Songfacts®:

• At 9 minutes and 19 seconds, the title track of Mahashmashana - Josh Tillman's sixth album as Father John Misty - is a proper odyssey. The title is Sanskrit for "great burial ground."
  
  The song sets the tone for the album. From the very first notes, it delivers exactly the kind of existential grandeur you might expect from something named after a cremation site. It opens with solemn, sweeping orchestration, a choral arrangement that feels almost sacred, and a drumbeat that plods along with the steady inevitability of time itself. Eventually, it all builds into a cinematic crescendo before Misty pulls us back down with the final, weary refrain:
  
  They have gone the way of all flesh
  And what was found is lost
  Yes, it is
  Yes, it is
• For Misty, "Mahashmashana" is less about religion in any traditional sense and more about the impossibility of avoiding the human condition. "There's an actor in every one of us," he told Blackbird Spyplane. "And maybe we have some kind of inkling that we are, in our truest form, an undifferentiated part of a non-localized consciousness."
  
  In other words, he's saying maybe God is out there, trying on different personas - Josh Tillman, Jonah, you, me - like a celestial character actor with an unquenchable thirst for experience.
  
  But before you go assuming this is all some grand spiritual awakening, Misty is quick to bring us back to earth. "The song 'Mahashmashana' is definitely written from a dream-logic place," he said. "But in the end, it's like, 'Yeah, maybe there's reason to believe that the real truth of our experience is non-human - but the flesh wins every time. The body wins. It's just too vivid. The hallucination is too strong.'"
  
  In other words, we can theorize all we like about the nature of existence, but at the end of the day, we're still just people with aching backs and overdue bills.
• Despite his moniker, Father John Misty is not religious, nor does Mahashmashana serve as any kind of spiritual manifesto. The album leans heavily on religious imagery, but only as a vehicle for exploring mortality, transformation, and the strangeness of human existence.
  
  "Despite the lofty title and concepts, my concerns in the work are pretty terrestrial," he told NPR. He just liked "the contrast of such a grand concept mapped onto what I'm usually singing about."
• And where, exactly, did he stumble upon Mahashmashana? Was it through deep theological study? A profound personal revelation? "I read the word in a Bruce Wagner novel," Misty told Mojo magazine. "And I mean, how could you not be inspired by that word? It jumped right out. I mean, just visually, it has all these sha-na-nas and ha-ha-has in it."
• Clocking in at just over nine minutes, "Mahashmashana" is the longest song on the album. Father John Misty has previously released longer songs: "Leaving LA" from Pure Comedy (2017) is 13 minutes long; "The Next 20th Century" from Chloë and the Next 20th Century (2022) is approximately 10 minutes and 30 seconds long.
  
  Mahashmashana's other tracks range from four to eight minutes, suggesting that brevity was not exactly a priority this time around.
  
  So, how does a song become nine minutes long? According to Misty, it's rarely intentional. "Probably the lyric," he told Mojo. "But you don't really know how long these things are going to be until you check them. And it was always a little bit of sticker shock when we would finish a take, and then I'd go into the control room and say, 'How long was that?' They'd say, 'Well, eight minutes.' (Laughs.) As long as it doesn't feel like eight minutes, then you're okay."