I Love You Honeybear Analysis

Josh Tillman, a.k.a. Father John Misty, is a man who sees himself as a kind of modern day prophet for skepticism and cynicism. One would be hard-pressed to find a more unique, modern musician. He carries himself with a kind of raw, mountain-man type crudity, which is then manifested in his violently honest and intelligent lyrics. Specifically in reference to his latest album, ‘I Love You, Honeybear,’ one finds an honest, self-aware, yet pervasively cynical Tillman. The anti-hero in a love album which is decidedly an anti-love album.

Throughout ‘Honeybear’, Tillman finds himself wrestling with his honeymoon-like feelings, dreams, desires, and his cynical attitude toward the world and all who occupy it. “Everything is doomed, and nothing will be spared, but I love you, honeybear” he bellows in the album’s opening track. In a sense, this could be seen as a partial thesis for the album. Nowhere does Tillman shy away from the darkness or difficulty of relationship that was ostensibly the foundation for his cynicism. Towards the end of the song he moans: “I brought my mother’s depression, you’ve got your father’s scorn, and a wayward aunts schizophrenia. But everything is fine, don’t give into despair, cause I love you honeybear.” It

is this juxtaposition of his love and his cynicism which is pervasive throughout the whole of the album: “Oh, and love is just an institution based on human frailty, what’s your paradise gotta do with Adam and Eve? Maybe love is just an economy based on resource scarcity, what I fail to see is what that’s gotta do with you and me.”
However, this is entirely the key.

This is the posture of ‘Honeybear,’ an overtly self-aware man infuriated by his normative, human feelings for another person which are entirely cliché. As seen in The Ideal Husband, Tillman does not hesitate to remind us how he feels about these feelings: “I came by at seven in the morning I said, ‘Baby, I’m finally succumbing’ said something dumb like ‘I’m tired of running, tired of running’” Even when he is proud, he finds his relationship characterised by negative feelings which he assigns the utmost of importance: “I haven’t hated all the same things as somebody else since I remember.” He seems to revel in this cynical conception of relationships that is built upon mutual disdain instead of mutual

love.
This kind of banality can only be balanced out by his self-aware, “honest feelings.” The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apt is just one example of this: “Of the few main things I hate about her, one’s her petty vogue ideas, someone’s been told too many times they’re beyond their years” Additionally, this kind of honest questioning is found in the album’s single, Bored In The USA: “Now I’ve got a lifetime to consider all the ways I grow more disappointing to you as my beauty warps and fades, I suspect you feel the same. When I was young I dreamt of a passionate obligation to a roommate. Is this the part where I get all I ever wanted? Who said that? Can I get my money back?”
Lastly, his desire to be so objective, to be entirely outside of himself to inspect his feelings, is predominant. He is constantly trying to be cynical. This is particularly highlighted in what is perhaps the albums most amusing line: “She says, like literally, music is the air she breathes, and the malaprops make me want to fucking scream. I wonder if she even knows what that word means. Well, it’s literally not that.” There is also a sort of elitism found in his understanding of his relationship, as opposed to everyone else’s: “People are boring, but you’re something else completely, let’s take our chances, I wanna take you in the kitchen, life up your wedding dress someone was probably murdered in, so bourgeoisie to keep waiting, dating for twenty years just feels pretty civilian.”
His love is almost a rebellion against love’s status quo. Other people do things because they are “boring” or because they are part of the “bourgeoise,” but Tillman and Emma are something else entirely. They are alone and they are the only ones who are “really” in love.
‘Carrie & Lowell’
Sufjan Stevens grew up in Oregon and Michigan. Unlike Tillman, though his family was not specifically religious, Stevens found himself gravitating towards Christianity at a fairly young age. Throughout his career, he as interwoven Christian doctrine, story and other forms of mythology which brilliantly express his ideas of the world. On his latest album, ‘Carrie & Lowell’ he finds himself grappling with the death of his mother. His relationship with her was incredibly complicated. As an alcoholic, a drug addict, and a diagnosed bipolar and schizophrenic, she left her family when Stevens was five years old. Afterwards, Stevens’ interactions with his mother were scarce and intermittent. Most of the imagery from the album comes from the little time that he had with his mother during summer vacations spent in Oregon with his mother and her second husband.
One would expect an album filled with such vague imagery and seemingly random allusions to his childhood that only he could interpret to be an overtly impersonal and foggy exploration of grief. However, nothing could be farther from the truth. What we, as an audience, are given is an intensely personal and revealing experience. An experience that causes some to squirm and cringe because of its posture.
There is a wrestling with the surreality of his loss—Death With Dignity—but there is also a fight, a reprimand of his feelings in the second track Should Have Known Better: “My black shroud, holding down my feelings, a pillar for my enemies”; “I never trust my feelings, I waited for the remedy”; “Frightened by my feelings, I only wanna be a relief” and finally, “I should have wrote a letter explaining what I feel, that empty feeling.” However, as with many Sufjan songs, there is a turning point. Near the end, the melody changes to a kind of refrain. Instead of the self-rebuking, there is a movement towards an evolution: from the inevitable pointlessness of life to an “illumination”: “Don’t back down: concentrate on seeing the breakers in the bar, the neighbour’s greeting. My brother had a daughter, the beauty that she brings, illumination.”
Additionally, there is space in his grief for absence. In other words, where many might offer up a theodicy, there is no sense of explanation, only room for peace to invade. This is accomplished by means of the instrumental breaks throughout the album, but most effectively in the fourth track, Drawn To The Blood. Through the song, Stevens takes upon a Job-like character: “For my prayer has always been love, what did i do to deserve this?” Ultimately, the lyrics, the prayers in the song end abruptly after he appeals to the divine, “What did I do to deserve this now? How did this happen?” Immediately as the last question rolls off of his tongue, an instrumental epilogue interrupts by means of a divine presence. It is almost as if God himself jumps to the scene to comfort him. The father in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son is immediately brought to mind. A man who sees his beloved suffering so he runs out to him and embraces him. This expression of the ineffable peace of God is so humble, so open to skeptics to criticise, so personal and subjective to what may be his actual experience, or maybe just his desired experience.
Eventually, Stevens comes to realise that, as much as he still believes in the truth of Christ, there is “No Shade In The Shadow Of The Cross.” Sufjan sings in the final stanza of the song desperately and painfully, “There’s blood on that blade; fuck me I’m falling apart. My assassin like Casper the ghost, there’s no shade in the shadow of the cross.” Stevens explained that after his mother died, he went through a sort of delayed teenaged rebellion (he is now in his late thirties) in order to feel close to his mother.
In a sense, this song flies parallel to something C.S. Lewis experienced in his short book A Grief Observed when he states, “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.” If there is shade in the shadow of the cross, then its impact fails to cover his pain. There is no consolation in Jesus, only more misery.
This is where we get to a very poignant example of the posture that Sufjan Stevens is modelling. Similar to Tillman, there is a potent honesty. When the album opens with Death With Dignity, the first lines are: “Spirit of my silence I can hear you, but I’m afraid to be near you, and I don’t know where to begin.” He continues remarking of the surreality of the experience of grief: “Amethyst and flowers on the table, is it real or a fable?” He is not pretending to be comforted when he is not, he is confused, so intoxicated with grief that his world feels fake. This kind of naked honestly is prevalent throughout the album, however, what differentiates Sufjan’s posture with Tillman’s?