After high school, most of my friends – scratch that, all of my friends – went off to college. I started a band.
Didn’t turn out to be much of a long-term commitment; we broke up after a highly tumultuous year of only a handful of concerts, a couple of demos and one radio session to show for it.
On the other hand, I could go on forever about the songs we wrote, traveling we did, shows we played, and all the incredible music we discovered together that year.
At the top of that list is Mark Kozelek (and his many incarnations – formerly as the Red House Painters, and now as Sun Kil Moon, whose new album April was just released on April 1).
I remember when I first heard the Red House Painters.
Keith, the singer in my band, was giving me a lift to band practice, his prized Bonneville blasting cool air in my face.
A plain song spoke through the speakers; I turned it up high.
It was “Have You Forgotten,” the leading track from the band’s 1996 classic, Songs for a Blue Guitar, the kind of song that just melts your heart without even trying.
Keith told me he bought it randomly at Tower Records – still in business then – because he liked the cover; and, more importantly, because he’d noticed, upon examining the song titles, that they’d covered YES’ “Long Distance Runaround.”
YES was, and is, Keith’s favorite band (which is pretty embarrassing and probably explains why our band didn’t work out) but I can be grateful that his misguided YES affection led us to Songs for a Blue Guitar.
I bought the album, played it endlessly and put the songs on just about every tape I ever made for a girl.
It was the perfect soundtrack at the perfect time; the right album to usher in my twenties.
It’s still hard to say exactly what makes Kozelek’s songs so lovely. The guitars masterful – ethereal one minute and raging like Crazy Horse the next, and the lyrics are evocative, richly painted scenes of youth past, love and turmoil.
His songs can be terrifically bleak, yet contain glimpses of hope; his songs can warm, sunny and pastoral, but not without an undercurrent of pain, anger, violence.
What separates Kozelek from your typical sad-core strummer is his restraint: there’s never an overflow of feeling. Kozelek deals in subtlety, in weaving simple things together into something new, something strikingly, achingly beautiful.
The Red House Painters was essentially the Mark Kozelek Band, and Kozelek dropped the moniker after the completion of Old Ramon in 1998.
He would go it alone for a time, releasing a solo album made up entirely of Bon Scott-era AC/DC covers (2001’s excellent What’s Next to the Moon) and making appearances in films like Almost Famous and Vanilla Sky.
Sun Kil Moon would eventually fill the void with their debut album, Ghosts of the Great Highway, which many claim is Kozelek’s masterpiece, eclipsing even the best Painters work.
Ghosts appeared in 2003, though Keith and I didn’t hear it until 2005, and it dominated our world.
Kozelek’s next effort under the Sun Kil Moon moniker came in 2005: the album Tiny Cities, which consisted of nothing but Modest Mouse covers. It was stunningly – and somewhat surprisingly – gorgeous, but whetted my appetite for new, original Kozelek tunes. (I don’t even want to imagine how it felt to more veteran Kozelek fans, folks who’d been waiting since 2003.)
Fortunately for the devoted, a new Kozelek record has finally come.
A month ago, “Moorestown,” the sixth track from April, leaked, and it seemed like clockwork: there I was again, playing a Sun Kil Moon record on repeat, getting lost in it.
That’s the kind of band Sun Kil Moon has always been: perfect for getting lost, for letting your mind wander.
The album was released on Arpil 1, 2008 and is available at caldoverderecords.com.