Mark Kozelek
In The Aristocrats, Penn Jillette notes that "in all of art, it's the singer, not the song." Fans of Mark Kozelek couldn't agree more. Though the San Francisco-based leader of Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon is one of America's finest songwriters, he's also a magician with covers, turning Kiss and AC/DC rockers into haunting ballads, getting indie kids to swoon to John Denver, and taking all the cringe out of Paul McCartney's "Silly Love Songs."
When Kozelek released What's Next To The Moon, a 2001 ode to Bon Scott-era AC/DC, it seemed like he'd taken his cover-song fascination as far as it could go, but his latest album under the Sun Kil Moon moniker is even more ambitious, because he's tackled a wildly popular, still-active band. Tiny Cities—released on Kozelek's newly formed Caldo Verde imprint—is made up of 11 Modest Mouse songs, going as far back as "Four Fingered Fisherman" (taken from the band's delayed-release debut) and even hitting the Good News For People Who Love Bad News single "Ocean Breathes Salty." As usual, Kozelek hasn't just tackled another artist's songs, he's dismantled them and rebuilt them in his own image—to the point where labels that got early copies of the record thought it was composed of originals. Shortly before embarking on tour, Kozelek spoke to The A.V. Club.
The A.V. Club: You've always done cover songs, but it seems like over the past five or six years, you've released more covers than originals. Why?
Mark Kozelek: I'm just writing less of my own music lately—I go in and out of phases a lot. Sometimes there are these accidents that just sort of happen, that are kind of waiting around the corner. I guess Modest Mouse was one of them. I mean, five years ago, I didn't know who the band was. [Laughs.] And then by chance I saw them live, and something about it just kind of got into my system, and the next thing you know, I felt compelled to go make that album. Had I not seen them and had they not had that effect on me, it's hard to say where I'd be. I'm not really sure why it's been so many cover songs lately, but I think it's sort of like a director who writes and directs and produces his own films, and then all of a sudden—probably just like Cameron Crowe doing Vanilla Sky. I don't think that was in his plans a year before he made that film, but one thing led to another, and he found himself remaking a film, which isn't really typical of his style. I think that that's just sort of the life of an artist. I don't know what I'm going to be doing six months from now, or a year from now. Even with Ghosts Of The Great Highway, when I started recording that record, I only had a few songs, but it was like certain twists and turns evolved over the next year and a half—songs started coming out of me, things I wasn't expecting to happen in my life were happening, and songs were coming out of it. I'm sure that's going to happen again, but the nice thing about me having that ability to do cover songs, and to do them well, and to make them my own is, it's a nice way to stay busy, you know?
AVC: Would you say you're suffering from writer's block?
MK: No. Throughout my life, there's just periods when I write and periods when I don't. I don't feel like anything's really blocked. It's just not where things are at right now, and it's just a matter of time until there's something going on where I feel compelled to write. "Writer's block" sounds so dramatic and worrisome, and I don't worry about it. I know deep down that I'm a writer, and it's just a matter of time until it comes back, and when it does, it'll be good like it's always been. [Laughs.] If I had the choice of making a Modest Mouse or an AC/DC cover record, as opposed to making a bad all-original album of forced material—which people do all the time, just in the name of getting a record out—I don't want to do that.
AVC: What inspired you to write when you made Ghosts Of The Great Highway?
MK: I'm embarrassed to say it, but I think that there was some sort of post-September 11th things happening in my psyche and in my life. I had a tour scheduled in Europe, and some stuff in Florida and New York, right around Sept. 11, and I'd cancelled it when Sept. 11 happened, and I remember wanting to be around my girlfriend at the time, and just sort of wanting to be home. It wasn't until April 2002 that I got on an airplane. There's a real theme of death in Ghosts Of The Great Highway, and I think rather than confronting my fears of death or my thoughts of death through this typical Bruce Springsteen/Neil Young obvious way of using "Let's roll" or whatever, there's a theme throughout the record where there's probably 10 references to dead boxers. There's Salvador Sanchez, Pancho Villa, Benny Paret, Sonny Liston. There was a reference to a woman who I knew down the street who died. Rather than focusing in one area, I think it came in with other young people who lost their lives tragically in different ways. At the time, I thought, "This is just my tribute to boxers that lost their lives early," but looking back on it, it was more than that.
AVC: Are you worried that you're going to start getting pigeonholed as "the covers guy"?