Happy 10th Anniversary to Father John Misty’s Fear Fun, originally released April 30, 2012.

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Weird that this is Father John Misty’s most fun album, isn’t it?

Before we had Love Is Cosmically Complicated (2015), The Social Contract Is Dead (2017), Ten Ways I Am Sad (2018), and Everything Is Bad, Always Has Been, And Always Will Be (With Strings) (2022), we had this debut set of ditties: some groovy tunes that aren’t yet groaning with the weight of the universe.

Fear Fun (2012) was J. Tillman’s debut as Father John Misty, the record where he shunned the sparsely quiet aesthetic of J. Tillman in favor of, well, whatever it is he’s doing now. While some of that early J. Tillman material is good (I really like “If I Get To The Borderline,”) it’s insular and moody. In his newfound persona as Father John Misty, Tillman found a way to separate himself from his personal gloom and let loose. It worked for exactly one album: Fear Fun. After this point, he started combining the existential dread of the earlier work with the oddball egocentric persona that he had pioneered on this record. Fear Fun, then, is right before that tipping point.

To be fair, there is dread and future-trademark Misty self-loathing on this record. Album opener “Funtimes in Babylon” features an airy melody that charts Misty’s foray into the amoral bacchanale of Hollywood, while “Now I’m Learning to Love the War” personally implicates Tillman (and any other Western listener) in the forthcoming environmental and/or political dissolution of the global order. Both of these ideas serve as preludes for Misty’s later work, especially Pure Comedy (2017).

But Fear Fun, largely on the back of its instrumentation and Tillman’s voice, feels lighter and less fatalistic than everything else he would do later. “I’m Writing a Novel,” a self-effacing, Pynchonesque drug-fueled romp through California certainly paints Tillman and his art as foolish, but does not condemn this foolishness.

This is the important difference: almost everywhere else in his catalogue, Tillman is the first one to tell you that he is doomed. But here, his lack of direction is painted not as representative of irreconcilable moral corruption, but instead a moment of transition. He’s just figuring it out.

Similarly, “Misty’s Nightmares 1 & 2” has a somewhat simple want: “Going to take my life back one day.” This is a guy who knows he’s in a weird spot in life but is working through it. Good for him!

A more cynical listener would probably say that he’s simply unaware that he’s doomed, that the ignorance is itself a problem. Maybe that’s true. But it’s not a problem for Misty, as narrator, in the moment, which is what gives Fear Fun its distinctive bent. The instrumentation supports the record’s status with truth-seeking rock & roll; there are way more jangling, major key acoustic guitars on Fear Fun than there are on the rest of Misty’s records combined—but more importantly, he means it this time.

When getting jaunty elsewhere (say, on Pure Comedy’s “Total Entertainment Forever or “Date Night” on 2018’s God’s Favorite Customer), Misty is almost always sarcastic. The groove is a way to show that he, or humanity, is missing the moral or social failure that he criticizes. But on Fear Fun, the groove is the freewheeling sensibility of his journey come to life.

Listening to Fear Fun ten years later, knowing where Tillman went artistically and where the world went politically and culturally, I feel this strange contradiction. I wish that this version of the Misty character persisted, and that his madcap adventures through California would continue to amuse us, and that he didn’t feel the desperate need to address all of the world’s problems through indie rock concept art.

But I’m also glad that we got the incisive social critic who gave us Pure Comedy and I Love You, Honeybear (2015). The demise of this version of Misty, and the creation of those works that hit you right in the soul, are inseparable.

Since none of that can be undone, we’re left with one option that still feels satisfying: a little bit of escapist nostalgia for this version of the world, a place where this version of Father John Misty lived. Ten years later, that’s what Fear Fun offers.

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