The future of literature, someone recently said, belongs to books “that are impossible to summarize, impossible to explain, the books that you have no option but to sit down and read.” The same could be said of albums—and Jon Bellion’s latest, Father Figure, checks those boxes. The musically eclectic and (be advised) lyrically explicit effort from the newly independent artist is a compelling portrait of the struggle in becoming a family man—and a man of faith.
It’s possible you’ve never heard of Jon Bellion, but you’ve almost certainly heard his music: He’s the songwriter behind megahits like “The Monster” by Eminem and Rihanna, “Memories” by Maroon 5, and “Ghost” by Justin Bieber, just to name a few. And that’s just the beginning: He’s also written songs for Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, Katy Perry—the list goes on and on. I first discovered him through his work on Jon Batiste’s World Music Radio—the refreshing “Drink Water” and the exuberant “Worship,” which Bellion recently named as his most meaningful song.
But Bellion’s own career as a singer has followed a somewhat rockier path. After releasing two solo albums, The Human Condition (2016) and Glory Sound Prep (2018), the Long Island native effectively went off-grid for six years, disappearing into writing songs for other people. When he reemerged, he had married his wife whom he’d known since they were teenagers, had three sons, and disentangled himself from a messy contract. In one fell swoop, he’d settled in and settled up, speaking directly to loyal fans with a new outlook on life—and a whole lot to say.
Father Figure is difficult to categorize musically; it glides from classic breakbeats to acoustic ballads, clearly drawing on Bellion’s beatmaking roots—the influence of both J Dilla’s Donuts and chipmunk soul is clear—but also stretching out into rock, pop, country, even spoken word. It’s the product of a man who knows and loves music of all kinds, with a variety of guest vocalists—Batiste, Luke Combs, Pharrell Williams, Teddy Swims—lending their talents in the process. The album’s creative spirit is summed up in the infectious “Kid Again”: “I am a kid again,” he sings over a James Brown breakbeat and chopped-up guitar sample. “I could do anything.”
But what makes Father Figure especially interesting is the collision of themes atop this collision of sounds—the quest for money and prestige running up against the hidden and humbling duties of simply being present to one’s family. Both the delights and work of marriage are there (“Wash”/“Wash2” and “Get It Right”), but the album’s golden thread is what it means to be a father. In fact, whereas Bellion’s first two album covers were high-concept illustrations, this one simply features an old Christmastime candid photo of his father and mother.
In one interview, Bellion reflects,
The whole record [is] what is the figure of a father now? . . . There’s a lot of the world reminding everyone how much of a piece of [expletive] they are. We’ve done that pretty well. And there’s a lot of, “I’m so spectacular. You should come and live a life like mine ‘cause I do what I want when I want.” There’s not a ton of, like, cut the grass, go to work. . . . I think we threw the baby out with the bathwater in the struggle for masculinity: What is a dad? What isn’t a dad? . . . You kind of have this existential dread that we’re all pretending is not there currently in America.
Bellion has hit on something important here—one thinks of the classic De Niro scene in A Bronx Tale about “the working man”—but he’s not, he adds, looking to sit down for a conversation on masculinity with Jordan Peterson anytime soon. He’s a musician, and this deeply personal album is simply about his own internal conflicts, offered to help others in the same place. Bellion feels the pull between, as he puts it, “vanity” and “humanity.”
That tension explodes in the album’s hard-hitting title track, “Father Figure.” Over a breakbeat, piano, and falsetto chant thundering with New York energy, Bellion’s lyrics reveal a fascinating crosstalk: He seems to be addressing, simultaneously, God (“Lord . . .”), his father (“I’ll be okay if I’m half the man as you / These boys will make it through”), his sons (“I got you / And your moms too / I swear I will follow after you”), and—this is where it really gets interesting—himself. Amid the positive self-talk about fatherhood, a counter-attack emerges, one that at first appears to be aimed at lesser fathers, but is actually aimed at his own ego: his attachments to money and success, which pull him away from his family:
You look so sick inside your big Ferrari
You left your kids outside to hit the party
You look so sick inside your
Sick inside your
Sick . . .All these horses, but where your carriage at?
All these crosses, but where your marriage at?
For the lettuce
You took a flamethrower to the cabbage patch
Rather than neatly resolve this tension, the song drives full speed right through it into the rest of the album, where the same dynamics play out again and again. On “Why,” a song written just before the birth of Bellion’s first son, he reflects on the anxiety of opening up your heart in love, risking suffering and loss—an anxiety that, needless to say, causes many men to forego marriage and kids altogether:
Why love anything at all?
If the higher I fly is the further I fall
Then why love anything at all?
But the question simultaneously answers itself, especially in the context of the video, which shows Bellion at home and at ease, with his parents, wife, and kids surrounding him. At genius.com, one annotation brilliantly ties the song to a passage from C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
As the album draws to a close, Bellion throws a one-two combo with “Rich and Broke” and “Don’t Shoot.” The first finds Bellion reflecting on being surrounded by the artifacts of success—big bed, big house, big car, big chain—when an earthquake hits New York, and immediately thinking only of his kids. The second is a protective father’s ballad: Bellion sings of shielding his son, happily at play, from cruelty, even if it means a momentary lapse into hot-blooded bravado. This leads to the coda, “My Boy”—a minimalistic lamentation on the brokenness of the world and the fear that one’s children will get a taste of it all too soon.
At the heart of this song—indeed, at the heart of the whole album—is Bellion’s relationship with the Father. Though he’s been guarded about the specifics of his own spiritual journey, religious themes permeate his work. He’s said that his father took their family to church growing up, and that later in life, around 2014, he had a kind of spiritual awakening, becoming “a devout Christian.” Father Figure makes reference not only to God himself (“Child of God, I am the Alpha and Omega’s draft”), but to saints (“I am no saint, I am no saint, it’s true”), the altar (“Jesus cosigned when I took you to the altar”), demons (“In my REM sleep, I see demons”), and the devil (“Son of the morning comes to take the family / We say, ‘Devil get out the house’”). On “Italia Breeze,” his ode to his Italian heritage, he even references the Mass, though from an ambiguous if not outright alienated standpoint: “Cold-stone killers, we’re showing up to Mass / Thank God my father took up the Christian path.”
While Bellion’s own relationship to Catholicism is obscure, as a Catholic, I can’t help but notice how one devotion in particular—to St. Joseph, the foster father of Jesus and the husband of Mary—ties all these threads of the album together in a remarkable way: Joseph is the patron saint of fathers and workers, the protector and defender of the Holy Family, the “terror of demons,” and a saint of great importance to Italians, in large part through the miracle of the St. Joseph’s altar in Sicily. Scripture records none of his words, but he spoke volumes by his actions: his righteousness, his obedience, his service—and his radiant disappearance into his God-given mission, despite all his hesitations and amid all his struggles.
What now for Bellion, and for all the other men caught up in the culture’s identity crisis? How do we get past the simultaneous flight from, and longing for, marriage and family? What does it mean to be a father, to be a good father—to be a good Christian father? Father Figure is an honest and creative confrontation with these very real questions. As for answers, maybe it’s time for all of us to go to that ideal father figure and take some notes.