Father John Misty Says Chipotle Offered Him $250,000 to Cover Backstreet Boys: Watch
This past weekend, Father John Misty (aka Josh Tillman) performed at Newport Folk Festival. During his set, he revealed that he was offered $250,000 to cover the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” for a Chipotle ad, Consequence of Sound reports. (Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James ended up doing it.) Tillman told the crowd, “I just got asked to do a Chipotle commercial not that long ago. I’ll tell you this: They were going to pay me a quarter of a million dollars to sing ‘I Want It That Way’ by the Backstreet Boys.” After a short pause he added, “Yup. That’s my life.” He also said, “I was like, cool, so then I could just buy, like, two Cadillacs and crash them together. I don’t want your fucking burrito money.” He clarified today that he told the story as “a discussion on whether folk music is good for anything anymore other than just the selling of things.”
Later, before performing I Love You, Honeybear highlight “Bored in the USA,” he said:
I don’t know how I feel about this song anymore. It’s called “Bored in the USA.” I think it’s a little too late for this kind of shit. But, if anything, when I wrote this song, I wanted to tell people that it is OK to feel your own pain. Even if it is bourgeois pain that feels inauthentic to you, you have to still feel it, because if you can’t feel that, you’re not going to be able to feel some exotic kind of pain that some people group that you perceive to be more authentic than you has. So let’s just feel our yuppie pain with a song.
Watch Father John Misty’s latest speech below. Scroll down for the Chipotle ad that he turned down.
Following the revelation, Portishead’s Geoff Barrow tweeted that Tillman “should of taken” the money. In response, Tillman said the ad was “like if Orwell got hired by an ad agency”:
@jetfury @pitchfork have you seen this fucking commercial? It’s like if Orwell got hired by an ad agency
— FARMER JAH MISERY (@fatherjohnmisty) July 26, 2016
Tillman’s Newport speech followed his set at WXPN’s XPoNential Music Festival, during which he decried entertainment and discussed the state of the world. He later said his set was a reaction to Donald Trump’s remarks at the Republican National Convention the night before. He added that, at the time, he felt “jeembles about entertainment, its narcotic properties and horrifying efficiency in elevating madmen to the heights of influence.” Yesterday, he further defended the speech in a Twitter feud with Strand of Oaks.
Point of the Chipote story was a discussion on whether folk music is good for anything anymore other than just the selling of things
— FARMER JAH MISERY (@fatherjohnmisty) July 26, 2016
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