© 2024
Donate
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Father John Misty's new record feels like an ending, but it's not his last

XPN | By Raina Douris,
Kimberly Junod
Published November 25, 2024 at 2:11 PM CST

Updated November 23, 2024 at 14:41 PM ET

Mahashmashana, the title of Father John Misty's sixth studio album, is a Sanskrit word meaning "great cremation ground." Fittingly, the musician says the record feels like an ending.

"This album does feel, I mean, I don't want to crash any markets or anything, but this does feel like the last record to me," Father John Misty's Josh Tillman explains, adding that he likely has more albums left to create but that Mahashmashana feels like a "last album" in spirit.

In this session, Tillman talks about what he loves — and doesn't love — about songwriting, the food he made for the studio, where aliens might live, and we talk about the urge listeners feel to interpret and analyze his lyrics.

Set list

  1. "I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All"
  2. "Screamland"
  3. "She Cleans Up"
  4. "Mental Health"
  5. "Summer's Gone"

Correction: An earlier version of this article ran with the headline, "'Mahashmashana' just might be Father John Misty's last album." Editors were unaware that in the unedited interview, Josh Tillman explains that he likely has several more albums to make as Father John Misty.

Copyright 2024 XPN
Tags
Artist Interviews World Cafe
Raina Douris
Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, is the host and writer of NPR's daily nationally-syndicated music interview and discovery program World Cafe. She has interviewed artists like Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, Questlove and Brandi Carlile, and was a 2022 keynote lecturer on the topic of Folk Music and music discovery at the Chautauqua Institution.
Kimberly Junod
World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).