Alphabetical Order: Father John Misty - 'I Love You, Honeybear'
An album that deeply understands what it feels like to love at the end of the world.
Welcome to ZERO CRED, the only music newsletter ever to exist. Alphabetical Order is a project where I go through my record collection and try to make sense of my life, from A to Z. This entry is admittedly a bit sappier than usual. Apologies. Subscribe for free. Or upgrade to a paid membership for just a buck a month during this month’s limited-time deal.
I was dreaming that I had to eat the biggest hot dog in the world or I would die for some reason. I was chewing and chewing when KG whisper-shouted, “What is that? DAN WHAT IS THAT?!”
I heard the picture frames rattling against our bedroom walls and I heard our window blinds clacking together above our heads. I snapped out of my dream and left the big hot dog behind. I could feel her panicking in bed next to me so I rolled over and laid flat on top of her like we were two pancakes. I squeezed her arms down tight and pressed my forehead against hers. We call this squozing.
I said baby it’s ok. It’s an earthquake but it’s alright. The walls clanged around us and I could feel her heartbeat against my chest while I looked into her eyes which were so so so so wide. Then everything stopped. See? Everything is ok now. Everything is fine.
I wasn’t this calm during earthquakes before we started dating. They freaked me out if I’m being honest. I wasn’t raised on the west coast so I’m still not sure what to do when they happen. I’m supposed to duck under a door frame, I think. Or maybe I’m supposed to avoid door frames? Run outside. Or is it stay indoors? The first time it happened, I heard my dishes clinking and as soon as I realized what was going on I opened the front door and screamed ahhhhhhhh! in the general direction of outside until it stopped. That’s how I handled earthquakes when I was alone.
Same thing with airplane turbulence. Never liked that either. The plane would get bumpy on solo trips and I’d start to sweat and then have to white-knuckle the rest of the flight. “Sorry,” I would say to the confused stranger next to me when the plane dropped and I clenched the armrest. One time I accidentally grabbed the forearm of the guy in the middle seat. Just for a second. “Sorry!” He was not understanding at all.
But the scariest thing in the world was my phone. I’d start scrolling through stories about the rise of right-wing militia groups or the decrease in drinkable water and spiral out. A new study just reported that scientists believe Earth is facing irreversible collapse sooner than originally believed. Even sooner than the last time they released a report that said that. Fuck.
Another group of historians looked at the facts and decided America no longer technically qualifies as a democracy. Like, officially now.
A billionaire made another billion dollars by inventing a new app that turns pain into suffering.
The Supreme Court ruled against something I didn’t fully understand but it sounded bad.
And here’s a graph where the line is going the wrong way. It’s supposed to be going the other way. The direction it’s currently going is not good.
Oh and that one AI image I made of my friend getting wedgied by Austin Powers and Shrek used so much energy that it probably killed an acre of trees in the rainforest so that sucks. I gotta live with that now.
Rising prices and food shortages and genocides and so on and so forth. This will all happen in my lifetime or is already happening right now. One million problems in the world and I am but one small instrument.
Two years ago I fell in love with KG and it didn’t fix any of the one million problems but it did make everything less scary. I realized how much fear comes from the feeling of being out of control and helpless. I still wasn’t in control over any of the world’s problems but at least I had a purpose now. I could lay on top of KG like a pancake whenever the bad things happened and tell her everything was going to be ok.
In January we were checking our phones constantly because our city was one giant bad thing. Los Angeles was on fire and we were sitting in our apartment with our bags packed in case we had to evacuate. And then we did. A new fire started down the road. I went outside to look and oh fuck there it was. A giant haze of orange. I tried to keep KG from seeing it but it was too late. She saw it and froze.
We started driving across town. The power was out on most of the streets and none of the traffic signals worked. The wind had blown huge branches into the street. We tried to get on the highway but an entire tree was blocking the entrance.
KG pointed at a dumpster that had blown into the street and said oh my god. Then she pointed at power lines that had fallen and said oh my god. Her hands started to shake so I said in the calmest voice, “Hey, don’t worry about it. You’re doing great.” Like driving through the apocalypse was the most normal thing in the world. “Everything is fine and I love you. Do you think you’ll want dinner later? Should we see if Taco Bell is still open?”
We slept at a friend’s house that night with our phones under our pillows in case it got worse. When we woke up our phones said that the fire had been put out and we could return home. That night after KG went to sleep I went on the internet and ordered her an engagement ring because I decided that we were never going to feel scared or alone again.
Truth be told my favorite song of all time is probably “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes. Everything about it is just so simple. There’s not a lot of depth or nuance in the lyrics, just one person saying to another person hey I love you and we should be together. Except it’s even simpler than that. It’s just three words: Be my baby.
Phil Spector doubled and even tripled up on instruments in the recording sessions to make the song sound as blunt as its message. That way, even when it was blaring out of the tinny speakers of an AM radio or a jukebox, the feeling of love would still hit the listener at full force.
But the world of “Be My Baby” doesn’t exist anymore. Or maybe we’re still living in that world but the walls are caving in around us. Everything is darker and more complicated now. Nothing feels as simple as what Ronnie Spector was singing about. There is still a timelessness to the song, but nothing about it feels current. It doesn’t feel like modern love. It doesn’t feel like loving someone in the middle of a fire.
If I had to pick an album that does capture the feeling of love in the hell world, it’d be Father John Misty’s I Love You, Honeybear. Like Phil Spector, Father John a.k.a. Josh Tillman has also described the arrangements on Honeybear as walls of sound. But his maximalist approach wasn’t because he wanted to overwhelm the listener with unabashed feelings of love the way Spector did. The opposite, actually. Tillman wanted to mask his sincerity under countless layers of instrumentation, a coverup for how fucking embarrassing it is to publicly celebrate your love in the End Times. His wife Emma once explained: “He started making these love songs into these huge crashing, sonically aggressive arrangements. It was sort of like he was hiding behind those arrangements for fear of being perceived as sentimental.”
Tillman hits the listener with the kitchen sink in the first few seconds of the titular opening track. String section, pianos, acoustic guitars, everything. “I can deal with how vulnerable or exposed this shit is by gooping it with impenetrable arrangements,” he once said. “If I put 100 instruments on top of this song, I can live with it.”
But buried below all these layers is a portrait of two misanthropes holding hands at the end of the world. There’s a romantic cynicism in the lyrics that I’m drawn to. Or maybe it’s a cynical romanticism. Tillman understands the rot and decay that plagues the world but is still able to appreciate the magic and wonder that endures in spite of it. “For me, love is more about having a partner with which to try to reconcile these two things,” he has explained. “It’s about having this other person with whom you try to make sense of this fucking chaotic horror show that is the human experience.”
Throughout “I Love You, Honeybear,” Tillman alludes to the global market crashing and death filling the streets. But even though there is a looming spectre of total societal collapse, there is also a sense that he and his wife are somehow above it all, safely watching as it unfolds below. Like their love makes them invincible and they will be the only ones spared. They are “garden-variety oblivious” to everything. At one point, they outright cheer it on.
Fuck the world, damn straight malaise
It may be just us who feel this way
Even the title is a sarcastic wink at the duality of apocalyptic love. It is so overly sappy that it rides a cliché so hard that it comes out clean on the other end of postmodern irony. Ha ha wouldn’t it be funny if we called each other honeybear? In this climate? Can you even imagine? That would be so funny wouldn’t it honeybear?
Everything is fine
Don’t give into despair
‘Cause I love you, honeybear
Here’s the weird thing about love: It is the most universal thing in the world but everyone experiences it slightly differently. Maybe some people can hear this song and feel nothing. Maybe they think it’s boring or pretentious. Maybe they hear other songs by other artists and those sound more like love to them. And that’s fine. There’s no wrong answer here. But for me, the way I feel about love fits into the space of this one song. In fact, I could probably boil it down to these two lines:
Don’t ever doubt this, my steadfast convictions
My love, you’re the one I want to watch the ship go down with
When KG and I did the most intimate thing two people can do (merge record collections), we realized we now had two copies of Honeybear on our shelves (gatefold LP for me, Record Store Day exclusive heart-shaped red vinyl for her). We have always said we would get married to “I Love You, Honeybear” one day. We laughed about how funny it would be to make our friends and family dance to a song with the word cum in it. We joked about it but we were so serious.
A month ago KG and I were in Paris and I wouldn’t shut up about photobooths. I kept telling her about a company that restores and rebuilds vintage analog photobooths and installs them around the city. I showed her picture after picture of photobooths on my phone and said we had to go to this one and we had to go to that one. She said we could visit whatever photobooth I wanted if I just shut up about it already.
So after dinner we walked up rue des Trois Frères as the sun was setting. There was a photobooth built into a wall off the sidewalk there that may or may not be the photobooth from the movie Amélie. We waited for the three teenage French girls ahead of us to take their photos and then it was our turn.
“Do one by yourself first and then I’ll join you,” I told KG. “You know like for fun?”
KG took a seat in the booth and closed the curtain behind her. I watched the flash hit her bare knees and I counted between each one.
Flash. One… two… three… four… five. Flash.
Five seconds between flashes. This was important. I kept repeating it to myself. Five seconds five seconds five seconds five seconds.
Then I crammed into the booth with her. We never know how to pose for these things. She sat on my lap and I covered her eyes with my hand all goofy style and we waited for the first photo.
Flash.
Okay.
One… two…
I held up the ring box in front of her and opened it.
Three… four…
I moved my hand away from her face and the camera flashed again. The photo captured the exact moment she first saw the ring. There is a glimmer in her eye. I always thought that was just an expression they made up for jewelry commercials but there it was. An actual glimmer. The photostrip cost six euros but I would have gladly paid $10,000 for this one photo.
Her eyes sparkled and she said holy shit are you serious are you fucking serious seriously you’re fucking serious right now?
This is when I was supposed to say the thing but I couldn’t remember what it was. It’s a line that’s been said in every movie and TV show in history so I should’ve been ready with it. But I froze. All I could get out was…
Will you?
I wish I could have said more than that because I wanted to tell her about all of it. About how scary it is to live on a dying planet and how there’s nothing either of us can do about it. About how the universe is like a huge cosmic dog and we’re just delicate little fleas that could be shaken off at any moment. And about how no matter how bad it got I would always lay on top of her like a pancake until everything was ok. But I only had five seconds so that’s all that came out.
Will you?
The camera flashed again.
She said, “Yes! Yes! Quick put it on me!” I said sorry sorry sorry it’s my first time.
I slipped the ring onto her finger and she didn’t stop looking at it for the rest of the night. We walked three miles back to our hotel, past Sacré Coeur and down Montmartre. Over the hilltop that overlooks the twinkling lights of the entire city. Past the cafes and bistros where people talked and sipped wine from glasses. Past the chain link fence where thousands of couples had immortalized their love by attaching a lock with their initials on it. These were the most gorgeous views in the world but she didn’t see any of it. All she did was look down at the ring. She said it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
When we got back to our hotel we got into our bathrobes. Our room didn’t have a stereo so I pulled up our song on my phone and let it play through its speaker while I squozed her and we slow danced. We both chuckled when Father John said the word cum and we knew why. It was our joke but it was going to be real soon.
We swayed back and forth to the music like it belonged to only us and nobody had ever heard it. Like there was no one else in the world at that moment. I could feel her ring against my neck when she reached up to put her arms around me. The song sounded so tinny but we could still feel the full force of it.
My love, you’re the one I want to watch the ship go down with.
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Dan, that was so beautiful I cried! I'm so happy for you two!!
I missed this when you first posted it, but I'm glad I caught it in the clip show (guess that's what they're for!). I fucking hate Father John Misty, but this made me tear up a little. Congrats to you both and hope everything goes as smoothly as it can at the wedding!