“WTF?!? Where’d the meerkats go? And is it just me, or did Narnia throw up on my computer screen?”

Do not be alarmed, good people of the Internet! You’re in the right place! You’ve navigated your browser to the same medium-to-long-winded music blog you know and love, just without the brazen misuse of intellectual property sitting atop the page (these Meerkat Manor fellas sure are cute, but my copyright conscience had, over time, transformed their adorably inquisitive gazes into guilt-inducing death stares). In addition to the new banner and background, I’ve also reclassified all 250-some YHT posts to keep things a bit tidier, subject-matter-wise. The 5 categories (links can be found on the left side of the page) include…

• #nowplaying — record reviews and recommended listening
• #live — concert reviews and performance videos
• #features — recurring gimmicks and especially long reads
• #rva — music that calls Richmond, VA home
• #guest — pieces penned by anyone other than yours truly

Many thanks are due to my big sis for hand-crafting the YHT mascot that’s pictured in the new banner, and thanks also to pixlr.com for making a web-based version of Photoshop, because I’m too cheap to buy the real thing and too guilt-prone to download it illegally.

To celebrate the blog’s new ‘do, I’m posting a video I’ve been meaning to write about for ages — one that tells its own story of physical transformation: Father John Misty’s (NSFW) “Nancy From Now On.”

By the time he decided to leave Fleet Foxes early this year, I had gotten used to seeing Josh Tillman with long hair and a beard. In fact, Fleet Foxes had become one of those groups that are uniformly facial-hairy in my mind’s eye, kind of like a less-creepy version of The Polyphonic Spree and their choir robes. This mental image isn’t 100% accurate (photos of the band always include at least one clean-ish-shaven Fox), but it’s definitely the one that materialized each time I listened to Helplessness Blues last year.

The “Nancy From Now On” clip seems to have been designed to blow a hole in this very image, its centerpiece a bathroom-set scene in which Tillman has his luxuriously long locks lopped the fuck off. Months after seeing it for the first time, I still can’t get over this part of the video. It feels so raw, as if we shouldn’t even be watching. I love that he let us in on such an intensely personal moment, and the liberation written all over his face is an inspiring reminder that we always have the power to change the course of our lives, no matter how much weight is resting (literally or figuratively) on our shoulders.

I hope you all enjoy the video above and the audio of the song below (as well as YHT’s new look!).

Father John Misty — “Nancy From Now On” [Spotify/iTunes]