Equally homage and interpretation, a cover song references as much as it reimagines. Yesterday, for a few brief hours, Father John Misty (Joshua Tillman) shared his version of two tracks off Ryan Adams’ just-released version of Taylor Swift’s 1989. Yeah, it’s like the Russian nesting dolls of covers. Taking on "Blank Space" and "Welcome to New York", Tillman’s interpretations were less homage than tongue-in-cheek criticism, serving up wry commentary about the imbalance between surface and substance in endeavors like Adams’. Tillman’s two tracks roasted the surface-level sheen existent on Adams’ 1989, which is all very pretty, but lacking significance.
Arranged and performed in the style of the Velvet Underground—with a particularly spot-on impersonation of Lou Reed from Tillman—the songs transformed Swift’s exuberant and Adams’ wistful versions into derisive renditions. After all, Tillman is the man who describes himself as a "self-styled satirist, provocateur, philosopher, and culture warrior." Take for instance his song "Bored in the USA", which pokes the existential bear by critiquing the malaise and mindlessness pervading life in the 21st century.
If Tillman’s covers yesterday didn’t immediately signify mockery—one seemingly aimed more at Adams than Swift—the caption accompanying his "Blank Space" SoundClound upload cleared up any question. "My reinterpretation of the classic Ryan Adams album 1989," he wrote, his tone practically dripping with sarcasm, the word "classic" a jesting arrow aimed at Adams and the critical reception that will most likely build the project’s novelty into something archetypal.
Adams styled 1989 to sound like Bruce Springsteen-era Nebraska mixed with the Smiths. The result, Swift said in an interview, is less cover than complete reimagining, bringing a weighty musical history to the pop star’s already-praised album. What listeners got with Tillman’s versions—at least what they got for the few hours the songs were legally available—is honesty through artifice. Under Tillman’s thumb, "Welcome to New York" became a palimpsest, barely recognizable as the original Swift song save for the lyrics, thanks to his and his band’s uncanny ability to play it in the style of the Velvet Underground. The song even exceeds the original’s tight pop time limit by an additional two minutes due to a heady jam. Leave it to Tillman, then, to one up Adams’ attempt to mine the musical past by showing off his killer Lou Reed impression. It’s a Shakespearean move à la "I do bite my thumb, sir," though intended more for comedic effect than dramatic.
Performing as Father John Misty, Tillman has never pretended his onstage persona is anything other than an affected performance designed to achieve the very verbs he transitions into identities—satirize, provoke, philosophize, and fight the cultural plateau. Recall if you will his Spotify session, where he showed up with a mobile karaoke machine that played his newest releases as MIDI songs. He is both performing a character and a performance of a character: The smartass musician.
Where Tillman is willing to lampoon his own songs at his live shows, which includes trotting up and down the stage, posing in eccentric ways that accentuate his performance-as-performance, and snarking the lyrics to audiences, he appears to take great pains to perform covers with grace, delicacy, and care. Those who have seen Tillman perform the Beatles’ "Happiness Is a Warm Gun", one of his go-to encores during his Fear Fun tour, know how his playfulness quiets down when it comes to covers. That’s when the music fan emerges. He’s covered Leonard Cohen, Nirvana, Cat Stevens, and even Arcade Fire, an oeuvre of influences or at the very least admirations. He may still parade around the stage playing Misty during those moments, but there’s an underlying earnestness that doesn’t always surface when he’s performing his own music.
If psychotropics and their vision-inducing powers helped launch the spirit, if not the career, of Father John Misty then the musician’s most recent vision has silenced him. Kind of. After releasing his covers yesterday, Tillman removed the tracks from his SoundCloud account. In their place, he released a statement less an apology to Adams and/or Swift than one aimed at making amends with the ghost of Lou Reed.
Tillman recounts his most recent dream, involving Barack Obama, a Burger King crown, and the haunting strains of Beethoven’s "Ode to Joy" lingering against that very weird and very Misty-esque landscape. It’s vaguely reminiscent of a scene out of his first album Fear Fun, replete with an ayahuasca-level revelation. Lou Reed appears towards the end to scold Tillman, saying, "Delete those tracks, don’t summon the dead, I am not your plaything." Tillman may have leaned hard on Lou Reed to make his critical point, but he succeeded in creating a spectacle equal to the problem he addressed.
Whether listeners interpret Tillman’s "Blank Space" and "Welcome to New York" as mean-spirited or comical depends upon the ear, but they are deeper reimaginings of what it means to perform a cover, and what that cover can actually say within the greater cultural melee. It’s a reminder that not all that glitters is gold.