HomeMusicMusic NewsFather John Misty Takes Down Taylor Swift Covers After Lou Reed Comes...

Father John Misty Takes Down Taylor Swift Covers After Lou Reed Comes to Him in a Dream

Folk rocker Father John Misty has taken down his covers of Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” and “Welcome to New York” after he claimed former Velvet Underground songwriter demanded it of him in a bizarre dream. He posted the covers earlier this week as a sarcastic response to Ryan Adams entire cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.

In a 450-word-long Facebook post, FJM (whose real name is Joshua Tillman) outlines an insane chain of events that includes crab-walking, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, a Burger King crown, Barack Obama and eventually, Lou Reed.

Although the full insanity of dream is tough to summarize, it opens with Tillman scuttling around a fictional suburb of New Orleans, he writes. After the appearance of a childhood friend and early 20th century psychoanalyst Lacan, “Ode to Joy” begins to play and Tillman begins to traverse the world as though it’s a treadmill, visiting locations like the Great Wall of China and the McDonald’s restaurant where he had his third birthday.

Tillman realizes he was late for a soundcheck in the dream, he writes, and says U.S. president Barack Obama appeared to give him a ride on Air Force One. After giving Obama some policy advice, Tillman leaps from Air Force One and lands in a large blob of something, where he finds Reed.

“Down inside the blob I could see thousands of familiar faces and one of them was Lou Reed on a catwalk hand-cuffed to supermodels who had adopted babies handcuffed to them and Lou said, ‘Delete those tracks, don’t summon the dead, I am not your plaything. The collection of souls is an expensive pastime.’ Then I woke up,” Tillman wrote in his Facebook post.

It isn’t all illogical nonsense though — Tillman channeled Lou Reed on the re-imagined 1989 tracks, adding characteristic sounds of the Velvet Underground frontman as found on songs like “Heroin.”

Tillman caused minor ripples when he first posted the covers on Sept. 21, having released them on the same day that Ryan Adams released his own collection of 1989 covers. “My reinterpretation of the classic Ryan Adams album, 1989,” Tillman wrote in a snarky addition to the Soundcloud posting. The tracks were removed later that day.

Although a Soundcloud listen is a no-go, you can still hear Father John Misty’s interpretation of 1989 in the player above.

(Main Image courtesy of Side Stage Collective via Flickr)

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