Time Passing and Time Passed

One of the most appealing qualities about Segovia’s classical guitar work (not to mention Ana Vidovic or even the rather spiritual Liona Boyd), is the evocation of time passing and time passed, almost expressed simultaneously in a single melody. Mark Kozelek, former chief of the Red House Painters, now in charge of Sun Kil Moon, like Segovia and so many other classical guitarists is just as much obsessed with the progression of time and its dire consequences. In the relative blink of a five to ten minute song, he often gives the impression of time slowing down. Languid tempos, songs awash with electric guitars (often distorted), deeply cinematic string sections, meditative lyrics, sad reminders of love lost and people vanished… Many of them mention places (most often name-checking his beloved San Francisco) as evocations of memories. They depict the desire to be somewhere else (or sometime else) and, when there, the desire to go back. Music for the permanently broken hearted. Timescapes of incurable nostalgia. The Portuguese would probably call it saudade.

Listen, for example, to ‘Void’ from Old Ramon, in which the chorus “Fill the void in me now/Make your love to me girl/Red lights cruising the night, red lights get me home” is repeated for over four minutes until the fade-out behind a backdrop of distorted, slowed-down Neil Young Crazy Horse guitars, creating an immense, epic atmosphere of simultaneous desperation and overpowering, all-consuming desire. Or listen to how in a short song such as ‘Summer Dress’, he not only evokes the atmosphere of a deserted, foggy beach but also manages to achieve a certain transcendence in the brief moment of looking at a lover staring off over the vast ocean: “Says a prayer as she’s kissed by ocean mist / Takes herself to the sand and dreams”. There is nothing extraordinary brilliant about a line like that, but in combination with the sober guitar caresses and the touch of violin shrugging closely besides, the song, highly personal in content, captures the human experience of an intense, powerful memory which in our heads seems to last much longer than it actually did at the time due to its overpowering, overbearing intensity. I am talking about a certain kind of rapture in a secular context and it’s this kind of memory-rapture of a seemingly eternal, yet fleeting moment which returns time and again throughout his work. The song ‘Summer Dress’ itself, just under the three-minute mark, seems to last much longer than it actually does, or maybe it is only because I am thinking about it and have a scene and my own private memory pictured in my head which takes up much more time and space than the song itself. It’s one of his major achievements anyhow.

His latest work, Admiral Fell Promises, published under the Sun Kil Moon moniker to get more press and sales, comprises solely of Mark Kozelek all by his lonesome accompanying himself with a nylon stringed classical guitar. There’s the occasional shaker, multi-layered harmony vocals and where needed, an extra guitar line. Because of that, it does not feel like a bare-bones, acoustic record, but is just as colorful, mysterious and lush as any other Sun Kil Moon record. When it succeeds, it evokes a feeling akin to Andres Segovia’s detailed performances and registers time passing, places and moments wonderfully. When it falters, it is just plain boring, as in the superfluous closer ‘Bay of Skulls’, which is nothing more than a wonderfully complex guitar outro in need of a good song. His playing is very classically inflected, with waltz-like interludes as on ‘Third and Seneca’ or an abrasive cascade of guitars reminiscent of John Williams’ ‘The Cathedral’ on the gloomy ‘Australian Winter’.

I have called Kozelek’s songs timescapes, and album opener ‘Alesund’ is no exception. The title references a city or rather an island which is an official part of Norway, most of all known for its university and Jugendstil-architecture. The chorus consists of a meditative repeating of the name: “Alesund/Alesund”, each time implying a different interpretation as the contradictory verses describe. After a long, patient classical guitar introduction, so vivid I tend to think of Van Morrison’s garden parlor all wet with rain every time I hear it (an image incepted in my brain after reading Rob O'Connor's liner notes to Admiral Fell Promises, he was right on the money in this description), the song starts off with the ironic statement “No this is not my guitar/I’m bringing to a friend” (indicated by Kozelek himself in an interview as a sentence to avoid annoying conversations with curious passengers in the airport) and from there on describes an on-stage experience (or so it seems) while a fan is shouting from the audience, for him an inspiring moment drawing him out of himself: “From the crowd I heard you sing a pretty line/(…) I thought about it long, had you repeat it in my ear/I couldn’t place it though/But loved you being so close”. By the end of the song he ends up in a bar and when offered the stage there, walks away and envelopes himself back in his own aloneness which he was so eager to escape in the first part of the song. His “Wanting to be numb/While I pass the lonely hours” is in high contrast with: “But I turned and walked/Away from all the fun/And back into the black, seaside night/Of Alesund”. The second time he repeats the name Alesund, this time four times, he not only seems to be singing about the beauty of the place but about the simultaneous sadness of leaving, remembering, forgetting and the constant permeating feeling of loneliness experienced while travelling which he constantly procures and simultaneously avoids.

In ‘Church of the Pines’ he focuses on nature (and the revival of it in spring), his own mortality and closing himself off from the world whilst struggling to write a song: “I see the youth passing along/While I unwind, head in a song/And in my bed, I play the guitar/I loosen the strings, till I find the tone/And if it don’t come, then I’ll put it down”. The guitar outro accompanying the song is hesitant, searches for an appropriate pattern or melody and fits the subject matter whereas the chorus I just described, with its stretched out guitar echos and distant shaker, has an ambient, mysterious, almost menacing feeling, following lyrics such as: “A service moves slowly through the hills/Faint sound of the highway/As night sets on the church of the pines/Ending the day they lay down to rest”.

On this album, Mark Kozelek focuses more than ever on his own solitary nature and in many cases, whilst travelling. The title track, ‘Admiral Fell Promises’, an intense love-song, albeit a less interesting one than the preceding ‘You Are My Sun’, references a hotel in Seattle. It has a splendid chorus which is faster-paced than the verses, creating a feeling of being pulled in a strong undertow of guitars and is interesting because it mentions a hotel in the title, ambiguous enough for the listener to understand that the promises described in the verses probably have remained unfulfilled or are broken. ‘Third and Seneca’ and ‘Sam Wong Hotel’ are both hotels, respectively in Seattle and San Francisco. Unlike ‘Admiral Fell Promises’, they both describe a solitary existence and in that, they are also each other’s counterparts: ‘Sam Wong Hotel’ is a declaration of love for San Francisco and its various neighborhoods whilst the narrator focuses on his own solitariness (which is remarkably different from loneliness) and revels in it, disappearing into his own thoughts: “Under long palm trees/On my easy rest/Centered in my gaze/Her pretty yellow dress/Catherine drifts again/Into my mind/Freezing the tide/She visits me still”. The interlude drifts by, languid, lush. Afterwards, the day has passed: “Post card city lights/My mid-evening walks/Down to Portsmouth Square/Past Sam Wong hotel”.

‘Third and Seneca’ contrasts ‘Sam Wong Hotel’ nicely as it picks up the pace with hasty fingerpicking and lyrics about restlessly travelling, constantly away from San Francisco and a relationship which by the end of the song is dissolving due to both a geographical and emotional distance. The chorus consists of nothing more than a summary of cities in the U.S. associated with colors or weather patterns (“Seattle black, Alaska blue/Oregon grey, raincloud Vancouver”), illustrating the repetitiveness and disconnect of travelling. The second verse takes place in a different hotel room and foreshadows an imminent decimation: “In my room at Laurel and Beverley/Your mind blossoms, mine is withering/I retire in your aspiring, your dream chasing/I’m only escaping/Blood orange L.A., blood red Arizona (…) Lifetimes away from your love I know”. The interlude this time is waltzy, drowsy, expressive as it stretches out and slows down before the fingerpicking and melody pick up the song again, this time in a different, higher scale, the relationship seems to have succumbed: “New York, New York, New Haven, Hoboken/The words we shared, dissolved as they’re spoken/All worlds away”.

After ‘Third and Seneca’ comes a definite high point, right in the middle and despite its banal title, ‘You Are My Sun’, it is probably one of the most intriguing, meditative pieces here. The song starts off with Kozelek’s typical fingerpicking and is a simple albeit lovely declaration of love with a strong melody line (“You are the suites of the cellos/There to mend if I bleed/You are a swing/On sleepy porches/The warm light on my face/You are a charge of wild horses”). It’s wonderfully simple and straightforward until the song bursts open when Kozelek starts repeating thick multi-layered vocals, his lover’s name in adoration: “Leona, Leona, Leona…” while underneath the guitar playing contrasts with classical flourishes, creating an incredibly lush opposition. He continues: ”Your fingers breeze/With grace and days/Of gentle waves/Of guitars playing/Leona, Leona, Leona/Descends the stairs/Light as air/Verses sound everywhere/Leona, Leona…”. In repeating her name, he constantly transforms her, calling out for her, yet keeping her also within. His most straight-forward song develops itself with the necessity of a prayer, it admires, adores and loves (reminiscent of ancient cultures adoring the sun), whilst it also describes the internal makings of memory as it happens. The song ends with a playful outro, optimistic and bright. It is easily my favorite song on the album, even more so, since this song captures the long, slow afternoons of summer – characteristic of the days of youth. It is happiness hard-won, well aware of its own transient, elusive nature. In the nearly five minutes of duration, ‘You Are My Sun’ holds on to hours.

I am again reminded of Van Morrison, this time of ‘Come Here My Love’, a fabulous song from his 1974 album Veedon Fleece. The song describes a similar desire, longing for rapture and the rapture itself, time passing rapidly and slowing down during its rational procession. It’s short, no more than 2 minutes and 20 seconds and it needs to be no longer than that:

Come here my love

This feeling has me spellbound

Yet the storyline in paragraphs

Laid down the same

In fathoms of my inner mind

I’m mystified, oh, by this mood

This melancholy feeling

That just don’t do no good

Come here my love

And I will lift my spirits high for you

I’d like to fly away

And spend a day or two

Just contemplating the fields and leaves

And talking about nothing

Just layin’ down in shades of effervescent

Effervescent odors and shades of time and tide

And flowing through

Become enraptured by the sights and sounds

In intrigue of nature’s beauty

Come along with me

And take it all in

Come here my love

As it happens most of the time with Van Morrison, the song has a religious side to it, mentions rapture and nature. It does not mention a specific name, but it is just as much a song of admiration and devotion, in a prayer-like fashion as ‘You Are My Sun’. Admiral Fell Promises, a more patchy work after April and the equally towering, lush achievement of Ghosts of the Great Highway might not be his most memorable piece of work, but at its best, it transforms and evokes the atmosphere and patience inherent to classical guitar music into relatively regular, lyrical song patterns. It explores the time which is left inside certain objects or places long after the person, himself or a lover, has moved on.

This is the case for example in ‘The Leaning Tree’, which begins as the album’s brightest tune and then transforms, glacially shapeshifts into a waltzy, dreamy, repetitive interlude and finishes quietly strummed, bare-boned. It captures reminders left after death, contrasting the vivid dreams of the narrator of a lover passed away with her own loss of life, turning his loss into hers: “Your poise was perfect, that of a statuesque queen/Your beautiful hair/Your ocean blue eyes/That bear the depths of your losses inside”. He begs to be forgiven and forgotten, leading to the ultimate realization that he himself is forgetting or leaving her. In the first part, fast-paced, he describes San Francisco – bay windowpanes and pastel homes along the sea – which he mentions only to say he would leave them behind “to join you in the hills”. In the final part however, he finds himself in these hills, which are deserted and dry: “A leaning tree/Like a dying hand/As we pass the long dead grass/Thirsty in the sun/Memories rest beyond the broken fence/Let their spirits be”, ending with a description of roses: “There they sway/Over the bleach white graves/Sprawled over the hills”. What follows is a magnificent outro, which revisits in a distorted, resigned fashion the melodies and guitar lines that came before, suggesting that the narrator , as he progresses into an evermore uncertain future searching through the rubble of his past, finds himself shaping that future with certain relics found which by no means suffice to bring the person searched for back to him. The song indicates a constant struggle with the landscape (just like ‘Alesund’ or ‘Third and Seneca’ does), from the icy snow pine trees described in the dream section (mirrored in her cold, statuelike apparition), to wanting to leave San Francisco behind for someone that cannot be found anymore, except within himself. Like many songs on the album and indeed, many songs in his oeuvre, it pays gratefully, gracefully tribute to memories and their elusive nature, capturing people loved, lost and regained in song through evocative timescapes.

(Nout)