Father John Misty shares ‘Ballad of the Dying Man’ ahead of new album

With the wheels fully rolling, and brand new Father John Misty tracks cropping up here there and everywhere, Josh Tillman’s only gone and put out another!

The third preview of FJM’s new album follows on from ‘Two Wildly Different Perspectives’and title-track ‘Pure Comedy’. In typically cheery fashion, it’s called ‘Ballad Of The Dying Man,’ and as the title might perhaps suggest, it’s an emotive slow-burner.

Father John Misty’s new album ‘Pure Comedy’ is out on 7th April.

Tillman also gave a fairly entertaining interview to Beats 1, chatting to Zane Lowe. “I just knew I wanted to make something fundamentally different than anything I had made before, and so my life was gonna have to reflect a fundamental change too. A lot of the songs of the first two records were like, four in the morning, drunk in bed with pizza hanging out of my mouth,” Father John (more like Papa John’s, right?) told Zane.

He also managed to casually bring up the French philosopher Foucault, as you do, when discussing the political aspects of ‘Pure Comedy’. “There is something about Trump that — I mean, I have to choose my words carefully, but Foucault said it’s better to have a king because you can see the king coming at least, and then you can defend yourself and you can unlock an authentic form of defiance. And relating to the power structure that way, he thought, was more natural to the human disposition or experience or whatever. Fast forward to now, where the power structure is largely sending these messages of “be yourself,” “have fun,” “find something you’re passionate about,” “be an individual,” “be a rebel,” and those messages. When the power structure is telling you to rebel it makes it so it’s very difficult to have an authentic form of rebellion and it is in no way a good thing unless you take a really macro view. But in the day-to-day now, people are experiencing psychic trauma in a way that they probably haven’t in their life — they’re scared it’s like there’s an evil king. But it’s definitely clarifying, it brings everything into focus in a way that a more established form of politics allows us to get away with never really having to examine.”

There you go, then. The full interview airs at 3pm GMT today on Beats 1.

Digest that sudden bit of post-structuralist philosophy, and then listen to ‘Ballad of a Dying Man’ below.