Although there’s been a lot of songs from the past two years all over my playlists and phone, there’s really just one song I can’t let go of: “Mental Health” by Father John Misty.

Honestly, I just can’t get over this song. A few weeks ago, I was compiling a list of favorite 2025 songs and started actively getting pissed at the year itself for not serving up another song as good as 2024’s “Mental Health” – although there are a lot of reasons to be pissed at 2025 in general.

It all starts with the music before we even consider the lyrical hook. Musically, it floats on a cloud. It’s a major to-6th-to-major-7th chord progression that wants to go on forever. Every chord change and production choice is exactly the right one accomplishing the greatest feat in music: it’s simultaneously familiar and novel.

With Mahashmashana, Father John Misty’s Josh Tillman moves beyond his reputation as a respected folk auteur, leaning into beautiful pop songwriting – he’s working on Rufus Wainwright’s corner now.

Misty and his producer Jonathan Wilson have openly described that when they are given larger budgets, they then can use “the finest studios, arrangers, microphones” to realize his vision. So, in a way, his earlier indie/folky success has allowed him to musically go where he wanted to all along.

The subject matter of “mental health” is a tough needle to thread since Misty recognizes that the issues and goals of mental health are both important and valuable. Yet he’s poking fun that the expression itself has become a cliched catch-all phrase. Misty treats “mental health” the way writers sometimes treat “the cloud”: A buzzword whose real meaning can get lost amid repetition and shorthand. That’s exactly how he uses it as the chorus gets cooking – it becomes a mantra, and an ironic one at that.

Misty is quick to dispel the ill-conceived notion that he’s blowing the lid off of the mental health industrial complex. Just like the song itself, his interview style is pleasantly all over the place: “It isn’t any kind of overt criticism of the mental health industry. I just view it more as like, if you were looking at your child you want them to be free.” Then a zag, “And I’m not sure that’s what is prescribed, I just have my doubts.”

Yes, the song is “ethereal” and starting with the lyric “in the panopticon” might scare you that it’s gonna get pretentious here, but it doesn’t.

While that propulsive musical pattern in the verses continues, show me a better sequence of soft rhymes sung more naturally than this:

This hallucination
The cathedral in the prison
Where the dreams of a citizen
Can only tell you what is wrong with them

There are more celebrated songs about psychology like the alienation of Radiohead, the bummer of R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” and the moving Sia confessional “Chandelier.” All great stuff, but this is more soothing and subtle than any of that.

Is it any wonder that Misty’s sentiment is more tailor-made for somebody like me – who is 100% in support of counseling and therapy for everybody, but I’m also an eye-roller, easily annoyed and I’ve got a strong Swedish avoidance of self-reflection. Yup, this is the song for me.

Anybody can listen to this song and hear whatever they want to hear. The listener can meditate on the wordplay about “mental health” and how simultaneously essential and silly it can be. Or to hell with it, just drift away on the pop vibe that, dare I say, gives off real Brian Wilson vibes.

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