[Reaper16]

02. Sun Kil Moon – Benji


I’m not usually one for rock music whose primary draw is its lyrics. It takes something pretty incredible for me to not be bored by a lyrics-driven album with simple, rote song structures. Benji is that something pretty incredible. Sun Kil Moon, or rather Mark Kozelek, has achieved something here that I’ve never before heard in music: he’s set an essay collection to music. Before I can really explain I need you to listen to the album’s first track, the soul-pummeling “Carissa.” The song is about Kozelek flying home to Ohio to attend the funeral of a distant cousin who died in an accident when a aerosol can blew up while she was burning trash, and how he only met her once or twice but he’s really affected by this death, and how he knows he can use his songwriting talents to memorialize her. None of that sounds on-the-nose because, I mean you’ll see when you click the Youtube link, this is not verse-chorus-verse stuff here. There is a chorus, presented twice over 7 minutes. The rest of the song is a first-person narrative of feelings & thoughts. Kozelek doesn’t care about making the narrative tight; he’s just expressing himself through selfish thoughts and small details. Kozelk’s lyrics are like this on every track of the album. Forget about rhyming or consistent meter. The only reason these tracks are proper songs & not literature read over acoustic guitar is because Kozelek sings his words with juuuuuuuuuuust enough attention to repetitive melody that the barest suggestion of a song structure forms in our minds. Most reviewers mention that these songs have a “diary” feel to them, but they only say that because that don’t know what a proper essay is; these are essays through & through: from the experience of going with his dad to visit a family friend who is about to go to prison for the rest of his life because he mercy killed his hospitalized wife & his pistol jammed when he went to kill himself (“Jim Wise”), to an essay about the nature of melancholy and why he’s been inclined towards it since childhood (“I Watched the Film ‘The Song Remains the Same’”), to an album closing braided essay about how middle age is affecting his art, the minutiae of eating crab cakes in a bar with “sports bar shit” all over the walls, and the thin line between professional respect & jealousy (“Ben’s My Friend”). I haven’t been emotionally affected by a lyrics-driven album like this in I don’t know how long. This is raw, open, sincere, selfish, grasping, hopeful, universal music like all the best personal essays are.