“Sunshine in Chicago”—Sun Kil Moon
1) With the exception of his occasional character studies (“New Jersey,” “Salvador Sanchez”) most of Mark Kozelek’s many hundreds of songs have been about what it is like to be Mark Kozelek, doleful Midwesterner monomaniacally fixated on the past, but this is I’m pretty sure his first song about what it’s like to be Mark Kozelek, modestly successful career musician. I know woe-is-me touring songs are considered gauche, but a) why do we expect artists working within an idiom as intensely personal as pop music to totally ignore the fact that they spend most of their lives playing songs to strangers in cities that they can’t even really get a good sense of, what with travel time and sound check, and b) Kozelek here unexpectedly subverts that maligned pop trope by saying, basically, “my life is awesome!” Wage slaves are tending to his cuticles as he kicks back in the Chicago sunshine and sees his name in big letters at the theater across the street. His name is next to ‘Julie Hollands,’ or at least he thinks that was her name, he cannot be bothered to Google it, or ask someone. (That ‘I think’ though does contribute to the off-the-cuff feel of the song; there’s nothing really revelatory or controversial here but it still feels like he’s intentionally deconstructing the sad-sack ”Kozelek character” by just being himself, like he’s squaring his infamously acerbic/sometimes confrontational stage banter with his actual songs, trying to prove to us all that he’s just a normal if kind of ornery and unlikable guy, for example there is a line in this song that essentially translates as “I liked my fans better when they were younger and hotter.”)
2) Probably the criticism most commonly lobbied at Kozelek is that his career has been one long, mid-tempo dirge, but the beauty of being consistent is that you never start sucking. Nearly every band that gets tons of attention for having a fresh new sound or for recontextualizing old, previously unhip sounds will one day, probably around album #3 and its attendant New York Times profile, have to stare into the multi-ringed abyss of a million upturned nostrils, some of them assisting the mouth with a sigh, some of them flared grotesquely at their once-loved buzzband’s decision to branch out into an ill-suited style, or to stop writing enjoyable melodies. But Kozelek’s insistence on doing the same unostentatious thing for over twenty years now (not to say he hasn’t changed at all, his Sun Kill Moon albums have been lighter, near-pastoral) means his third decade has maintained roughly the same level of quality as his first, if you’re into that sort of thing.
