“Give me five minutes,” Josh Tillman tells me, holding up his hand. “I’ve got to go write my drug-dealer a check for $600.”

Ten minutes later, he reports back to the green room as promised. Immediately heading for the refreshment table, he surprises me, opting for hot tea over the rum in the corner. He sits down, crosses his legs, and lets out a sigh of relief. It was just an hour before that Tillman, previously Fleet Foxes’ drummer, played his second show to a sold-out crowd under his new moniker, “Father John Misty.” Granted, that crowd consisted of just enough people to fill the Natural History Museum’s North room, but it is a promising start nonetheless.

Misty is the polar opposite of Tillman’s eponymous folk crooner. It took three years of balancing his time drumming with Fleet Foxes, and working on his J. Tillman solo career, for him to reevaluate his artistic identity. “I was reading a lot of weird shit at the time, my state of mind was just ready to explore on every level, professionally, personally.” So in 2011, ready to explore, he left Fleet Foxes and found himself on a shroom-induced road trip down the coast, eventually landing amongst the taxidermied mammals in this museum.

Tonight, sporting a new name and a new do, Misty took the stage, his deep voice echoing off the glass-encased wildlife scenes that lined the walls. He began with the upbeat, “I’m Writing a Novel,” a country-ish tune that pokes fun at the absurdity of Los Angeles egos. From his stage name, which he calls “patently ridiculous,” to his gyrating hips, it is clear that Los Angeles is not the only thing he cares to make light of. “You can tell just from talking with me for five minutes how funny I am,” he jokes. And with his shimmying hands and mid-set tambourine solo, you can tell from watching him too. 

As Tillman wound down with the slow-tempo rocker, “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings,” the concert faded to a close. Though his humor made a starring appearance, Tillman also reads as honest, relatable, and unabashedly exposed. His smooth vocals, virtually untouched on the album, proclaim: “Jesus Christ, girl, what are people going to think, when I show up to one of several funerals I’ve attended for grandpa this week, with you, with me. Someone’s got to help me dig.”

Later in the basement, surrounded by a makeshift beverage bar and cold chicken wings, Tillman jokes around, using the podium in the corner as a prop - it is clear that he has nothing to hide: “That’s why there’s so much sex in this music, that’s why there’s so much death. I want to address the human condition.” He spares no detail when describing his process of self-discovery, a journey in which he wrote a novel (an achievement he mocks with his lyrics, “because it’s never been done before”), recorded an album, and found his songwriting voice. “[It was a] total epiphany—a moment,” he says. “It’s embarrassing to say, but I was in Big Sur, I was naked, in a tree, on mushrooms.”

And what exactly did that epiphany tell him to do?

“Just write like you talk, that’s what songwriting is, you dumdum.”

Eleven tracks later an album emerged, with songs ranging from humorous numbers, to those like “Every Man Needs a Companion,” putting Tillman’s vulnerability on full display. After I ask him for one last pose by a 15^th century knight, Tillman happily obliges, plopping down next to the silver statue. He puts on his aviators and feigns ignorance to the camera situated just a foot from his face. “I always knew”, he says when I ask if he always wanted to be musician, “I was one of those poetry writing fourth graders who painted on my walls as a kid”.

After his years of construction jobs, chart-topping success, and seven obscure solo albums, it seems that Josh Tillman, among these stuffed animals and historical scenes, is finally where he should be.

Written by Rachel Ellison