http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9w1O7mu8Yog
Fear Fun occupies a familiar and yet unique space in the vast expanses of the indie folk-rock-country jumble. It's well-instrumented and melodically interesting stuff, obviously, but also imbued with an individual spark; Joshua Tillman's songwriting is simultaneously self-deprecating, consciously ironic, vividly descriptive and just plain funny. I'm Writing a Novel comes off to me as an intersection of a snarky fuck-you to the world around him (he's writing one, he says, "because it's never been done before") with a genuine confession of sorts; the imagery conveys acknowledgement of his shortcomings, his plight. What is his plight, exactly? There's not quite enough elaboration to tell, but it hardly matters: it still feels like I'm looking through one-way glass at this man, witnessing him as he truly is. Tillman said about the album that he's uninterested in "any alter-egos, any vagaries, fantasy, escapism, any over-wrought sentimentality", having found a voice that earnestly articulates the smart-ass he is at heart. It's not only weird and whimsical; it's unabashedly, almost nakedly true to the artist himself.
"I like humor and sex and mischief", he states plainly in an interview. And, seriously, don't we all?
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