First, the good news: Father John Misty revealed in an interview with NME (which you can watch below) that he’s already written the follow-up to his lauded album, I Love You, Honeybear. Then, the news that’s not necessarily bad, but just different: there’s no lyrical Love left for the Honeybear, so to speak. For, in the same interview, Josh Tillman declared:
No, I have no interest in writing about love anymore, for a while. I’m kind of worn out on that. I’m proud of it—I feel like for me it was an accomplishment. At the time that I undertook it, it felt so far out of my wheelhouse.
Fans of his last album will hopefully be able to come to terms with the idea that no one — not even Josh Tillman — can be expected to croon about one’s love of their spouse amidst the incessant woes of the human condition forever. He said, rather:
I feel like writing about intimacy afforded me a really unexpected level of clarity and kind of turning that perspective outward — that’s essentially what the next album is all about.
He then discusses his new material being more along the lines of “Holy Shit” (“Age-old gender roles/Infotainment, capital”) and “Bored in the USA” (“Save me President Jesus/I’m Bored in the USA”) — so it’s likely that what he meant by “turning that perspective outward” meant a greater focus on lambasting American consumerist signifiers, religion, and surely still, to a certain extent, himself. He also (jokingly…it seems, but you never know) revealed that the album after that is “pure vodka. Just the vodka album.” He concluded with his typical brand of unexpectedly jovial pessimism, saying, “at some point I’ll absolutely run out of juice. It happens to everybody… I’m sure there’s some horrible music from me on the horizon, but I’m not sure that’s just yet.”
Via Pitchfork.