One of the most anticipated outdoor shows of the summer is coming to Surly Brewing Field next week when Father John Misty will bring his Pure Comedy tour to town on Saturday 8/19 for a 5 PM show. Tickets are available HERE
Father John Misty is one of the most magnetic live performers to experience and has been a favorite of Twin Cities alt music fans for quite a while.
His new album Pure Comedy is the story of a species born with a half-formed brain. The species’ only hope for survival, finding itself on a cruel, unpredictable rock surrounded by other species who seem far more adept at this whole thing (and to whom they are delicious), is the reliance on other, slightly older, half-formed brains. This reliance takes on a few different names as their story unfolds, like “love,” “culture,” “family,” etc. Over time, and as their brains prove to be remarkably good at inventing meaning where there is none, the species becomes the purveyor of increasingly bizarre and sophisticated ironies. These ironies are designed to help cope with the species’ loathsome vulnerability and to try and reconcile how disproportionate their imagination is to the monotony of their existence.
Now all of a sudden they expect light in the dark, warmth in the cold, and to make something out of nothing. Cooperation among the species to achieve these goals eventually yields a worldview wherein some among the species believe that there are individuals for whom this type of work is maybe ill-suited. The contribution of the ill-suited is of a more abstract, inspirational nature. The ill-suited begin to make subtle distinctions among themselves that extend beyond “eaten by a bear/not eaten by a bear”. These distinctions involve do-it-ness, cool-face-and-body-ness, craftiness, etc. – an arrangement emerges where these traits can be traded in for better-than-ness. This better-than-ness really starts to run rampant, and the species begins to wonder if there isn’t a Sky-Man in the sky who is perhaps the source of all better-than-ness. It seems like a pretty good explanation for why the species is so important.
Sky-Man pretty much runs the show for a really, really long time, and his inner-circle of better-thans gets increasingly smaller and smaller, even though by the end of his reign everyone in the species considers themselves one. Unfortunately, there are some better-thans who get together and decide that one way of better-than-ness is better than other betters-thans’ better-than-ness and teach their little half-formed-brain babies as much (most who interpret this distinction as “me’s” vs. “not-me’s”). “Not-me’s” eventually come to encapsulate everyone that is not a single “me” at any given time, and this paves the way for incredibly distasteful behavior until the species arrives at a place of such alienation and fear there is really nothing so horrible that one of them wouldn’t do to the other. To deal with this less than ideal state of affairs, which seems suspiciously incompatible with how progressive and evolved they are by this point, they set about to entertain themselves into an oblivion with politics, sex, finance, philosophy, and other games of war. This they do until they are so numb, and the idea of any “not-me” so untenable, that they are blissfully incapable of noticing they’re all dead. This happens more or less on an infinite loop until the end of time.
Tour Dates:
Aug 18 Interstellar Rodeo Winnipeg, Canada
Aug 19 Surly Brewing Festival Field Minneapolis, MN
Aug 20 CrossroadsKC Kansas City, MO
Aug 23 Cain’s Ballroom Tulsa, OK
Aug 25 Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre Morrison, CO
Aug 26 Project Pabst Portland, OR
Aug 31 End of the Road Festival Dorset, United Kingdom
Sep 02 End of the Road Festival Dorset, United Kingdom
Sep 13 Blue Hills Bank Pavilion Boston, MA
Sep 14 The Capitol Theatre Port Chester, NY
Sep 15 Mann Center for the Performing Arts Philadelphia, PA
Sep 16 CityFolk Ottawa, Canada
Sep 18 Massey Hall Toronto, Canada
Sep 19 Royal Oak Music Theatre Royal Oak, MI
Sep 20 Auditorium Theatre Chicago, IL
Sep 22 Peabody Opera House St Louis, MO
Sep 23 Palace Theatre Columbus, OH
Sep 25 Thomas Wolfe Auditorium Asheville, NC
Sep 26 Ryman Auditorium Nashville, TN
Sep 27 The Tabernacle Atlanta, GA
Sep 29 Bass Concert Hall Austin, TX
Sep 30 Bomb Factory Dallas, TX
Oct 01 White Oak Music Hall Houston, TX
Oct 02 Bass Concert Hall Austin, TX
Oct 04 Orpheum Theatre Phoenix, AZ
Oct 05 The Observatory North Park San Diego, CA
Oct 06 The Observatory North Park San Diego, CA
Oct 07 Greek Theatre Berkeley, CA
Oct 11 Arlington Theatre Santa Barbara, CA
Oct 12 Brooklyn Bowl Las Vegas, NV
Oct 13 Greek Theatre Los Angeles, CA
Oct 14 Fox Theater Pomona Pomona, CA
