Father John Misty - Fear Fun

Josh Tillman shed his solo-folkie skin and became Father John Misty on this 2012 breakthrough, a woozy, wickedly funny song cycle written after he decamped to a spider-infested Laurel Canyon treehouse, dropped acid, and started writing a novel in his head. Released on Sub Pop, the album marked a total reinvention, trading his Fleet Foxes day job and a string of quiet solo folk records for something looser, funnier, and far more theatrical.

Co-produced with LA songwriter and frequent collaborator Jonathan Wilson and mixed by Phil Ek, Fear Fun drew on the ghosts of Laurel Canyon's own songwriting tradition while filtering it through Tillman's specific brand of hedonism and self-aware wreckage. "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings" and "Nancy From Now On" set the template for the sardonic, orchestral folk-rock Tillman would spend the next decade refining, while opener "Funtimes in Babylon" remains one of the most quietly devastating album openers of the 2010s, funny and bleak in the same breath.

Fear Fun still holds up as one of the defining singer-songwriter records of its decade, the moment an artist previously known for hushed, straightforward folk revealed a far stranger and more ambitious persona underneath. It set the stage for everything Father John Misty would become, sharp-tongued, orchestral, and impossible to pin down.

This vinyl LP pressing brings Tillman's transformation to wax, a great entry point for anyone tracing Father John Misty's evolution from the very beginning.