Album of the Week: Father John Misty I Love You, Honeybear

With love songs as ubiquitous as they are these days, particularly since we're staring down the barrel of another Valentine's Day as I write this, it's easy to not give them a lot of thought. For most people it's enough to have a beautiful turn of phrase and lovely melody and that's about it.

Father John Misty (real name Josh Tillman) is not one of those people.

Listening to his new album I Love You, Honeybear (and reading his delightful album notes and instructions for listening, which you can do here) it's clear he spent a lot of time thinking about love songs – the bullshit clichés that get recycled over and over, the melodramatic narratives and over indulgent sonicscapes.

On Honeybear, Tillman takes all these aspects of love songs and bends them to his hilarious, warped, and ultimately human will.

In his notes Tillman admits the album sounds a bit like Scott Walker, Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, and Dory Previn, but when I listen (which I have been doing incessantly) I hear early Tom Waits (circa ClosingTime and The Heart of Saturday Night, specifically). There's the same biting humor, the same hidden romance and lush orchestration that made those early recordings so swooningly romantic, even at their bitterest.

The strings are the most prominent instruments on Honeybear (outside of Tillman's rock-you-back vocals, which I'll get to in a moment) and they are used to brilliant effect, from channeling mariachi music on "Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)" to adding subtle depths to "I Went To The Store One Day." Tillman said he found a way to make Honeybear sound both dense and spacious, and the use of strings is how he does it.

The real star of the show here is the lyrics and the way Tillman delivers them. The guy was a member of Fleet Foxes – a band that made a name for itself in large part due to the gorgeous waterfall of harmonies they created – so he knows how to lay you out flat with his voice. Just listen to the way he calls out his lyrics when all the music drops out on "Strange Encounter" or the way he howls out his faults on "Ideal Husband." From a tears-in-beers weeper like "Nothing Good Ever Happens At The Goodamn Thirsty Crow" to the Passion Pit-esque electronica of "True Affection," Tillman has figured out how to use his voice in just the right way, no matter what the song is.

What reminds me most of Waits (one of the most literary of rockers) on Honeybear are Tillman's lyrics. Each song reads like a David Foster Wallace or John Updike novel in four -minutes or less – so specific to his experiences and yet so relatable to the listener. In his notes he writes that before working on the album, he never really knew how to write a love song. Once he started in on it, however, he wanted to get rid of clichés when talking about self-doubt, romantic inadequacies and the state of the world.

You can hear this desire clearest on "When You're Smiling and Astride Me," a song so fucking gorgeous that I had to hit pause to take it in after listening for the first time. The way he works both sex and fear together on lines like " When you're smiling and astride me/I can hardly believe I've found you and I'm terrified by that" is startling in its clarity. The extra heft he gives the word "smiling" when he sings it can break you if you let it.

You can hear this desire in the LOL-worthy way he bitches about his lady's pretentiousness on "The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apartment": "She says, like literally, music is the air she breathes/ And the malaprops make me want to fucking scream/I wonder if she even knows what that word means/Well, it's literally not that." Two verses later he blasts the silly black culture appropriation that has been doing on for ages: "We sang 'Silent Night' in three parts which was fun/Till she said that she sounds just like Sarah Vaughan/I hate that soulful affectation white girls put on/Why don't you move to the Delta?" It's Bob Dylan's "Positively 4thStreet" for the Vine generation.

You can hear this desire in "Bored in the USA," a biting look at the ways modern America lets its population down that would make Randy Newman proud. The laugh track he lays under the second half of the song is a little on the nose, but his observations like, " How many people rise and think/'Oh good, the stranger's body's still here/Our arrangement hasn't changed?'" are so poignant you can forgive anything. Yes, he's cribbing Springsteen's melody from "Born in the USA" for the chorus, but his laments to be saved by "White Jesus" boil down religious fanaticism in America to a punchline – no small feat. (Let's take a second to appreciate the fact that "Born in the USA" is actually about a Vietnam veteran getting screwed over by his country once he returns from the war. I think Tillman's use of one of Springsteen's most misunderstood songs for this track is inspired. End aside.)

Truthfully, you can hear this desire on every song here, but the most devastating one-two punch comes on the last two: "Holy Shit" and "I Went To The Store One Day." They're both the most straight forward folk songs on Honeybear, and also the simplest – all finger-picked acoustic guitars and glittering strings.

"Holy Shit" is about how fucked up the world is, how the chaos impacts our daily life and he explores the effects of these two ideas to devastating results. The way Tillman marries the despair in lyrics like "Oh, and no one ever knows the real you and life is brief/So I've heard, but what's that gotta do with this atom bomb and me?" to the hope of "Maybe love is just an economy based on resource scarcity/What I fail to see is what that's gotta do with you and me?" is simply astounding.

"I Went To The Store One Day" has to be the most romantic thing Tillman has ever recorded, and the simple way he describes meeting his wife Emma (the inspiration for the album) is stunning, but what makes the song stand out is the directness. Up to this point, Tillman had buried his romance beneath an avalanche of nonchalance and incrimination, both of his partner and himself. Here, he lets love be pure – " For love to find us of all people/I never thought it be so simple." After an album of questions and doubt, to arrive at a point where he can write that with such honesty, that's a major achievement. Ending the album with the first thing he said to his wife, "'Seen you around, what's your name?'" eloquently sums up the man he has become in the process.

Shakespeare wrote "The course of true love never did run smooth" and Tillman takes listeners on his intensely personal journey on that course on I Love You, Honeybear. By immersing the listener in the intimate and interpersonal, he's created something bigger than himself – a portrait of love in the modern age. It's a wonder.

I Love You, Honeybear is out on Bella Union.