Mark Kozelek is a 45-year-old American musician who came to prominence in the early 1990s with his band Red House Painters. Unlike the college-derived bands of that era, his group did not specialise in an idiosyncratic take on post-punk guitar playing, or have a mildly ironic lyrical stance. Instead, Kozelek and Red House Painters wrote autobiographical songs of a beauty and vulnerability that might be seen to have peaked in 1995 with a song called Summer Dress. In the days when people still made cassette compilations to convey their feelings to prospective romantic partners, Summer Dress ("Makes you more beautiful than the rest") was the kind of song guys who aspired to be musicians would put on a tape for girls they had just met.
Today, Red House Painters are no more (fittingly, given Kozelek’s habitual mode, there was no big drama; more a quiet leave-taking), and Kozelek operates either solo or with a flexible personnel, as Sun Kil Moon, a variation on the name of a South Korean boxer, Moon Sung-kil – boxers, like birds and cats, being themes that recur often on this album. Some of his contemporaries (let’s say Pavement and their frontman Steve Malkmus) today have a niche, iconic status, are mentioned in American novels and enjoy the financial security of reformation tours. Some, more minor and neglected (like, say, Codeine, who with Red House Painters were considered proponents of something called “sadcore”), are being rediscovered and compiled. Others, not so lucky, are dead. Somewhere between those positions, Kozelek is still working steadily.
Among The Leaves is Kozelek's fifth full-length album as Sun Kil Moon, and while it continues to feature his melancholic singing voice, his fine playing on the classical guitar and his jaw-dropping capacity to paint a situation in a couple of lines, it does not yield many songs sensitive guys would want put on cassette compilations to convey their suitability to girls. Instead, it muses on touring and homesickness, disappointing experiences at European festivals, infidelities and one-night stands. Among The Leaves reflects on two decades in the music business, and wittily anatomises the condition of being a 45-year-old singer-songwriter whose talent is considerable but whose appeal is selective.
Songs about the music business are not, it’s fair to say, often the work of someone at Kozelek’s stage of the game. A sophomoric endeavour, they are the traditional riposte to sudden popularity from a band that has yet to uncover anything more interesting to write about than the idea that fame is not all they thought it would be. This, however, is a more mature view, in which Kozelek looks long and hard at his life and asks himself, as he does here, “What kind of man travels and sings?” This is a long album, and it travels as far and wide to do its work, as Kozelek himself must.
Touring and questionable decisions are all big topics but Kozelek’s take on them is the opposite of that moronic stag night motto “what happens on tour stays on tour ...”. Trains, planes, even airport shuttle buses all figure in the songs here, their motion conveyed by the gentle shuffle of Kozelek’s words. Human contact in this context is as fleeting as it is said to be in wartime. The magnificent That Bird Has A Broken Wing emphasises the impersonal nature of a casual sexual encounter: “Didn’t get a number/Get a name/Went to sleep, woke up and got a train ...”
That's what we might laughably call Kozelek's "down time" covered, not that there are many times you could exactly describe him as "up". Presenting his songs to a paying audience is not viewed here as a joyful experience. As the album proceeds, we find him picking up his "pitiful handful of cash", playing to a half-empty room at a gig on a boat in Bristol, UK, as well as facing down heckles from a drunk man in Dublin, who tells him: "It's the worst night I've had since Bill Callahan". A crushing contextual blow arrives as early as track 2, Sunshine In Chicago. His band, he remembers, played the city in the 1990s when they had female fans who "all were cute". But times have changed. "Now," he sighs, "I just sign posters for guys in tennis shoes."
But this, as Kozelek reminds us (and more often than not, himself) throughout Among The Leaves is the life he has chosen. On the one hand, he's faintly embarrassed that his ambitions haven't changed since he was a teenager, wanting to play "at outdoor festivals, theatres and bars". On the other, he can come across as bitterly defensive of his life as it might appear to a regular office-bound commuter ("You get on this plane/And I'll sit at your desk ..." he admonishes one imagined critic). Kozelek's condition, as recounted here, is essentially a midlife crisis, albeit an inverted one. A businessman in middle age might seek excitement by taking up motorcycling, having an affair or buying an electric guitar to play in his den. As a musician, Kozelek, if he is envious of anything, envies convention, forced to put his nose up against the glass of white collar success: ex-lovers and contemporaries who have become financially successful (as he recounts in The Winery) or who have signifiers of comfort "a stable family with a picnic table", as he does not.
What Kozelek effectively does throughout the album is reassure himself of having taken the correct path. It’s a tough road, but he takes some comfort in knowing that it’s not everyone who has the talent to walk it. Ironically, the song that addresses this idea most explicitly on the album is not as successful as one would hope it to be. It was probably amusing to call a song The Moderately Talented Yet Attractive Young Woman vs The Exceptionally Talented Yet Not So Attractive Middle Aged Man. But the conceit of the song, in which Kozelek fleetingly hooks up with an aspirant singer-songwriter and essentially “reviews” her underwhelming gig in comparison to his own stellar performance seems a little callous: an occasion here where he crosses the line from unvarnished truth into plain mean-spiritedness.
It's near the end of this 70-minute album, on the 11th song, where Kozelek completely nails the unique tone of musical and lyrical beauty, music business satire and deadly seriousness that is the ultimate gift of Among The Leaves. As others on the album have been, the song ostensibly seems to be a beautiful song about his hometown (Martinez in the San Francisco Bay Area) but which then begins to unpick his entire process. "Ever wonder," he asks, "why there aren't more/Than 10 songs on most albums?/Because it's a chore." It's a statement to stop you in your tracks.
That, of course, is the point – this is an album ultimately about respecting the song and the person who writes it. Writing songs has to be a chore, far in excess even of what it must be to promote them in their recorded form around the world. But while a professional might view the process wryly, as Kozelek does (“I wrote this one/I know it ain’t great/We’ll probably sequence it track number eight”), this is ultimately a calling on which only a select few are entitled to comment. If you want to know how serious a business this is, the song suggests, you should ask some of Kozelek’s talented 1990s contemporaries: Elliott Smith, Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse, Blind Melon’s Shannon Hoon. “Ask them to get up on stage/And sing you a tune.” As Kozelek’s tennis shoe-wearing fans will all know, we cannot – they’ve all either committed suicide or overdosed.
Other less immediately well-known persons are mourned on this album. Elaine grieves for an ex-girlfriend who is now a drug addict. Song For Richard Collopy is, if anything, more tender, being a eulogy for a Californian luthier who kept odd hours but did incredible work restoring guitars ("He fixed my old Gibson L-00/He reset the neck/used a patch of Bondo ..."). If there's a way to touch Kozelek on this album, it's via professional dedication.
Certainly, that's one important part of Among The Leaves. But while it initially plays as a funny record about a songwriter, it pulls back to reveal itself as an album about work, legacy, love, music, humour and what is important. In short, though it seems at first to be about one person alone, it's actually about everyone.
John Robinson is associate editor of Uncut and The Guardian Guide's rock critic. He lives in London.