Father John Misty Streams Lo-Res Version of I Love You, Honeybear Via Fake Streaming Service

Father John Misty‘s new album, I Love You, Honeybear, is set to drop February 9 in Europe via Bella Union and February 10 everywhere else via Sub Pop. Now, you can stream the album in its entirety… with a catch.

Today, Father John Misty (aka Josh Tillman) launched the website for Streamline Audio Protocol (aka SAP), a fake “streaming service” that he’s been “developing.” Below, read a statement from Tillman explaining the point:

I am pleased to introduce SAP, a new signal-to-audio process by which popular albums are “sapped” of their performances, original vocal, atmosphere and other distracting affectations so the consumer can decide quickly and efficiently whether they like a musical composition, based strictly on its formal attributes, enough to spend money on it. SAP files sound incredible when compressed and streamed at low resolutions over any laptop speaker or cell phone. They are cheap to produce and take up even less space than the average MP3. They contain just enough meta-data to be recognized by sophisticated genre aggregation software. Everything you love about discovering and sharing free music, minus the cost to anyone: artist or fan.

So: That means you can listen to I Love You, Honeybear sans vocals and many of the things that make it interesting. But that’s okay! You get the gist of it, and following Tillman’s logic, that should be enough to help you decide whether you want to hear it in full.

Again, you can check it out here by scrolling to the bottom. You can also listen to the proper versions of “Chateau Lobby #4 (in C for Two Virgins)” and “Bored in the USA”. 

Update: Below, check out video of Tillman performing “Bored in the USA” and “I Love You, Honeybear” at Spotify’s office. He’s accompanied by a karaoke machine.

Read our interview with Father John Misty from last year. 

Watch Father John Misty perform “I Love You Honeybear” on Pitchfork.tv’s “City of Music”:

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