The song retains the pain
By PATRICK FAGAN
There’s a song I can’t listen to without crying. Nearly every time. And if I don’t cry, it’s because I’ve somehow been distracted and I’m not really listening to it.
It’s called I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same, and it's by Sun Kil Moon; a moniker used by the 47-year-old US songwriter Mark Kozelek and the various musicians that play with him.
I have to write about it because it’s the first song that has ever compelled me to do so. It inhabits me as I listen to it, and lays dormant within me, just below the surface of my eggshell heart, until I listen to it again. And weep again. It’s a whole new experience for me: it’s like scratch-and-sniff but it’s hear-it-and-weep.
Mark Kozelek’s music entered my life in 1994. The first album, Down Colorful Hill, by his first band, Red House Painters, was given to me by the only other person in my school year who liked bands on the 4AD label. (Thanks Nigel!) I was 16 at the time and was getting heavily into introversion. So much so that I was already writing my own melancholic odes to adolescent love, and to other intricacies of the heart of which I thought I knew more than I did.
Down Colorful Hill both cradled and changed me. I had it on constant rotation with what has since become my all-time favourite album, Gentlemen by Afghan Whigs. These records combined irrevocably altered what I thought I knew about myself, about life, about love and about music.
“So it’s not, loaded stadiums or ball parks.
And we’re not, kids on swing sets, on the black tyre.
And I thought, at 15, that I’d have it down by 16.
And 24, keeps breathing in my face… like a mad whore.”
Following a sparse, reverb-laden, plucked-guitar intro, those are the very first lyrics of Down Colorful Hill’s opening track, 24. As far as I can tell, it’s about everything not improving with age. A sadness that doesn’t lift with time. As a sensitive, introverted 16-year-old, I thought that I would have had it “down by 16”, too. When I eventually turned 24, I still didn’t. Damn it, Mark was right.
Add another 12 years to my tally, and 23 to Mark’s, and we’re both still down with the non-musical blues.
This bit of I Watched The Film… chokes me every time:
“I got a recording contract in 1992, and from there my name and my band and my audience grew.
And since that time so much has happened to me,
But I discovered I cannot shake melancholy.
For 46 years now I cannot break the spell,
I’ll carry it throughout my life,
And probably carry it to hell.
I’ll go to my grave with my melancholy,
And my ghost will echo my sentiments for all eternity.”
Jesus. That is black. The last line even shows his wearied distain at his dramatic self for singing about it. It’s the most honest description of depression I’ve ever heard, read or seen. It shows the unbeatable beast in all its horrible beauty: its longevity, its patience, its strength, its damning nature, its part in shaping some of the most powerful music ever written.
Back in 1998, when I’d just turned 20, I almost met Mark. Our almost-meeting was as powerful a game-changer in my life as his music. He played the then-Mean Fiddler (now Village) in Dublin in August. It was a good gig but had turned out rockier and more meandering than I’d hoped. (More straight-up acoustic pain would’ve been nice.) I remember seeing a hammered-drunk fan slumped with his head right in the middle of a PA speaker, and thinking to myself: “Well, there are some more intense fans than me.” My long-term ex-girlfriend was also there … with her dad. I’m pretty sure I was responsible for that double conversion.
Following the show, Mark graciously stuck around to talk to some fans. I lurked nervously, awaiting my turn to tell him how his music meant so much to me … got me through so many dark nights … thought me so much about real love, heartache and pain etc.
I was one person away when a roadie approached and said: “Hey Mark, there’s a girl over there who really wants into your pants.”
Mark walked off in pursuit. Everything I believed in died. A powerful lesson about art and life, and the mixing thereof, was learned. The base humanity of the situation appalled my idealistic soul.
Ridiculously, the art/life equation was rebalanced by Mark himself at a solo gig in Dublin’s HQ venue (now The Academy) in 2000. After berating a boozy fan - and by extension the entire audience - for drunkenly and repeatedly asking for his classic tune Katy Song, he launched into the story of that night with that girl back in 1998. Turned out she was so drunk she ended up crawling into his hotel wardrobe and used it as a toilet. It was a miserable brand of justice, but one fitting for the rift he obliviously caused between himself and a fan he’d never met.
The honesty, though, to tell that story resurrected my appreciation of him somewhat - even if the following 11-12 years were littered with albums I felt fell some distance short of his earlier output. His 2008 and 2010 Sun Kil Moon releases, April and Admiral Fell Promises respectively, made me a different type of sad; I grieved for the death of the music of someone I considered a kindred soul.
Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t I? But that’s my sorry connection to his music. When the music became more, let’s say, musician-y, and the lyrics became less tortured and personal, I lost my connection to it.
And this is the main - and saddest - reason why I cry every time I properly listen to I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same. I mean, yes, the lyrics are beautiful, smart and thought-provoking, and the stories they tell are unbearably moving. But the key ingredient is that his misery is fully, unquestionably and seemingly eternally confirmed. I feel bad for him that he can feel that low, and I feel transcendently happy/sad that I have music in my life again that nourishes the darkness within my own soul.
That said, the 2014 album the song comes from, Benji, does finish with a humorous track, Ben’s My Friend, that actually makes me laugh every time I hear it. I’m not sure where this leaves us.
Sun Kil Moon – I Watched The Film The Song Remains the Same
Picture of Mark Kozelek by Gabriel Shepard
