Father John Misty and Lucinda Williams at the Greek: Concert Review

Early on in his headlining appearance at the Greek in Los Angeles, Father John Misty offered his closest equivalent to an invocation for the evening, calmly telling the full house in Griffith Park, “I arrived at about the same time as everybody else, and I was inching up the hill and I got a good look at everybody as they were walking in here, and it sounds funny, but I was like…” He solemnly paused for effect. “…I really hope they have a good time.”

Those same words would be obvious whoop-and-holler bait for nearly any other performer playing the venue, but coming through Misty’s voice, it was a laugh line, even if he was surely being as earnest as he was deadpan. At the Greek, you could find pockets of the audience that were there to party (and woe unto you if you found yourself in one of these chatty circles whose apparent sole previous exposure to Misty was the uncharacteristically chirpy public-radio staple “Real Love Baby”). But most fans know there will be serious matters attended to at an FJM show: life, death, meaninglessness, misogyny, microdosing, the vanities of show business, the opiates of religion and alcoholism, and our fate as a fleeting species on this earth. Does that sound like a good time?

Damn right it does, in the hands of Mr. Misty, who has a limitless capacity for making feel-bad thoughts feel good. This is not because he’s ironically contrasting music and lyrics — although irony is way, way, way in his wheelhouse — but because even his most despairing choruses have a kind of bittersweet uplift that finally feels just a little more grand than grave. He’s one of contemporary music’s greatest lyricists and one of our loveliest melodists (a good combo, when you can find it, by the way), so there’s usually some kind of euphoric effect even in distemper or dystopia. His wish is our command when it comes to actually enjoying stuff that sounds more challenging on paper, or even on vinyl, than it does in the flesh.

Misty is now about six months into doing headlining touring behind his album release of last November, “Mahashmashana.” (That tongue-twister title is a Hindu term that basically signifies “cremation”… well, we told you about him.) For those of us getting him on the last leg of this tour, it may be the first excuse to hear some of that music in a while since, as much as “Mahashmashana” was one of 2024’s best records, it’s heavy-going enough that it’s not the kind of album most fans are going to have on replay all year long. It was a beautiful thing to revisit — in whole, since Misty performed all eight of the album’s mostly lengthy songs, to the set’s benefit.

Father John Misty at the Greek, July 25, 2025
Chris Willman/Variety

He’s had to retire some things, to make room for the wealth of new material, and that’s fine. The most notable omission fans are likely noticing on this tour is what might’ve been considered his signature song, “Pure Comedy,” which spent about seven years being the effective climax of his shows before it got retired. It was his philosophical magnum opus for a reason, but over time, it did come to feel like hearing the world’s greatest TED talk, but over and over. The new songs that have replaced it and a few other dropped catalog tracks feel less recitative, more tied to making sure every note of the melodies is as haunting as the words.

This touring cycle is his first in a while without at least a small orchestra in tow. The strings felt necessary when he was doing shows behind 2022’s lush and intermittently nostalgic “Chloë and the 20th Century,” but while the newer stuff also makes a lot of use of equally strong orchestral arrangements, the arrangements of those tunes at the Greek show felt just a little stronger with sax but no violins. (Synths did the job of recreating the string stings on occasion.) No one in rock has made a better use of orchestration in recent years, so there might’ve been a twinge of regret in seeing the stage set up now with a less elaborate bandstand. But any question of whether it was the right call was set aside by the time he got to the soft ballad “Summer’s Gone,” which has thick swells of strings on record that felt like a nice touch at the time. Hearing him perform that poignant lament at the Greek accompanied by almost nothing but piano was so powerful that it’s now a little tough to go back and hear the album version. Either way, that’s a song that sounds magnificently Randy Newman-esque — but stripped down and less adorned, it’s like a rawer Randy.

Another comparison that comes up a lot for Misty is Nilsson, with his obviously more melodious voice… so you might think of “Nilsson Does Newman.” Or, considering the bigger cosmic and philosophical themes that Misty is often going for, “Nilsson Does Nietzsche.” His set had its share of ’70s singer-songwriter instrumental tropes, including sax and steel guitar — comfort-food instruments whose warm touches help some of Misty’s more lacerating songs feel like you’re being treated with a balm.

Misty doesn’t indulge in huge heaps of stage banter these days, which is almost too bad, given how eagerly the audience anticipates his occasional dry morsels between songs. “We’d like to pick things up now,” he said at one point. “But I have precious few of those kinds of numbers,” he pointed out, “so we must do this sad country ballad” — that being “Goodbye Mr. Blue,” a narrative about how the death of a shared cat becomes a death knell in a teetering relationship. He apparently thinks of the oldie “Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow” as an intractable part of his show, despite apparently no longer being a personal favorite, as he introduced the song as being “increasingly more inappropriate for me to perform” — but, he noted, “I’m not in the business of not giving you what you want.” In introducing the newer ballad “Being You,” he said, “Can I give you a little advice? Just disassociate.” (Indeed, he has said a real-life dissociative state he experienced during the pandemic was the inspiriation for that tune.” “This works very effectively for me,” he added, “like, say, when the set opens with a 10-minute disco song [“I Guess Just Time Just Makes Fools of Us All”], most of which I don’t have an instrument in my hands for, and I have to sashay around [during a solo] for 90 seconds.”

Some of the audience members know about dissociation, of course. Like, when he was singing one of his established classics, “Ballad of the Dying Man,” with lines like “Eventually the dying man takes his final breath / But first checks his news feed to see what he’s ’bout to miss,” and I couldn’t help but be distracted by the trio of young people to my left using that moment to show each other photos of who-knows-what on their phones. (Misty can’t supply all the ironic content of a gig without a little audience participation.)

Four of the newer songs in particular made a powerful impact during the show. “Mental Health” has a more soaring chorus than any song with that odd and un-anthemic a title has a right to. The central trope of the tune — that it’s people who clock in as psychologically unwell who may have the firmest grasp on reality — may or may not conceptually hit you where you live. But when he loosens up a little with the high-minded language and just sings “Run, baby, run, baby, run,” it feels moving enough to make you want to throw away your meds and break into an insane sprint.

And an almost-climactic trio of “Mahashmashana” songs — “She Cleans Up,” “Screamland” and “Summer’s Gone” — is as good a run of back-to-back material as any song sequence he’s ever had in his tours before. “She Cleans Up” is the rocking concert standout it always promised to be on record, but even more funky and furious with this particular band. (And apropos for the L.A. setting, with its tales of the Hollywood casting couch.) The more epic “Screamland” is a loud and gorgeous howl that seems to be his take on the escapism and limitations of religion — what he jokingly referred to in an interview as “a mutilated Hillsong,” which is to say, a very dark praise song. (This song, too, had a local application — it finds salvation in the singer’s lover picking him up and driving him to the desert from the Drawing Room, which happens to be a bar just down the hill from the Greek on Hillhurst. Did anyone meet up there after the show?) And “Summer’s Gone,” so lovely in its solo-piano accompaniment here, a simultaneous wish that the California summer heat would dissipate and that the season of peaches and skinned knees would last forever. What a benediction.

Misty isn’t including “Real Love Baby” in his set these days, but he does know to end on a couple of uppers from his catalog for encores, even if it’s just the closing lines of these songs that offer some solace. “Holy Shit” catalogs half the sins of the universe, then ends with “what I fail to see is what that’s gotta do with you and me” — a line that has a lot to accomplish, in turning the tune into a love song, but gets it done. And “I Love You, Honeybear,” which has him beseeching, “Don’t give into despair,” does the neat trick of fooling you into believing you’re just seen the world’s most uplifting concert. Maybe you just did, if you’re the right brand of broken romantic.

Providing support on this end of the tour was Lucinda Williams — a curious choice, in a way, since she tends to be as straightforward and elemental in her roots-rock approach as he is ornate and twisty. But it worked, in a naturally complementary way, and especially for that possibly small subset of those of us in the audience who come in already considering both FJM and Lu to be among the greats.

Williams did not pull out “Are You Alright?” from her catalog to perform among her seven selections as opening act, but that was likely the question on some of the audience’s mind, namely those who are aware she suffered a stroke in 2020. The answer is, very much so. While getting an assist in slowly moving on and off the stage, Williams is now standing through her performances, an upgrade from her seated shows last fall, a sight that was cheering to all her fans on hand.

Lucinda Williams at the Greek, July 25, 2025
Chris Willman/Variety

Two prominent covers gave her expert band room to stretch out, with old hand Doug Pettibone doing the requisite soloing on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” That didn’t even turn out to be the main guitar soloing showcase of her set, as Pettibone was joined by Marc Ford for a dual guitar workout on “Rockin’ in the Free World.” But the highlight remained the singer-songwriter’s own: “Joy.” “You took my joy, I want it back” always felt like a kind of cry in her catalog, and all the more fruitfully so now that the audience has seen her battle back to thriving on stage.

Father John Misty setlist, Greek Theatre, Los Angeles, July 25, 2025:

I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All
Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose
The Night Josh Tillman Came to Our Apt.
Being You
Mr. Tillman
Nancy From Now On
Goodbye Mr. Blue
Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)
Mental Health
Ballad of the Dying Man
God’s Favorite Customer
Nothing Good Ever Happens at the Goddamn Thirsty Crow
She Cleans Up
Screamland
Summer’s Gone
Mahashmashana
(encore)
Holy Shit
I Love You, Honeybear

Lucinda Williams setlist, Greek Theatre, Los Angeles, July 25, 2025:

Let’s Get the Band Back Together
Stolen Moments
Drunken Angel
Lowlife
Fruits of My Labor
You Can’t Rule Me
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Joy
Rockin’ in the Free World