Sun Kil Moon

I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same

by Salvatore Setola

Sun Kil Moon – I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same

(2014 – Featured on “Benji”, Caldo Verde)

“Il punto, professore, è che se nella tua vita non ci fosse la sofferenza, come faresti a capire quando invece sei felice? Felice rispetto a cosa?” (Cormac McCarthy, Sunset Limited)

When you reach the threshold of thirty, you feel the need to take stock of who you are, to measure the gap between what you wanted and what you have, and to gauge the distance still left to travel toward what you want. You look back, with a weight on your soul, at everything you've already lost along the way, at the time wasted, at the buds of life so often left like seedlings on the windowsill, waiting for the sun to break through the clouds. You weigh the pains (not many, fortunately) and the regrets (few of those too, but some as huge as elephants), the goals that already smell of failure, and the possibilities that still keep you moving forward: go on and walk. Mark Kozelek, along his road, has been walking for years. Ever since, with his Red House Painters, he took sadness by the hand and didn't sell it to us as some childish singer-songwriter cliché, but presented it for what it is: the awareness we lack in order to make peace with our own idea of happiness. There's no other way to explain how such tormented songs can soothe the very torments they describe; no other way to explain why every listen to "Grace Cathedral Park", "New Jersey" or "Medicine Bottle" feels like sending yourself a cry for help while, at the same time, finding in those very notes – always – an emergency exit, a lifeline. They called it sadcore, because it was rhythmically as slow as slowcore but even more mournful in atmosphere and subdued in melody. In truth, it was music that lifted the melancholy from the heart only to leave it etched, all the same, in the eyes.

Melancholy: there she is, Mark Kozelek's traveling companion. And even though he plays it down, saying that at forty-seven you can't write from the perspective of a twenty-five-year-old because life's circumstances change drastically, the truth is that Mark has always sung about her. And we, who listen to him, love him precisely for this: for his melancholy, which is our melancholy too. Regardless of age. So, approaching a new turning point on his human journey, Kozelek too felt the need to take stock of his existence and – being no ordinary fool but one of the greatest songwriter American songwriters of the last thirty years – he poured into music his own reckoning with what he has lived and with living itself, with the past and with the present, with what he was and with what he has always been.

Released at the start of this 2014, “Benji” is an intimate, moving record, almost a summation of Kozelek's poetic universe, as well as a portrait of his private cosmos, his innermost essence. It's a dense work that calls for close attention but also allows for simple surrender to the quiet beauty of eleven songs written by a man returning to the places where he grew up – Ohio – to come to terms with memories and lost loved ones. And to put back in order what remains.

The Ohio of “Benji” is the counterpart to Nebraska di Springsteen, to Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, where sins and sorrows go to drown, to the gas stations painted by Hopper that can do nothing but sit there, along those desolate highways where every so often someone shows up to cross paths with another lonely soul. It's the deepest America, the scars on its hypocritical facade, the stars falling one by one from the flag, leaving only two stripes. Red like blood and black like mourning. Ohio demanded back the lives of Mark's cousin – Carissa, who died in a fire at thirty-five – and of his childhood friend Brett, while it spared that of John Wise (Jim in the song), a friend of his father who tried and failed to kill himself after killing his wife out of despair at watching her suffer in a hospital bed. But that same Ohio also knew how to give great friendships, first loves and first fucks (“Dogs”). It's the Ohio of girlfriends who last only so long and parents who last forever (“I Can't Live Without My Mother's Love,” “I Love My Dad”); the Ohio of “Micheline,” the mentally disabled girl who kept knocking on the Kozelek family's door, innocently asking to take a bath with Mark and taking her host's refusal with the same smile as someone who “has just received an autograph from Paul McCartney.”

Above all, though, it's Mark Kozelek's Ohio: the microcosm in which mister Sun Kil Moon came of age, figured out who he was and what he would become. In this sense, the ten ecstatic minutes of “I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same” play like an account – to borrow from Proust – of time lost and time regained, unspooled over suspended acoustic arpeggios reminiscent of the most transcendent John Fahey turned into a nostalgic black and white that blurs the images imprinted in memory the way Gerhard Richter's paintings do with photographed things, people and landscapes, rendering their materiality uncertain and transforming them into holograms of consciousness. Life, after all, is exactly a burst of filmic images that flash fleetingly before our eyes. We can't hold onto them beyond that fleeting moment, because we can't stop the flow, and if we try to grab them, clenching them in a fist, all that's left in our hand is a feeling of evanescence, like when we stick a hand out of a moving car's window, naively trying to catch the wind. That's it: “I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same” is the instant we pull our arm back in.

The song's title quotes “The Song Remains The Same,” the famous concert film by the Led Zeppelin released in 1976, which alternated footage from the English band's shows held three years earlier at Madison Square Garden in New York. Kozelek sets his stream of consciousness in motion by pinpointing the exact moment when, as a boy, he watched it for the first time on TV. It was the night of a hot summer weekend at friends' house in the town of Canton, northeast Ohio. The molten words, sung in a possessed tone, describe a virtual encounter with the members of Zeppelin in a visionary ecstasy. John Paul Jones's dreamlike sequences in “No Quarter” and the close-up of the icon Jimmy Page brandishing his legendary double-neck Gibson hypnotized him (“Everything mesmerized me”). It's the eternal, incorruptible enchantment of musical vocation. We've all been through it: those who create it, those who listen to it and those who try to write about it. In this particular case, what struck a chord in young Mark's soul wasn't so much John Bonham's rhythmic cannon fire or Page's guitar roars, but the faint folk caresses of “Rain Song” and “Bron-Yr-Aur.” And that says a lot about his sensibility.

Kozelek – like all melancholics – knows himself perfectly well; he knows full well that this state of gnawing unease will never go away, so he analyzes it, becoming his own psychologist and using his wonderful music as a diagnostic tool. Mark digs, digs with the fingers that pluck the strings of his guitar just as his vocal cords scrape his throat, unearthing the roots of a feeling that is sometimes so inconsolable. Melodically, the song always stays the same. Harmonically, though, the final two minutes stretch out into dreamlike interweavings. But there's no overflowing; the notes float while staying within the banks. The narrative river, on the other hand, bursts its banks, bringing skeletons to the surface. The first, that of a young friend who was thrown from his moped and run over by a truck; the second, that of a classmate who died in a car accident; the third, that of his grandmother, whose death paralyzed him with grief (“Then I went to my bedroom and I lay down/ And in my tears and in the heaviness of everything I drowned”). But there's more: the guilt that gnawed at him for knocking out an innocent kid at the playground with a punch. The specter of the boy's broken glasses and reddened face still haunts him, so much so that it drives him to an unlikely yet heartfelt posthumous apology (“I was never the young schoolyard bully/ And wherever you are, that poor kid, I'm so sorry”).

Kozelek's existential biography reaches its epilogue in the final part of the song, which speaks of a friend who lives in New Mexico: “It's been fifteen years since I last saw him.” The reference is to Ivo Watts-Russell, the founder of 4AD who in 1999 decided to abdicate from the music industry and retreat to the desert areas near Santa Fe. “È l’uomo che mi mise sotto contratto nel ’92/ Andrò laggiù a ringraziarlo viso a viso/ Per aver scoperto precocemente il mio talento/ Per avermi sostenuto a lungo in questo bellissimo mondo musicale a cui ero destinato”. That musical world which, in Mark's eyes, still retains all its magic intact, even though his gaze is no longer that of a child. If anything, the difference lies in the lucid awareness of an inescapable, senseless force – called fate – that no one can escape: “Quando lo riguardo adesso, The Song Remains The Same/ Mi comunica le stesse cose che mi comunicava allora/ A eccezione delle scene con Peter Grant e John Bonham/ Che ora mi sembrano diverse quando penso alla morte che incombe su di loro”.

The deaths of Peter Grant (the Zeppelin manager felled by a heart attack in November 1995 while at the wheel of his car) and John Bonham (who died in his sleep at 32, choked by his own vomit) stand here as the allegory of a demon impossible to drive away. One can only accept its existence and try to exorcise it. Kozelek has spent a lifetime trying, taking a universal psychotropic drug called music, but he's discovered that his congenital sadness will grip him forever: “I'll go to my grave with my melancholy/ And my ghost will echo these feelings for eternity.” And yet he keeps singing, keeps writing enchanting music, knowing full well it won't do him a damn bit of good. He's done for by now. He can no longer be healed. But maybe we can. If he hasn't yet laid down his guitar and put a bullet in his head, it's evidently because he hopes that the sadness of his songs can still be – for those of us who listen to them – the awareness we're missing in order to make peace with our own idea of happiness. He's given up his own joy to give ours a chance. And to think some consider him a surly sociopath, a sarcastic misanthrope. The truth is that maybe we don't deserve Mark Kozelek.

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24/02/2026

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Salvatore Setola, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition