J. Tillman
Father John Misty
Biography
For most of my life I’ve felt that I dodged a bullet in being born to a couple of atheists. It seemed so unlikely to me that my mother would blossom into an unbeliever, given the fact that my maternal grandmother is a bit of a fanatic. But maybe that bullet didn’t come quite as close to my skull as I had imagined, because I’ve come to notice that the most ungodly among us tend to come from a family governed by the Lord.
So I guess I wasn’t really surprised last year, when I cyber stalked my new favourite musician and discovered that he, like my mother, had grown up in a hardcore Evangelical household. Unlike my mother, Joshua Tillman was born in Rockville, Maryland, which doesn’t tempt children with sin in the same way a big city like Toronto can. He was so isolated, that in 1991, at the age of ten, Tillman announced that he wanted to be a pastor, simply because that was the closest thing he knew to performing.
This ambition was soon abandoned, when he transferred from a Episcopal elementary to a Pentecostal Messianic Jewish school, where he was sufficiently traumatized. (I tried to research this strand of religion and came up empty handed, in that most sites were more interested in recruiting me than informing me. All I gathered is that they’ve managed to combine Judaism and Christianity. And they’re very cult-ish.) Tillman would later recount his classmates experiencing something more attune to demonic possession than Holy enlightenment.
While the teenaged Tillman knew he wasn’t fit for the life of a pastor, he was not yet able to realize his talent because the only music he was exposed to came from a choir, and failed to ignite any passion. His love for music was not established until he was almost an adult, and his parents surprised the 17 year old with a new house rule. He would be able to listen to secular music so long as it was spiritually themed. Tillman returned from the record store with Slow Train Coming, Bob
Biography
For most of my life I’ve felt that I dodged a bullet in being born to a couple of atheists. It seemed so unlikely to me that my mother would blossom into an unbeliever, given the fact that my maternal grandmother is a bit of a fanatic. But maybe that bullet didn’t come quite as close to my skull as I had imagined, because I’ve come to notice that the most ungodly among us tend to come from a family governed by the Lord.
So I guess I wasn’t really surprised last year, when I cyber stalked my new favourite musician and discovered that he, like my mother, had grown up in a hardcore Evangelical household. Unlike my mother, Joshua Tillman was born in Rockville, Maryland, which doesn’t tempt children with sin in the same way a big city like Toronto can. He was so isolated, that in 1991, at the age of ten, Tillman announced that he wanted to be a pastor, simply because that was the closest thing he knew to performing.
This ambition was soon abandoned, when he transferred from a Episcopal elementary to a Pentecostal Messianic Jewish school, where he was sufficiently traumatized. (I tried to research this strand of religion and came up empty handed, in that most sites were more interested in recruiting me than informing me. All I gathered is that they’ve managed to combine Judaism and Christianity. And they’re very cult-ish.) Tillman would later recount his classmates experiencing something more attune to demonic possession than Holy enlightenment.
While the teenaged Tillman knew he wasn’t fit for the life of a pastor, he was not yet able to realize his talent because the only music he was exposed to came from a choir, and failed to ignite any passion. His love for music was not established until he was almost an adult, and his parents surprised the 17 year old with a new house rule. He would be able to listen to secular music so long as it was spiritually themed. Tillman returned from the record store with Slow Train Coming, Bob