Father John Misty Brings Full Orchestra for ‘Seth Meyers’ Performance
Father John Misty performed his grandiose orchestral ballad “Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution” Tuesday on Late Night With Seth Meyers.
A stoic-looking Josh Tillman transformed into his warped crooner persona – often singing his satirical, post-apocalyptic lyrics in a tender falsetto as his massive band crescendoed with brass, strings and guitars.
“Revolution” appears Pure Comedy, Father John Misty’s third LP. Last month, Tillman released the song’s vivid yet depressing stop-motion video, in which a nomad wanders through an abandoned city littered with blown-up cars and decrepit buildings.
In a sit-down Late Night interview, Tillman spoke to Meyers about how he conceived his Pure Comedy tour as a since-aborted musical – and how he decided to nix that idea during an awkward plane ride with the production’s already-hired choreographer.
“I don’t know what it was about this, but she was like, ‘So this scene where the girl scouts are sexually assaulting Mother Earth, what is this about?'” he said. “And I was like, ‘Give me one second. I gotta go smoke.’ Turns out you can’t smoke on a plane, so I went to the bathroom and emailed my manager and was like, ‘This is not good. By the time I’d finished writing [the musical], it resembled something that should be scrawled on cardboard and held by a transient on the side of the road [more] than a musical.”