Photo by Gabriel Shepard
It’s almost impossible to keep track of Mark Kozelek’s many releases. For twenty years, he’s been putting out numerous LPs, EPs, covers comps, one-off collaborations, holiday thingamabobs, and live albums under various names: Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon, and, of course, Mark Kozelek. Most are readily available, but many remain rarities that even the hardcore fans have trouble tracking down. Limited edition live performances are included free with order through his Caldo Verde Recordsweb site, while bonus EPs are bundled with CD copies of major releases.
The result is a formidably sprawling catalog that can intimate listeners unfamiliar with the Kozelek cult. Perhaps they’ve heard Benji—one of the best albums of the new year and arguably the apex of the Ohio-born/California-based songwriter’s discography—and want to explore some of his previous releases but are confused about where to start. Below, I've picked six essential releases dating back two decades, representing some of the best work Kozelek has done.
The Red House Painters album: Red House Painters (Rollercoaster)
The Red House Painters released not one, but two eponymous albums in 1993: their full-length debut, known (because of its cover art) as Rollercoaster, and a follow-up, known as Bridge. The former remains one of their best—a creased and worn postcard from San Francisco. The band wanders up steep hills, down winding alleyways, around the wharf, down to the water, from "Grace Cathedral Park" to "Strawberry Hill" in Golden Gate Park. Kozelek maps out the city as emotional terrain, less interested in civic histories than in all the romantic scenes that have played out against this backdrop. As a songwriter, he’s learning here how to explode the verse-chorus-verse format; as a vocalist, he has a bit more range than he does now, often singing in a higher register; and as a guitar player, he is already patient and careful enough (some might say self-indulgent) to let "Funhouse" and the incredible "Katy Song" meander melancholically.
The (formerly) long lost album: Old Ramon
The Red House Painters spent the 90s churning out downtempo guitar jams that would get them lumped in with other so-called sadcore bands like Galaxie 500 and American Music Club. But that genre was never a perfect fit, as the band’ swan song makes clear. Old Ramon is one of Kozelek’s most storied albums: The band recorded these songs in 1998, but the obliteration of Supreme Records, an imprint of Island, doomed the album to gather dust on the shelf for years. By the time Sub Pop released it in 2001, the Painters had dried up.
It’s a shame, as Old Ramon is arguably their best and certainly their most diverse album. These songs point out all the different musical directions the band might have pursued in the next decade, toggling between the crunchy ("Between Days") and the ethereal ("Cruiser"). Opener "Wop-A-Din-Din" boasts a quasi-Hawaiian hook, a modest backing choir, and a relatively upbeat pace, all of which make it one of the band’s spryest numbers. Lyrically, it’s a gently erotic love song… about his cat. Few songwriters could imbue such a cuddly subject with such gravity. Fewer still would even try.
The covers collection: What’s Next to the Moon
Kozelek is an inveterate interpreter of others’ songs, with a repertoire that ranges from "Send in the Clowns" to "I Killed Mommy". Red House Painters’ surprise take on the Kiss song "Shock Me" introduced his signature trick of turning hard-rock songs into mopey folk numbers, but it wasn’t until 2001’s What’s Next to the Moon that Kozelek devoted a full full-length to other writers’ songs—in this case, AC/DC. Nothing about the originals sounds like they’d work in this forlorn, acoustic setting, but it’s an intriguing experiment that’s both respectful to the source material yet slyly irreverent: He knows he’s not locating new meaning, but amplifying the loneliness and yearning in the Aussie band’s hedonistic rock. It’s a technique he would revisit on subsequent covers albums, including 2008’s Finally and last year’s Like Rats, but the less said about his doomed Modest Mouse collection, the better.
The Sun Kil Moon album: Ghosts of the Great Highway
Kozelek quickly assembled a new group called Sun Kil Moon, named for the Korean boxer Sung-Kil Moon. The group’s debut, released in 2001 on Jetset Records, places the slowcore landscapes of the Painters in the framework of Americana: rich country-rock guitar tones and a steady rhythm section evoking flat landscape and a far-off horizon. It’s a perfect roadtrip record, and more crucially it reveals a new sharpness in Kozelek’s songwriting, a newly honed intuition for the right details and the right words. He toys with the expectations of confessional lyrics: Opener "Glenn Tipton" is a character sketch about a dude who sounds a lot like Kozelek himself: He loves old boxers, old movies, old musicians, his dad, and... killing people. Kozelek is no serial killer. Presumably.
As with Old Ramon, Ghosts suffered under label woes. Shortly after its 2003 release, the album slipped out of print and was unavailable until 2007, when Kozelek released a 2xCD reissue on his own Caldo Verde label.
The live album: Live at Phoenix Public House Melbourne
Via Caldo Verde, Kozelek has loosed innumerable releases upon the world: odds-and-ends collections, free-with-purchase EPs, live albums. Especially considering how he has settled into a solo acoustic set-up—seemingly for financial rather than aesthetic reasons—some of these performances blur together, rendering a few largely inessential to all but the most devoted fanboy. But last year’s Live at Phoenix Public House Melbourne stands out for several reasons. First, there’s the venue itself, which closed shortly after Kozelek’s concert. His voice and guitar resonate beautifully around that room, adding an ambient hum similar to vinyl crackle. There’s also the setlist, which culls primarily from Among the Leaves: That 2012 album marks the point when Kozelek stopped giving quite so many fucks and starting writing with disarming honesty about groupies, fanboys, VD, his bad back, and lame opening acts. And finally there is the stage banter—which isn’t banter so much as bitching. Long-in-the-tooth artists griping about their lots in life can be tedious and alienating, but here Kozelek’s cynicism is weirdly compelling and even caustically funny: "I don't even know the name of the hotel I'm at,” he confesses. “I just walked around the park, went to the 7-11, ate some nuts or something. I don't fucking know. I was bored out of my fucking mind."
The not-a-reunion-but-close-enough album: Mark Kozelek & Desertshore
Quick on the heels of a one-off album with the Album Leaf, Kozelek released this full-length collaboration with Caldo Verde signees Desertshore, which includes one Red House Painter (guitarist Phil Carney) and one Sun Kil Mooner (pianist Chris Connolly). Evincing their long history with their label boss, the band proves sensitive to Kozelek’s distinctive phrasing and song structures. He writes these songs like he’s reading his journals, favoring near-stream-of-conscious lyrics about anonymous hotel rooms, ESPN Classic, the loneliness of touring life, Papillon, Kung Fu, Johnny Carson, and Anton LaVey. There’s a sneaky humor to these musings, especially the hotel ramble "Livingston Bramble", which sizes up Kozelek’s fellow indie-rock guitar players. "I hate Nels Cline," he sings, then launches into a scribbly solo that’s also a wicked parody of scribbly solos.