Album Of The Week: Father John Misty I Love You, Honeybear

Father John Misty left a successful band and invented a whole new persona just so he could get away from the idea of cliche. And then he fell in love, the biggest cliche of all. FJM is, of course, Josh Tillman, a young man who escaped a fundamentalist Christian upbringing in suburban Maryland to spend his '20s working low-paying jobs and releasing sincere, downtrodden folk album after sincere, downtrodden folk album. Somewhere in there, he joined Fleet Foxes as the band's drummer. For a moment, he felt like he was saved. But then he began to feel like he was doing just another mechanical job and not being true to himself. So he split from the band, moved to Laurel Canyon by himself and reinvented himself as a louche, slithering Leisure Suit Larry take on the '70s singer-songwriter archetype. There was a psychedelic-shaman element to all of this; all the (very good) FJM profiles this week have noted that he came up with the idea for his artistic rebirth while on an ayahuasca trip. But the motivating force behind FJM's 2012 re-debut album Fear Fun -- or the one that lingered with me the most, anyway -- was the acidic self-awareness of it all. He couldn't just be a man with an acoustic guitar expressing himself; he had to sneer at the entire institution of men with acoustic guitars expressing themselves: "I'm writing a novel because it's never been done before." But around the same time he made Fear Fun, Tillman met a woman named Emma in the parking lot of a hippie-ish Laurel Canyon grocery store. They got married. And now he's left with the question of how to address something as life-changing as the act of falling in love -- something that's been so corrupted by hack songwriting -- and make that experience feel vivid and alive and new. Somehow, he did it. I Love You, Honeybear is an uncomfortable wriggle of an album, one packed with sardonic doublespeak and bad faith. But it's also a deeply felt, beautifully realized piece of work about what happens when two people build a life together.