Father John Misty set out to write his very first love song on his latest album, I Love You, Honeybear. But with the track “Chateau Lobby #4 (In C for Two Virgins)” he’s more Leonard Cohen than Michael Bolton.
Misty’s idea of love is something a little sweet, a touch perverse and very honest—perhaps, a bit too honest for some.
As he told Radio.com back in February, “I’ve never been inspired to write about wanting love. I’ve never wanted love, I wanted intimacy—and that’s the word that I prefer—far more. ‘Love’ is just too useless of a word.”
This mariachi band-infused intimacy from Misty involves a lot of TMI. The video is a kaleidoscopic daydream that shows Tillman and his wife, Emma, prancing around half-naked in wedded bliss. But, it’s the singer’s off-putting nature that makes it more than another silly love song.
“Chateau Lobby #4” plays out like a short film, a rather blue one, which should be no surprise being that Tillman has defined himself as a “horny man-child mama’s boy” who sells merch featuring the words “mascara, blood, ash and cum” heard on the record’s title track.
Tillman sings like a dirty Harry Nilsson about taking Emma into the kitchen and doing unspeakable things to her while she wears her wedding dress, adding the much-needed detail of it being a vintage gown that “someone was probably murdered in.”
But this only son of the ladies’ man can’t hide behind his polyamorous ways forever. He eventually bares his monogamous soul, singing, “People are boring/ But you’re something else I can’t explain/ You take my last name.”
The last line of the song is so saccharine—“What are you doing with your whole life?/ How about forever?”—it’s almost as if he has to immediately end the song before he goes too far. Even his oddities—satanic Christmases, realizing you hate all the same things—sound like wonderful touchstones in every relationship. Those things that even in this world of oversharing you still keep to yourself just because you can.
Misty gets at that feeling you have when you’re truly in love. That feeling that it’s us against the world. That feeling you hope never, ever ends. And it’s that feeling that he somehow manages to cram into this two-minute and 28-second song that you’ll wish you could have on repeat forever.
Father John Misty set out to write his very first love song on his latest album, I Love You, Honeybear. But with the track “Chateau Lobby #4 (In C for Two Virgins)” he’s more Leonard Cohen than Michael Bolton.
Misty’s idea of love is something a little sweet, a touch perverse and very honest—perhaps, a bit too honest for some.
As he told Radio.com back in February, “I’ve never been inspired to write about wanting love. I’ve never wanted love, I wanted intimacy—and that’s the word that I prefer—far more. ‘Love’ is just too useless of a word.”
This mariachi band-infused intimacy from Misty involves a lot of TMI. The video is a kaleidoscopic daydream that shows Tillman and his wife, Emma, prancing around half-naked in wedded bliss. But, it’s the singer’s off-putting nature that makes it more than another silly love song.
“Chateau Lobby #4” plays out like a short film, a rather blue one, which should be no surprise being that Tillman has defined himself as a “horny man-child mama’s boy” who sells merch featuring the words “mascara, blood, ash and cum” heard on the record’s title track.
Tillman sings like a dirty Harry Nilsson about taking Emma into the kitchen and doing unspeakable things to her while she wears her wedding dress, adding the much-needed detail of it being a vintage gown that “someone was probably murdered in.”
But this only son of the ladies’ man can’t hide behind his polyamorous ways forever. He eventually bares his monogamous soul, singing, “People are boring/ But you’re something else I can’t explain/ You take my last name.”
The last line of the song is so saccharine—“What are you doing with your whole life?/ How about forever?”—it’s almost as if he has to immediately end the song before he goes too far. Even his oddities—satanic Christmases, realizing you hate all the same things—sound like wonderful touchstones in every relationship. Those things that even in this world of oversharing you still keep to yourself just because you can.
Misty gets at that feeling you have when you’re truly in love. That feeling that it’s us against the world. That feeling you hope never, ever ends. And it’s that feeling that he somehow manages to cram into this two-minute and 28-second song that you’ll wish you could have on repeat forever.
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