In The Particular Lies The Universal

On Sun Kil Moon, Mark Kozelek, and his recent songwriting.

Mark Kozelek has made a twenty-plus year career out of writing songs about death, but for the first time on Sun Kil Moon's 2014 release Benji these deaths were completely personal and unobstructed. Where death is usually handled in songwriting in metaphor and euphemism, Kozelek dove right in and confronted it; who killed who, the way they died, and the things they took with them to the grave. There was a distinct lack of reverence, but not to the deceased, but to the deaths themselves.

Kozelek refused to be afraid of death, while also not claiming to understand it. His relationship to the dead was always clear, whether it was family (“Carissa”), a friend (“Micheline”), or someone he had never met (“Pray for Newtown”). And while the deaths of Benji were of all different proximities to Kozelek, they were all clearly meaningful to him, whether they had any business to be or not. Kozelek himself admits that he’s obsessing, and has his entire life (“I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same”). But most notable about the deaths was the way he relayed them: through small details of their lives and his. He would mention locations, fast food chains, movies, and bands, none of which had any meaning to the stories except that Kozelek associated them with the people and their deaths. On first glance it’s rambling, but on second glance it’s recognizing that the things we remember about people are rarely the things we’d expect.

Bloggers and critics seem to bring up novels when discussing Benji more than with any other album I’ve bothered to extensively Google (which is more more I’d care to admit). They call Kozelek a “late great American Modernist,” or as another dared to ask, “Is Sun Kil Moon's Benji The Great American Novel?” Yet another compares a song on Kozelek's next release Universal Themes to Anna Karenina, and Kozelek to Tolstoy. These are bold claims, and weird claims, because it is unusual for critics to turn to literature when discussing music, but Kozelek has brought that about. Why?

Benji is certainly an album of stories, but so are many songwriters’ lyrics, and you don’t see them frequently getting called literary. But Kozelek at times doesn’t seem to be writing lyrics. To block quote Jeva Lange, one of the writers who makes the connection:

“…I read it as a kind of Great American Novel—and note, I choose the word “read” here intentionally. That’s because great albums can function like novels—or, in the case of Benji, like memoirs. What makes Benji even more novelistic to me is, when you get right down to the songwriting, the words and structures aren’t lyrical. Kozelek’s lines rarely end in rhyme, there are almost no choruses, and there seems to be little consideration for the sounds and rhythms of the words he sings…”

But perhaps the most critical part of these stories is that we perceive them to be true. Ian Cohen of Pitchfork did the fact-checking for Benji; the places he describes are real, the ages he gives are verifiable, and the shows he mentions going to really took place. This is real life, and real death, and really vulnerable. Kozelek isn’t writing stories that express how he feels, but relaying events that made him feel, and asking if they make us feel the same way. As Lange puts it, to weaken Benji would be to find it fictitious.

Universal Themes, as far as I can tell, is also true. Sun Kil Moon’s 2015 offering is also about the details and scenes, but it is about, for the most part, nothing. It is an album of eight, eight-plus minute “Ben’s My Friend” songs, long stories of Kozelek’s travels and adventures over the last year. He sings about the meals he’s eaten, the people he’s met, the TV he’s watched, the shows he’s played, all through the same imagery of mundane details he used so effectively on Benji. In this sense it is Benji all over again, but with the meaningfulness of the personal suffering behind the stories ripped out. Retroactively, I felt like I should have asked whether Kozelek’s songwriting style on Benji was a sort of distancing tactic from his subject material, but Universal Themes appears to hold the answer: no. Or, if it was, Kozelek found something in it, and now it’s just songwriting.

Universal Themes is Benji blown up and taken to its extreme. It takes the framework established on Benji and draws it out into longer songs that make less sense structurally and narratively. It’s fractured, scatterbrained, and all over the place. There are hardly choruses, but there instead are asides, pauses, and rants. But it doesn’t feel like Kozelek is messing around; he’s serious about these stories, and he wants you to take them seriously. He wants you to take his lunch every bit as seriously as you took Benji. What does that say about Benji? What does it say about his relationship to Benji, or his relationship with songwriting in general?

I insist on talking about Benji so much when I discuss Universal Themes because I’m not sure Universal Themes can exist without it. In a very real sense, Universal Themes would not be nearly as powerful as it is if it did not follow up Benji. Without Benji, Universal Themes would just beg the question “what if this was all about something?” But that question has already been answered. Instead, Universal Themes is able to ask, and demand an answer, “what if this was all about nothing?” And what does it mean when it still moves you?

As a bit of an aside, a worthy distinction to make of Universal Themes from Benji is that it is more of a “rock” album than Kozelek has made in quite some time. The noisy electric sections of “With A Sort Of Grace I Went To The Bathroom To Cry” and “Ali/Spinks 2” bring to mind the same Neil Young comparisons Red House Painters got on Songs For A Blue Guitar in 1996. One critic said of Benji: “It feels as if that hollowing out of the American song tradition that Kozelek has been attempting his whole career has here been achieved.” I’m not sure that really happened until Universal Themes.

It’s no big statement to say that there’s a certain identity crisis with “rock stars” nowadays. No one wants larger than life rock stars anymore; now they have to be relatable. That’s all you get nowadays, is singers trying to convince you that they’re really just like you. Universal Themes calls BS on that. Kozelek’s average day frequently involves traveling, playing shows, or meeting celebrities, because he is a professional musician and actor. It’s refreshing to hear someone own up to it. Universal Themes implicitly says “if you think songwriters are some sort of fantastic artistic heroes then I guess that does makes me better than you, yet here you are wanting me to be relatable. So here’s my life, the movies I watch, the friends I have, where I live, and what happens behind the scenes of the shows you watch and the albums you listen to.” It’s funny, in singing about being a rock star, Kozelek found the relatability few have been able to find.

When I started brainstorming for this blog post I searched for other people’s thoughts on these two albums to get me thinking, but I kept finding people just telling personal stories. People were telling stories of their own banalities, and sometimes their stories were heavy, and sometimes they were not. Sometimes people also talked about the albums directly, and sometimes they did not. But they were clearly inspired by these albums, not only to just write about them, but to partake in them, and to try to write their own stories in the same way. Which was shocking to me, because that’s what I did too. Kozelek isn’t just making music or art right now, he’s making something that makes others want to make it too. He’s expressing something that’s making others want to express themselves. That’s important. That’s how you know something is important.

Some person on RateYourMusic claimed in their review of Benji well before Universal Themes came out that James Joyce said, “In the particular lies the universal.” I suppose in this case I couldn’t agree more.

This is the second in what has accidentally become a series on Sun Kil Moon. Read the first here and the third here.