Father John Misty, aka Josh Tillman, found himself in the national spotlight when he covered two Taylor Swift songs via Ryan Adams via The Velvet Underground via Lou Reed, and in a new interview for Louisville radio station WFPK 91.9 FM he comes clean on the whole story from the inception of the idea to his trolling of the media.
He said he was passing by his tour manager's office and heard her listening to Ryan Adams' newly released 1989 covers album. Tillman apparently had never heard Swift's versions of the songs and simply went into the studio for about an hour and played off the lyric sheets.
His covers of "Blank Space" and "Welcome To New York" went up soon after and he said he was surprised by the immediate reaction to the stunt.
"By the time I got back to the bus that night, my TM [tour manager] was like, 'It's the top trend on Facebook. It's on USA Today,'" he said. "And I was like, 'this is ridiculous,' so I went and took them down, thinking, 'now that's over.'"
Of course, the story didn't end there. The media freaked out and bombarded his camp for answers on why he took the songs down. Swift's management even called him and requested he put the songs back up. But Misty wasn't having any of it.
Misty decided to troll the Internet and make up a story about how Lou Reed visited him in a dream and told him to take down the song.
"I was annoyed at the media," Tillman said. "I was like, 'these people will print anything', so I went and gave them the most fraudulent, the most blatantly absurd, unprintable piece of surrealistic nonsense, and they printed it."
Listen to the whole interview below for an in-depth discussion about his latest music video for "The Night Josh Tillman Came To Our Apartment," in which he kisses himself and has to travel on a walk of shame back from his night of sexual encounters with himself. It's a good look into his twisted Freudian brain.
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