There’s a copy of this record in your collection right now, probably filed under F, possibly with a slight warp from that summer you left it in the car. Put it on tonight. Not as background. As the thing you’re actually doing.
I Love You, Honeybear came out in February 2015, and if you were paying any attention at all, you heard “Chateau Lobby #4” and figured you had the whole thing mapped. Witty, theatrical, Josh Tillman doing his baroque-lounge-lizard bit, very funny, very clever. You were right about all of that and you missed nearly everything.
What the first few listens cost you
The jokes are load-bearing. That’s the thing. When Tillman sings "I’m a natural, Annie / Isn’t that what you wanted?" on the title track, the humor is the wound — not a shield over it. He and Emma Tillman (then his fiancée, now his wife and frequent creative collaborator) are all over this album’s conceptual DNA, and knowing that the whole record is essentially a love letter to a specific person in a specific apartment in Los Angeles changes the register of every song.
Jonathan Wilson produced it at EastWest Studios in Hollywood — the room where the Wrecking Crew recorded half of what you think of as the sound of the 1960s. That’s not an accident. Tillman wanted the music to feel like it had always existed, like you could find it in a crate. Wilson delivered.
The arrangements are doing more than you remember. The string writing on “Chateau Lobby #4” was handled by Gavin Bryars’s former collaborators, and it moves in that slightly wrong way — not lush, not film score, something stranger. The rhythm section is often Josh Klinghoffer, then still of Red Hot Chili Peppers, playing drums with an almost formal restraint that keeps the whole production from tipping into pastiche.
The part you skipped
Side two is where this record actually lives.
“Ideal Husband” is a confession dressed as a comedy set, and the piano arrangement — low, formal, a little Weimar — makes the self-indictment land harder than any loud guitar could. “Bored in the USA” is the centerpiece and everyone talked about it, but listen to the laugh track. It was actually recorded live at the Late Show with David Letterman, and its placement — cutting in mid-song, these bursts of studio laughter at a man cataloguing his own spiritual emptiness — is one of the more genuinely uncomfortable things in recent American music.
“I Went to the Store One Day” closes the album at nearly six minutes, and it earns every one of them. This is Tillman dropping the performance entirely, or letting you believe he is, which might be the same thing on this record. It’s a love song so specific it becomes almost embarrassing to listen to closely. Which is exactly why you should.
The record was mixed by Tuck Precup, and the low end on a proper system is warmer and more present than you expect. The kick drum on “When You’re Smiling and Astride Me” has actual weight. The acoustic guitar on the quieter passages has been placed back in the room rather than up front, which rewards headphone listening specifically — there’s a depth to the stereo image that sounds flat on a laptop and opens up completely when you actually sit down with it.
Tillman has said in interviews that the album was intended as a refutation of ironic distance, that sincerity was the radical act. Spend forty-five minutes with it tonight and you’ll feel both sides of that — the performer who can’t stop performing, and underneath him, something that just wanted to say I love you and couldn’t figure out how to do it without all the costume jewelry on.
The record was already in the room. You just hadn’t been quiet enough.