The Story Of Goose Covering Father John Misty’s ‘I’m Writing A Novel’

Covers have always been an essential part of the Goose experience. Some are familiar favorites; others come from surprisingly deep in someone else’s catalog.

Flight Path follows those songs beyond the Goose setlist and back to the artists who wrote them and the deeper musical histories behind them.

Debuts, one-offs, fan favorites and standout performances. We’ve got you covered.

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For all the absurdity packed into Father John Misty’s “I’m Writing a Novel,” its title was actually literal: Josh Tillman really was writing one.

Tillman had already made eight albums of mostly somber folk music under his own name and spent several years drumming for Fleet Foxes. By then, he was ready to leave both behind. He later described reaching an “immobilizing period of depression” in Seattle and losing interest not only in making music, but in thinking of himself as a songwriter at all.

So he bailed. Tillman loaded up his van, brought along what he colorfully described as “enough mushrooms to choke a horse,” and started driving south with no particular destination. Along the way, he began writing a novel. More important than the book itself was what happened while he was writing it: Tillman discovered a voice that sounded much more like the person he actually was.

Eventually he landed in Los Angeles, settling into a Laurel Canyon home he called his “spider-shack.” The setting seemed to be pretty appropriate. Laurel Canyon had already been mythologized as the home of the California singer-songwriter, populated decades earlier by the likes of Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Graham Nash and Neil Young. Now Tillman arrived there determined, in part, to poke fun at exactly that sort of mythology.

The next time he picked up an acoustic guitar, he wrote “I’m Writing a Novel.”

And now, musically at least, he was no longer J. Tillman. He was Father John Misty.

Where his earlier songs were mostly solemn, “I’m Writing a Novel” most certainly was not. The song is more like a drug-addled short story. A narrator whips around Southern California encountering shamans, talking animals, actresses, philosophers and his own inflated ego while repeatedly announcing his literary ambitions with the self-important declaration that he is writing a novel because, hilariously, nobody has apparently thought of doing that before.

It is something like a Hunter S. Thompson fever dream and a joke about the kind of person who has a psychedelic experience and immediately decides everyone else needs to hear about his profound new understanding of reality.

Tillman later explained that one of the song’s jokes, the narrator insisting that his reality is somehow more authentic than everyone else’s, was deliberately self-directed, a jab at his own tendency to think that way. That mockery became fundamental to Father John Misty: rather than creating a conventional alter ego, Tillman could exaggerate himself to the point where it became difficult to tell where autobiography ended and satire began. Come to think of it, maybe the Hunter S. Thompson comparison isn’t so far off?

Los Angeles provides the perfect backdrop. Malibu and West Hollywood appear by name. Celebrities mingle with would-be artists, spiritual seekers and people trying very hard to look as though they are not impressed by celebrities.

Neil Young even turns up for the dune-buggy ride, accompanying the narrator to Malibu and offering advice about writing “the real,” only to be dismissed with, “I’m sorry, young man, what was your name again?” A jab at the aging folk legend. If there was ever any doubt that the “Neil” in “I rode to Malibu on a dune buggy with Neil” was Neil Young, Father John Misty put it to rest during a 2016 performance at the Newport Folk Festival. After dedicating the song to Graham Nash, who Tillman said had told him it “doesn’t make any sense” and that he’d rather listen to Chuck Berry, Tillman altered the lyric. This time, he rode to Malibu with Graham Nash “and associate Neil.”

“I’m Writing a Novel” became the fourth track on Father John Misty’s debut album, Fear Fun, released May 1, 2012. Produced by Tillman and Jonathan Wilson, the record sort of represented his reinvention. The gloomy Pacific Northwest singer-songwriter had become a brash L.A. raconteur, and “Novel” was an excellent example of that transformation.

And Tillman made sure the album itself carried the joke all the way through. The novel he had actually been writing on that strange trip south, Mostly Hypothetical Mountains, was included with the liner notes of the physical editions of Fear Fun, its 31 sections printed in tiny font across sprawling fold-out inserts tucked inside the record. So anyone buying an album containing a song called “I’m Writing a Novel” could pull the LP from its sleeve and discover that, yes, Father John Misty brought the novel along too.

Tillman recognized a potential problem. Humor in songwriting, he later said, “can easily turn a song into novelty.” When he wrote this one, he remembered wondering whether it might be the stupidest thing he had ever done.

Apparently it wasn’t.

Eight years later and nearly 3,000 miles from Laurel Canyon, the song’s flight path carried it east into Goose’s repertoire.

With touring abruptly halted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Goose retreated to bassist Trevor Weekz’s Connecticut home for an acoustic livestream dubbed “aGOOSEtic Live From T’s House.” On March 21, 2020, during a seven-song set broadcast as part of the Live From Out There series, the band debuted two covers: Tom Waits’ “Gun Street Girl” and Father John Misty’s “I’m Writing a Novel.”

It was an oddly appropriate moment for a song about a man losing one version of his life and stumbling into another.

Goose’s arrangement preserved the song’s bouncing Americana feel, a natural fit for Rick Mitarotonda’s voice and the band’s lighter acoustic side. What began as an “aGOOSEtic” living-room cover, however, did not become a one-off. “Novel” survived the return to live performances and gradually became a recurring member of Goose’s unusually deep cover repertoire.

Then, on June 25, 2022, the story of “Novel” took a delightful turn.

Goose was playing the second night of its landmark Radio City Music Hall run in New York. The evening would become famous for its extraordinary performance and for Trey Anastasio joining the band for much of the third set, but another guest had already appeared earlier in the night. Looking back, Rick Mitarotonda described Radio City as “a unifying moment for the band” and “the center point of a phase,” adding that everything had lined up “in a serendipitous way, like we couldn’t have planned it any better.” The description is particularly apt considering what happened next.

Coming out of “Red Bird” during the second set, Goose began “I’m Writing a Novel.”

This time Father John Misty walked out to sing it with them.

Tillman and Mitarotonda traded their way through the song while Goose supplied the country-rock beat underneath. For a band that had begun covering “Novel” from a Connecticut living room during lockdown, having its author suddenly standing at center stage at Radio City amounted to a rather remarkable promotion.

Misty wasn’t finished for the night. He returned for the encore, moving behind the drum kit, appropriately enough for the former Fleet Foxes drummer, while Anastasio joined Goose for the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Thus one of Goose’s biggest shows to that point ended with Trey Anastasio playing guitar, Father John Misty playing drums and a Connecticut band that had spent part of the pandemic livestreaming from a house suddenly occupying one of the most famous stages in America.

The Radio City “Novel” was subsequently included on Goose’s official Live at Radio City Music Hall release, giving the cover what can likely be considered, to date, its canonical version.

Goose, of course, continued playing the song without its author. It is usually compact, upbeat and lands in the first set, easily capable of slotting in the setlist between considerably more expansive pieces of music.

Their covers of Misty’s music extend beyond this one song. Goose has also performed “Well, You Can Do It Without Me,” another Fear Fun track, while “So I’m Growing Old on Magic Mountain” debuted in 2024.

But “I’m Writing a Novel” remains the Father John Misty song most often played by Goose.

There is something kind of cool about the song’s durability. “I’m Writing a Novel” was born when Josh Tillman abandoned one musical identity and discovered that writing a novel had taught him how he actually wanted to write songs. Goose first played it when the band’s own momentum had suddenly been interrupted and musicians everywhere were trying to figure out what playing music even looked — and sounded — like without an audience in front of them.

Tillman once worried that writing something this funny might be the stupidest thing he had ever done.

Instead, it helped introduce Father John Misty to the world and ultimately gave Goose another song for its massive arsenal of covers. Nearly 15 years after Tillman first wrote it and more than six years after Goose picked it up, the flight path of “I’m Writing a Novel” is still unfolding.