillman still deals in clever, allusive vignettes, but the tone is ultimately gentler this time around, hazier and less incisive than God’s or 2017’s Trump-era Pure Comedy.
For a troubadour who’s referred to himself as a “sarcastic Michael Bublé,” the turn toward a more golden-hued melancholia is effective. The album opens with a curdled horn line and unabatedly tame big-band arrangement for the character study “Chloë,” and the listener thinks, Here comes the self-ironizing lounge lizard, sounding like the Beatles-doing-vaudeville. (Which, to be honest, we like very much.) But the next track, “Goodbye, Mr. Blue,” veers into a sunny-sad Harry Nilsson-like tune over Laurel Canyon guitar, the lyrics ruminating the end of a relationship coinciding with the death of a cat. Lines like “One down, eight to go, but it’s no less true/ Doesn’t the last time come too soon?” are genuinely funny — and genuinely sad.
Album highlights include “Buddy’s Rendezvous,” a lament over a bed of jazzy horn reveries, while Tillman leans patiently into a few good phrases. “Q4” is an upbeat baroque number, an indictment of “airport autofiction” and trading human tragedy — ours and others’ — for capital and critical acclaim. It’s hard not to hear how a lyric like “the ironic distance kept her sane” reverberates against Tillman’s own artistic positioning.
The instrumentation and arrangements of Chloë recall the soundtracks and vistas of Carey-Grant-era Hollywood romantic thrillers. Like those scores, the music evokes past eras and moods — swing, big band, Western, jazz, Tin Pan Alley — but is conscientiously separate from “the real thing.” Tillman himself, as Father John Misty, often cuts a figure like that leading man, squinting in irony and pathos at the love interest and the camera. The cinematic scenes wrought here are not meant to be complete narratives; they are more like writer William Trevor’s definition of the short story: “the art of the glimpse… its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in.”
Album closer “The Next 20th Century” is the only song that does not obviously reference a past musical era, but it carries the scope and gravitas of the best late-career Dylan (another self-styled crooner). The meditation meanders through harsh industrial crescendos, a low-key bossa nova beat, and lyrical references to Nazis, Val Kilmer, and “jeembles” — personal slang Tillman’s used to describe his negative visceral reaction to the entertainment complex. The song, and album, is punctuated with a thesis that’s less an ethical statement than a momentary plea: “I don’t know bout you/ But I’ll take the love songs/ And give you the future in exchange.”
For all their evocations, the dreamscapes on Chloë are not actually nostalgic. Instead, the songs seem to underline the artist’s gallows humor at our collective doom, repeating various destructions of humanity — both on the scale of an endless century and every love affair.
Essential Tracks: “The Next 20th Century,” “Goodbye, Mr. Blue,” “Q4”
Catch Father John Misty on tour; tickets are available via Ticketmaster.
Essential Tracks:
Chloë and the Next 20th Century Album Artwork:
Father John Misty’s Chloë and the Next 20th Century: Doomed Love Songs For the Pseudo-Nostalgic
Katie Moulton
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