On Monday night the internet briefly stopped losing its shit over Ryan Adams covering Taylor Swift in the style of Bruce Springsteen to momentarily lose its shit over Father John Misty covering Ryan Adams covering Taylor Swift in the style of the Velvet Underground. But if you went back to the well yesterday to re-live Josh Tillman’s magic, you may have noticed his “Blank Space” cover was scrubbed from the Internet.
Why? Because the ghost of Lou Reed visited Father John in a dream and told him to ditch the song. “Delete those tracks, don’t summon the dead, I am not your plaything,” Reed apparently told him. “The collection of souls is an expensive pastime.”
Father John Misty conveyed the dream yesterday in a Facebook post, and the whole thing is pretty good. Read his full account below:
I had a very strange dream that I abruptly woke up from around 3am early this morning. I was crab-walking around a neighborhood in New Orleans that, though it does not exist, is a recurring location in my dreams. My childhood friend Brian Kawamura was was telling me I still owed the tennis rental place $7000 when the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was suddenly standing over me, saying over and over, “The only thing crazier than a peasant who believes he is King, is a King who believes he is a King.” He put one of those birthday Burger King crowns on my head and out of the clouds a sort of “Switched on Bach” version of “Ode To Joy” began to play. A crowd which had formed around me began to sing along, with tears streaming down their faces. The crowd was obviously hypnotized and I assumed if I crept away discreetly no one would notice.
The earth became a sort of treadmill, and though the locations (The Great Wall of China, a McDonald’s where I had my 3rd birthday, the town from Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Vignola’s restaurant in Rockville, Md.), “Ode To Joy” and the crowd remained all around me. All of a sudden it was time to soundcheck, which I was late for, and Barack Obama offered to give me a ride on Air Force One. He told me he needed urgent advice regarding some important policy decisions, and we spent the day in Hawaii playing basketball, petting his dogs, golfing and the like when I, gripped with anxiety, told him I really needed to get to soundcheck so we needed to discuss the ruling of the free world. By this time he had turned into an obscene visage of my Father and said, “I have one injunction for you, son: That you enjoy life. It is by this mandate that all is ruled. It is the true tyranny; the equalizing force that binds us all.”
I jumped out of Air Force One and landed on top of this massive pink, sparkly, glowing blob that stretched for miles beyond miles, covering entire cities, and I had to keep gulping down chlorophyll because the thing was emitting insane levels of EMF’s, so my mouth and hands were stained dark green. Down inside the blob I could see thousands of familiar faces and one of them was Lou Reed on a catwalk hand-cuffed to supermodels who had adopted babies handcuffed to them and Lou said, “Delete those tracks, don’t summon the dead, I am not your plaything. The collection of souls is an expensive pastime.” Then I woke up.
Well shit.
Meanwhile, Father John Misty performs this Saturday at Boston Calling Music Festival at City Hall. The next day, Boston’s own Dirty Bangs open up the Sunday slate, and they recently provided their own “re-imagination” of “Bad Blood”, done in the style of ’70s NYC proto-punks Suicide. Listen to it below before the still-living ghost of Martin Rev demands its deletion.