Father John Misty Reveals Story Behind His Taylor Swift Covers (And Her Camp’s Reaction)

Father John Misty Reveals Story Behind His Taylor Swift Covers (And Her Camp's Reaction)

Ahead of his show in Louisville, Kentucky tonight, Father John Misty stopped by local radio station 91.9 WFPK Radio Louisville. Josh Tillman played some music and discussed a variety of topics, including his provocative video for “The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apartment”, his new song “The Memo”, and most importantly, “Blank Space” and “Welcome to New York”: two Taylor Swift-via-Ryan-Adams-via-the-Smiths-via-the-Velvet-Underground covers he uploaded and later took down. 

According to Tillman, the covers of “Blank Space” and “Welcome to New York” came together over the span of “like, an hour”, when he passed by his tour manager’s office and found her listening to Adams’ 1989. Tillman says that he never heard Swift’s originals prior to that day (although he concedes, “I’m sure I’ve been walking by a Cinnabon or something at the airport and heard it”). To record the new versions, he referred to a printout of Swift’s lyrics.

After he uploaded the covers, Tillman became surprised by their immense popularity. “By the time I got back to the bus that night,” he recalls, “my TM [tour manager] was like, ‘It’s the top trend on Facebook! It’s on USA Today!’, and I was like, ‘this is ridiculous,’ so I went and took them down, thinking, ‘now that’s over’.”

Except it wasn’t. Media outlets (including this one) began reaching out asking why he took down the covers. Even Taylor Swift’s camp got in touch to ask why they came down and encouraged him to put them back up.

So Tillman decided to troll everyone by issuing a statement that Lou Reed came to him in a dream and asked him to take down the covers. “I was annoyed at the media,” he explained. “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 entire interview above. Tillman begins addressing the “Taylor Swift thing” around the 26-minute mark, and at 36:40, he performs an acoustic version of “Bored In The USA”, from this year’s excellent I Love You, Honeybear.

Read our feature on Father John Misty, “How to Make Love”

Watch Father John Misty and his wife Emma on a new episode of Pitchfork.tv‘s Over/Under:

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Welsh Da God Brooklyn New York. Co founder of Onthesceneny Follow me Twitter Welsh_ci/ Instagram Welsh_ci.

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