Oh no, not another blog post about Sun Kil Moon

A third in an ongoing series.

As I watched season 3 of BoJack Horseman and first began listening to Jesu/Sun Kil Moon this week I started drawing comparisons between the two. Both are about the behind-the-curtain lives of celebrities (a relative term with Mark Kozelek I suppose), both feature morally ambiguous enigmatic protagonists, and both prominently feature backstories filled with the people who made them who they are. I started imagining a BoJack-style show about Kozelek beginning in 2013 about an artist's crisis leading to the recording of Benji. Season two would follow Benji, the reaction to it, and the events following it, many of which were later recounted in Universal Themes. Season three would continue the same way, leading up to the release of Kozelek's 2016 collaborative album with Jesu, Jesu/Sun Kil Moon. The show would depict the events described on the albums in a more linear fashion, including old events via flashbacks, show Kozelek wrestling with them, and ultimately reach a point of putting them into the albums. It was too easy to imagine and practically wrote itself, which was odd because I couldn't think of any other stretch of albums by any other musical artist I could nearly do this with. Kozelek was writing the show himself, and it dawned on me why I've been so enamored with his new album (and all of his recent stuff) lately.

I spent time last blog post on Kozelek talking about Benji as a novel, but I'd instead now like to propose a different cross-medium comparison: yes, television. Increasingly, Kozelek's albums sound more like seasons of the Sun Kil Moon Show, with each song being an episode composed of scenes, some connected and some not, and some connected across albums and songs. He's only able to tell sophisticated enough stories by losing a lot of songwriting norms and frequently just speaking in monologue over Jesu's backdrops. Most lyricists write with choruses and short verses, but there's Sun Kil Moon songs with lyric sheets longer than this blog post. He also occupies a similar realm of recurring characters and structures as a tv show; many songs can be taken primarily in isolation, not pertaining to any particular overall narrative, but often do reference places or people featured in other songs. It's not unlike how a television show would have an individual plot in each episode, but with thematic content and stories also being told across episodes and seasons. Really, he's just describing his everyday life, as it happens as mostly disjointed but loosely connected events.

The Kozelek cinematic universe allows him to explore themes deeper than just about any other songwriter. Most every songwriter explores themes, but few can really live in them as thoroughly as Kozelek. The songwriting isn't very different from Universal Themes in content and style, though perhaps even more of diary, with some "entries" even timed and dated. But with every album like this Kozelek is able to draw from a greater cast of characters (as in, real people), and settings established in previous albums allow each new release to be more than just itself. It's the latest update in the Mark Kozelek story, and each one is more powerful because of what came before it. The story has been going on for a few years now, and I'm finding myself getting more attached with each iteration. Plus I would argue he's continuing to grow into his new songwriting style, and getting more at home in making the everyday interesting.

When he says he cares about Carissa's mom in the album's saddest song "Exodus," you know he does. And you know exactly what he's talking about, because he wrote a song about Carissa on Benji. But ultimately I would say that this is his most uplifting album in a while, mostly because of the stunning 14-minute Basinksi-esque ambient closer "Beautiful You," which, along with a few other songs on Jesu/Sun Kil Moon, firmly establish that despite Kozelek's obsession with death he really is truly happy, and he knows he is happy. Somehow, through all the darkness of his albums for the last few decades, he's still able to rest at night with someone he loves, and walk into the San Francisco Bay and let it embrace him.

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