Father John Misty Finds Catharsis Amid a Musical Body Count in Hollywood Forever Cemetery Show: Concert Review

variety.com:

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticOn the second evening of his two-night-stand at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Father John Misty sang “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” early on in the show, as he does nearly every night on his current tour, and then confessed that, on the previous night, he’d blown a significant portion of the lyrics.

At a loss to explain that uncharacteristic lapse, he attributed it to that particular song choice maybe being so on the nose that thinking about it kind of threw him a little.If he were a more woo-woo kind of person, maybe he’d have attributed it to the assembly of local spirits messing with him, for daring to be so meta as to finally play a gig on the hallowed-grounds-turned-entertainment-venue he named a song after. (“We should let this dead guy sleep,” indeed? — to quote the tune.) But Father John is not that kind of mystic, as the audience would soon be reminded with a reading of “Pure Comedy,” his own epic anti-divine comedy, which doesn’t have a lot of use for magical thinking.

Still, the pairing of artist and setting had a synergistic quality, if not a spiritualist one. “It didn’t occur to me till last night, my first time playing in a graveyard, that my catalog has quite a serious body count,” he said. “We’re, like, five in, and quite a few dead.” That was after he opened a set full of short-story-like songs with “Q4,” a recent song about an ambitious novelist who profits from lifting ideas from the life story of her deceased sister, followed by the mentions of a burying a deceased grandpa in “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings,” further succeeded by “Chloë,” which ends with the effervescent starlet of the title throwing herself from her balcony.Although Misty.