Time won't make a fool of Father John Misty on the nihilistic but never despairing Mahashmashana

The world as we know it may be ending, but Father John Misty is feeling fine. He didn’t much like the world as it was anyway; he made that perfectly clear on the dozens of musings ranging from pensively existential (“I Went To The Store One Day“) to wholly nihilistic (“Total Entertainment Forever” et. al.) that made up the majority of his past five albums. But now, “after a decade being born, Josh Tillman (the bearded poet behind the FJM moniker) is finally dying,” as he wrote in the album notes accompanying his latest and most confident release thus far, Mahashmashana. For Tillman, the line between life and death has always been a bit fuzzy—living is an endless parade of psychological papercuts, and “time just makes fools of us all,” as he sings on the record’s penultimate track. But now, in choosing to stare headlong into the void, Tillman has finally freed himself from that absurd and endless cycle. What is there left to do but dance and sing with the corpses left behind? 

The folk rocker has long been fascinated with the miasma of modern life. “Eventually the dying man takes his final breath/But first checks his news feed to see what he’s ’bout to miss,” he sang on “Ballad Of The Dying Man” back in 2017. Unlike his last release, 2022’s curious Chloë And The Next 20th Century, a revue of “alternate-timeline American-songbook tunes” (according to the liner notes) about all our quotidian errs, Mahashmashana sees Tillman take a bird’s eye—or, one could argue, god’s eye—view on the whole mess. The songwriter has clearly latched onto some multi-denominational form of spirituality, one that’s allowed him to make tentative peace with the righteous cynicism that plagued him on previous outings like God’s Favorite Customer and Pure Comedy. This album and its opening track both take their name from the Sanskrit word for “great cremation ground” or “all things going thither,” as he explains in a press note. But while the people—the ones still being born—go to this anonymous Asphodel field, Father John Misty is living up to his name, positioning himself as a sort of unbiased preacher of the great beyond. 

Don’t take this passivity for indifference. Tillman’s aphorisms and X-acto knife turns of phrase are as sharp here as they’ve ever been. In the title track, he diagnoses a party dressing in “donor class panache,” and later name drops “Pynchon yuppies,” the “panopticon,” and even his own past work, singing “There’s no fun left to fear but/To Georgie it’s still Babylon.” What other songster out there could so gracefully stuff “the Anthropocene, an amnesiac, [and] a himbo Ken doll” into one passage, as Tillman does in “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools Of Us All”?

In the same standout track—a nearly nine-minute disco and cinematic-Western-tinged epic about the human condition that recalls Bright Eyes’ “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And To Be Loved)” from two decades prior—Tillman again turns the camera on himself: “Go and serve your client notice/That of all the young gods I have known/Yours is easily the least famous/To turn down the cover of The Rolling Stone.” That’s a real thing that actually happened to him, as he told Blackbird Spyplane this past October. In the same interview, he also shared that he’d experienced “a few non-elective ego deaths, where the self is receding” as the result of becoming a parent, a condition that certainly contributed to the meditative detachment he exhibits across the record, but especially on tracks like the funky string piece “Josh Tillman And The Accidental Dose” and the jazzy “Being You,” an ode to dissociation. 

If all these genres sound a bit dissonant, that’s because Father John Misty songs tend to create little celluloid worlds unto themselves. While they’re all united by the soaring, ’70s-esque big band arrangements that FJM tends to fall back on, the eight tracks on Mahashmashana, many of which cap out around the six-and-a-half minute mark, are no exception. Tillman gracefully flits from genuine (and fun!) grunge rock on “She Cleans Up” to old Hollywood strings on “Mental Health” to something that we can’t help but (lovingly) compare to a slightly more sardonic version of 30 Seconds To Mars’ “Kings And Queens” on “Screamland.” “Stay young/Get numb/Keep dreaming/Screamland,” he belts in the song’s chorus, perhaps his most lyrically unadorned to date. But while the stadium-ready rocker is a departure from Tillman’s usual fare, the style is commentary as much as anything else on this album. “The optimist swears hope dies last,” the song opens, transforming it from what could be read as an empty anthem into a primal scream for survival, no matter the emotional toll. 

In light of the current state of the world, Tillman’s pen may come to seem almost prophetic. “I know just how this thing ends/Man, I hope nobody messes with the wrong rejected men/I know just how this thing ends/Sure your politics are perfect with a gun aimed at your head,” he sings on “She Cleans Up.” That’s followed by another scorcher on “Josh Tillman And The Accidental Dose”: “A publicist and a celibate started talking politics/By a small degree she got them to admit/They’re tacit fascists/Without knowing it.” But if Mahashmashana seems oddly of the moment for an artist whose new project seems to be rejecting it completely, it’s only because Tillman is such a keen observer of social patterns, regardless of age or epoch. “But you can eat a peach/Or you can skin your knee/And time can’t touch/Me,” he leaves us. That might just be true.