Father John Misty live is anything but understated

I have no firsthand evidence that Father John Misty‘s ever done a low-key, small-scale performance. For one, I’ve never actually seen him in a venue as small as the one he’s seen playing “Chateau Lobby #4 (In C for Two Virgins)” in the first season of Master of None, nor did I ever catch him in his J. Tillman days. And by the time he released his 2012 debut Fear Fun, he was already playing Coachella and releasing videos with famous actors in them. Maybe he played a humble club show somewhere in there with no more than two or three backing musicians. There are a few YouTube videos of Tillman performing in a t-shirt, which admittedly creates a little more cognitive dissonance than I’m comfortable with, but when he showed up for a late-night performance of “Nancy From Now On” that same year, he invited an entire string section to share the stage with him.

So it provided a better sense of scale when, at a recent performance at The Anthem in Washington, D.C., Josh Tillman shared an anecdote about opening for “someone much more famous than I am,” as he put it, and wrestling every night with the audience’s interest or lack thereof.

Humbling though that experience must have been—and based on his sardonic and self-deprecating lyrics, it’d be far from the first humbling experience he’s had—Father John Misty’s Anthem show, as part of his tour behind the excellent new Mahashmashana, was anything but. When Tillman arrived with a seven-piece band behind him, the image of the large ensemble onstage made clear that we were in for a big production—and mind you, this is without the string section that accompanied him on the Pure Comedy tour.

Facing the audience in the tiered levels of what he described as looking like the Galactic Senate in Star Wars, Tillman was a requisite showman in a well-tailored suit, no graphic t-shirts anywhere near the stage. And after a relatively subdued, if dramatically effective introduction with 2012’s “Funtimes in Babylon,” he and his band took the show into high gear just four minutes in with a fiery and funky performance of groove odyssey “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All,” a song that’s spectacular in any context but which proved revelatory here. You run the risk of the rest of the show sliding downhill after a barnburner like that, but not Tillman—he’s too damn good at this to let something like that happen.

Tillman and company stacked the set full of longtime crowd-pleasers that make frequent appearances on FJM setlists, including “Nancy From Now On,” “I’m Writing a Novel,” “Chateau Lobby,” “Mr. Tillman” and closer “I Love You, Honeybear” (which was the opener when I caught him last in 2022). But it was the moments from his latest album—of which he and his band played the entirety throughout the evening—that left the biggest impact, their rich arrangements and stunningly written melodies marking a thrilling and ambitious new era for the singer/songwriter. There was a nocturnal magic in the starlit “Being You,” a triumphant majesty in the overtures of the title track, and a sense of Gainsbourgian drama to the climactic “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose.” You get the sense that songs like these certainly could work on a smaller scale, but if you have the means to deliver them in a presentation like this, why wouldn’t you?

In hindsight, every time I’ve seen Father John Misty, it’s seemingly been at a moment of personal change, worry or vulnerability. The last time I caught Tillman live, my wife and I were mourning the loss of our beloved cat of 15 years; the first time was at the beginning of the first act of our current moment of reality TV authoritarianism, complete with opening act Tim Heidecker singing songs about Trump in the style of Jimmy Buffett (though you couldn’t call it comedy per se). This year got off to an almost comically bad start for me, personally, and despite the best of intentions, pet surgery, citywide water outages and various other headaches made certain that 2025 kicked off with an overcorrection.

But as I stood, stunned, heart ready to burst from my chest as Tillman and company soared through the spiritual and existential catharsis of “Screamland”—a hymn for the losers and the lost (i.e. everyone) that’s even better live than its already-strong studio counterpart—somehow all seemed to realign, as if the clock had reset that night in that very room. I felt it all. That’s probably too much to pin on one performer. But if Father John Misty offered nothing more than a pleasant distraction, he damn well made it count.

Treble is supported by its patrons. Become a member of our Patreon, get access to subscriber benefits, and help an independent media outlet continue delivering articles like these.