I Love You, Honeybear

For all the layers of irony on I Love You, Honeybear, the biggest irony of all might be that such an ostensibly knotty and confusing album’s real strength lies in something as prosaic and transparent as its author’s ability to write a beautiful melody.

The lyrics are brilliant and subtle.

A messy, extravagant, astonishing, beguiling and honest experience: that’s love, and that’s also what I Love You, Honeybear is. Just magnificent.

With a welcoming tenor and a likeably schmaltzy delivery that finds him displaying loads of range and emotions, he’s able to give his subject matter the unforgiving and ultimately warm treatment it deserves.

Tillman’s writing, already literate and caustically funny, has progressed as well as his arrangements.

It’s the sort of album that even repeated listenings can throw up a myriad of surprises: you never really get to know who the character of Father John Misty is (is he a self-hating misogynist, is he a sage or is he just a simple romantic?), but it’s clear that Josh Tillman has slowly turned into one of the most talented songwriters of our age.

I Love You, Honeybear, despite the occasional double entendre, is as powerful a statement about love in the vacuous, social media-obsessed early 21st century as it is a denouement of the detached hipster charlatan.

Tillman becomes one of the great diarists of our generation in Honeybear, possessing a keen, merciless intelligence within a sophisticated melodic sensibility.

If Tillman's this brilliantly pointed as a paramour, we're scared to hear the breakup album.

A brilliant album certainly not lacking in other highlights.

It's a rare fulfillment of outsized ambition and a crystallization of Tillman's inimitable narrative verve, however unreliable his narrator may be.

Written around the time Tillman got hitched to this girlfriend, it's a hugely ambitious, caustically funny album about the redemptive possibilities of love, and being heartily sick of your own bullshit.

Bored is one of 11 songs on I Love You, Honeybear, an album by turns passionate and disillusioned, tender and angry, so cynical it's repulsive and so openhearted it hurts.

I Love You, Honeybear is the rare love letter that manages to capture all the ugly, bitter sides to a relationship, the angles covered in shadow and hidden behind front doors, because it understands that these are the moments that make up a full and fulfilling relationship between two people with issues and histories and feelings that are more often awful and conflicted than not.

It’s a little too steeped in irony, not without tenderness, flippant but consternated, self-satisfied yet hungry for more, eager to expose the world’s duplicities alongside its own and then do nothing about it.

Sonically, Honeybear finds Tillman in a ruminative mood, favoring lavish strings, sweeping layers of voices and acoustic guitars. But he still has a knack for unexpected flourishes.

Musically, Honeybear is more polished effort than Fear Fun, with more production and horns to fill out the songs and an even bigger experimental streak. [No. 117, p.56]

There are grand arrangements and barbed bon mots in the style of Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, but what's most striking are the more restrained moments. [Mar 2014, p.94]

It never rests and never tires.

This warped, lovely album suggests that a true longtime partnership isn’t two people who love each other even for their flaws, but of two people accepting decay--their own and each other’s--and choosing to ride it out nonetheless.

If there's a funnier, stranger and more touchingly bizarre album released this year, it will be a very good year indeed.

I Love You, Honeybear is actually an album that reaffirms your faith in the transformative powers of love.

Upping the spectacle from Fun Fear his 2012 debut, I Love You, Honeybear is an autobiographical set about love, marriage and derangement that's both ironic and empathic.

Still, for all his determination to thumb his nose at convention, I Love You, Honeybear finds Tillman falling face first into perhaps the most expected of musical tropes: the “mature” sophomore release.

Honeybear is rich with sarcasm, flagrant in some places and barely discernable in others. It is impossible to take seriously, but too damn compelling to be dismissed.

The finest album of Tillman’s career to date, it should have the staying power to make the end-of-year lists.

For its black lyrical humour alone, I Love You, Honeybear would be a winner. The fact that it's matched to towering songwriting makes it masterful stuff. [Mar 2015, p.107]

Co-produced again with Jonathan Wilson, the album bristles with richness and bespoke detail. [Mar 2015, p.70]

Song for song, I Love You, Honeybear outdoes its predecessor, Fear Fun, in nearly every way. [Nov-Dec 2014, p.64]

You're inclined to not like the too-self-aware man of I Love You, Honeybear, rejecting his moodiness because you can't stand another white man taking himself so fucking seriously. Then again, making fun of him is just falling into his trap.

Misty's music cushions some of his most outrageous observations in plush wordless harmonies, strings and orchestral-pop melodies, sometimes to a point where he melts into background music.

Like its overall theme of love, Honeybear can be as intoxicating as it is messy. But given the rewards, it’s totally worth the plunge.