“Hi, sorry, you’ll have to speak up a bit, I’m a little deaf”. Phil Selway, drummer with multi-platinum selling, genre-hopping, conscientious stadium behemoths Radiohead, doesn’t quite hear when I say hello. Human after all. Radiohead’s profile was perhaps higher than ever in 2007, due largely to their announcement in October of the release of their seventh studio album, In Rainbows. It’s not so much the music that got people talking though. The little blank boxes on the In Rainbows download page sparked more discussion, debate and parody than anything else in the musical sphere. Even Pitchfork, notorious for specific ratings, left their review score up to us.

There were whispers of a great social experiment, that Radiohead were testing their fanbase and the world to see how much value was placed on their music. If file-sharing democratised music for the masses, then Radiohead were the great established band trying to legitimise that once and for all. Pay as much or as little as you like. It’s up to you.

Nothing is as simple as it seems, however, and reports started to trickle out that Radiohead had made more money with their download than they would have from an ordinary CD release. The only way to own a physical copy of In Rainbows initially was to pay fifty-five euro for the admittedly well-presented discbox release containing the album, a bonus disc, the album again on double vinyl and a book of artwork. Then they signed regular record deals to release the album conventionally too. They were setting a precedent that common or garden indie bands couldn’t follow. They announced a European tour and sparked a backlash due to high ticket prices. The New York Times called it revolution in the music industry, but Forbes called it one of the 101 Dumbest Business Moments of 2007 . Was it revolution? Was it just more capitalism in a different shape? Does it matter? More on the politics later. First and foremost, the music:

In Rainbows took nearly four years to come out, why was that?

Well, we took… [thinking sounds] 2003 to 2007… 2003 was the year Hail To The Thief came out I think, wasn’t it?YeahYeah, so we toured for a year, then took about half a year off after that, away from the band. The actual process of making this record has been about… watch my maths now, but I think it’s been about two years. Two and a half years, actually. A year and a half of what was, with hindsight, preparation really, trying out different approaches to how we would record, just trying to find something that excited us in how we were going to present the material, how we were going to play the material. And then we went in with Nigel Godrich last September [2006]. It’s been quite a painstaking process making the record. Especially when, you know, you start the process and you hope it’ll be fast, but it just isn’t. And when it doesn’t happen spontaneously initially, you kind of know that you’re in for the long run, really, till you get to the point where those moments of spontaneity are there. Not that you construct spontaneity, but you put the right situation together for it to happen. I hope that comes through in the performances. It was a very painstaking process. But we completed it, which is fantastic.

The album sounds very carefully constructed, very complete as a whole. It sounds different to Hail To The Thief, was the process of writing the songs different in any way?

Well, there are similarities. Apart from Kid A, we’ve always started with a collection of songs, and us in a rehearsal studio. And at some point we will have played those songs live as well. So a very similar process from that point of view. We spent a lot more time in the studio this time, so hopefully we got to the point where we felt more comfortable with being there. The biggest difference really was the length of time it has taken. Hail To Thief was a relatively quick record to make, and this one has taken a lot longer. I think with any of our records, a part of what drives it along is a bit of a reaction to the record that’s gone before. With hindsight, I mean, there’s a lot of good things about Hail To The Thief, from our point of view, but there are also elements that we’ve come away thinking “wish we’d done that differently”, or spent a bit more time on that. So you act on those impulses on the next record you make.

You’ve put out an extra disc in the discbox version of In Rainbows. Was it difficult to decide which songs to put on the actual album proper, which to put on the bonus disc, and which to leave off altogether?

I think the difficulty came in realising that we’re not going to get everything onto the record. We kind of felt like we put everything on Hail To The Thief, and we didn’t want to do that again. So I think once we got to the point where we’d decided that we want to make a ten-track record, then you actually select the ten tracks that sit well together. So it kind of then decides itself. It was probably a good three or four days of trying out different tracklistings and different combinations of songs on there until we got to the point where it became sort of self-evident which songs sat well together. And oddly enough actually, the second CD sits well together as a collection of songs.So you’d consider the second CD to be a complete…Oh! You’ll have to wait a moment! My youngest son is just about to burst into the room… hold on… [sound of a small child] “Hi Dad!” [Phil, aside, amidst shuffling] Hi Patty! Hold on, I’ll just go somewhere else… Sorry about that.

I think we were pretty much done with that one. Everyone’s been talking about you giving away the album for free, or letting people choose what they want to pay, which in practice means giving it away in a lot of cases. What was the thinking behind doing that?

Well, one of the initial things was actually getting the music out there as quickly as possible. Generally, you get into this… you finish your album, you deliver it to your record company and three months later, after all the marketing processes, the record comes out, having run the risk of being leaked in the meantime. I think for us it was kind of almost leaking our own material, if you like, just at that point being in control of that process. Also, it was having that immediacy of getting the music out there very quickly. It was under a week between the final mastered version of the record getting to us and it going up as a download. That was something we’ve always wanted to, work a bit faster, especially when you’ve been working on a record for two and a half years. You’re just absolutely desperate to get it out there, really. So then you think, okay it’s going out as a download, how do we put it out there? Do we put a price on it? I think the important thing was to get the music around to as many people as were interested, but then at the same time there was scope in there for almost like an experiment, saying, well, what value do people place on the music? We could give people an opportunity to think about that. It seemed a very fair way, and a transparent way of putting the music out.

Certainly novel, as well. Do you feel that releasing the album as a download was equal to a CD release? Do you not think there would be some disappointment for people who weren’t able to go out on the morning and buy a physical copy of the new Radiohead album?

Um… sorry, I think I heard that, you’ll have to excuse me, the line was not quite there. But the whole thing behind it, with the release, it was like viewing as different formats. If you take it from the basis that we want the music to reach as many people as are interested, and if you put out something as a download only, you’re cutting out a lot of people who wouldn’t have access to that. But we’ve never wanted it to be exclusive, we’ve always wanted it to be a CD release at some point. So it is just different formats really. Hopefully there is something there for everyone who wants to listen to the music.

You’ve signed to XL to release the physical album…

Yes.

Thom put out The Eraser on XL, was it because of his experience with the label that you chose to do that, or was there any other reason?

They seem to have a very good understanding of where we are as a band at the moment. And yes, Thom had a very good experience putting out The Eraser with them. When you’re in a position where you’re out of contract, you can view as who is the most appropriate place to release the record, who is the most appropriate label to be with. And XL definitely “ticked all the boxes” on that one.

And how is your relationship with EMI now?

Um… well… we still have a huge amount of respect for all the people we worked with at EMI and Parlophone. There were a lot of people there from when we released the earlier albums, from around The Bends era, and we had a very good working relationship with them. We just felt that ultimately, it wasn’t the right place for us to release In Rainbows.

They’ve put together their own boxset, I believe…

Yes, they have, all of the previous…How does the band feel about that?Um… well, it’s our music, you know… I think we’d prefer to concentrate on the release which we feel most connection to, which is In Rainbows. Um, you know, they’re all our records and of course we stand by them, but we’ve kind of moved on from that point…

Are you afraid that they might try to put out an unauthorised “greatest hits” or something like that in the future? Or is that a possibility?

It’s well within their rights to do it. [sigh]. So we’ll have to see. But as I say, for us the main thing is that we’re excited about the process of releasing In Rainbows and what we’re doing, around the touring, around the way we’re able to release it, and most importantly around the music itself.

About the touring, tickets for your gig in Dublin went on sale this morning… it’s very expensive, it costs €70.70, and there’s been some discussion about how you can justify releasing your album in such a fair way, as you say, and then charge that much for a tour gig?

Right… and what’s been the general response on that, that you see?

There’s been arguments that you might be pricing out some fans, people who may have bought the diskbox, or students who may not be able to pay that much money to be able to go to a gig.Right.Do you have any reaction to that?

Well, whenever we’ve looked at ticket prices and set them, we’ve wanted to make them as fair as possible. So I would hope that we’ve pitched it right on this one, made it as fair as possible on the price. We’ve never really set out to max, as they say, our tour revenue. So I think we’ve always put out reasonably priced tickets. That’s as much as I can say really.

It’s just something that’s come up in the last few days in Dublin.

Yeah.

The use of Dead Air Space [the band’s blog on radiohead.com] during the making of the album, what was the reasoning behind that? Did they the band enjoy doing it? Do they think it was a good idea?

It was just to have that kind of immediacy in what we were doing, really. It was somewhere that if any of the band members wanted to air their feelings about the recording, or put pictures up, if anyone was interested in seeing it then yeah, there was a place there for that to happen. It’s been a good space for us to have. We were able to put our announcement about the download out through there, and that kind of thing. It’s like with the release of the download, it’s a much more direct way of reaching people who are interested in the music. That’s very much the feeling with Dead Air Space. It’s a very honest representation of us, really.

Was there the same sort of thinking behind the Radiohead.tv broadcasts?

That seemed like a lot of fun to do.It was! It was very random, but it was also fantastic for that as well. It was great. Especially after having taken such a long time in the whole recording process, to do something that didn’t have that weight of scrutiny on it, to be in the studio and have loads of different thing going on, happening quite quickly, yeah, it was great! It was fantastic fun, it was a good response to how we’d been working for two and a half years.

You did a couple of covers, The Headmaster Ritual [by The Smiths] and Ceremony [by New Order] I think, how did you decide which to do?

Yeah, our Manchester section really, wasn’t it? It’s funny because when we were at school, we never really played covers. It’s something that we’ve not done an awful lot of either, at any point. We’ve always kind of worked on original material. So to come back at this point and just go in and work on these songs which we’ve all really loved at some point and seeing if we can pull them off… we enjoyed doing those versions of them.

So if those were the songs you were listening to in your youth, are you keeping up with music now?

I hope so! [laughs]

Is there anything in particular that you’ve been listening to recently?

Personally I’ve been listening to Juana Molina, Will Oldham, Adem, Fourtet, those kind of Domino artists… Tunng, that kind of thing. Between the five of us, we’ve got a very broad musical spectrum.

So you’d all consider that you’re staying sort of hip?

Sorry?!

You all consider that you’re keeping up with what’s going on?

You’d get five different responses to that one, depending on who you speak to in the band. Where we are at the moment is just a great love of music, from wherever and whenever really.

With all the political causes Thom has been involved in, in the past couple of years, is there ever a feeling within the band that he’s becoming a bit of a Bono?

[laughs] Two very different characters though, aren’t they?

They are different, but do you never consider what he is doing naff?

No, because he does it from the heart. I don’t think it is naff at all. I think he speaks very effectively on the issues that are very close to his heart. You’re kind of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t with that one really. I think he uses the platform that he has effectively. He doesn’t, well in my opinion he doesn’t abuse it, he just uses it effectively.

But even in the general sense, it’s sometimes considered that a musician shouldn’t talk about politics. You don’t think that applies at all?

I think if you stop somebody talking about… well it’s the basics of principles here, you don’t want to impinge on anybodies’ free speech, do you? Different people are probably more effective at it, or less effective, but I think in Thom’s case he has a very strong interest, so he has a great grasp of what’s he’s talking about.

First of all, I have to dispel a rumour that you are from Limerick-is it true?

Well I am from New Jersey. I am three or four generations into the States and everybody is from Cork, I mean EVERYBODY. They all go back to the one place. My great grandparents are the most recent but that didn’t stop my grandmother from having an Irish accent. It’s true.

So, you have just come back from a tour with Arcade Fire. How was that?

It was great. It was really different. It was kind of nice to just not be in charge. It was like a festival. I kind of enjoyed it. I didn’t think I would. I didn’t think I would enjoy fitting into someone else’s schedule but I really enjoyed it.

You did a 7” single with the band. How did that come about? Did you all just sit down and decide to do a single together?

Well I don’t know. Things with us just happened pretty organically. Like we knew them and we met them a bunch of times and did a bunch of festivals and we got to know them more and more. I‘ve known some of them for a few years now and just kind of enjoyed playing at festivals together and hanging out. We could hang out with all the guys in the band and get along with them and it seemed like such and interesting thing to do. We thought it would be cool to do something with someone else. Like have a double bill more or less.

So the tour was more or less a double bill?

Yeah! It kind of lets off the pressure somewhat. It was not like some weird jerk headlining. It was like “Oh it’s just like a festival”. It worked out great.

You were brought up in a small town in New Jersey and your only musical outlet was the Princeton Record Store. Can you describe it?

It was a pretty incredible store. It still is. It’s still worth driving down from New York to. Princeton is a big university town. I lived in the town next to Princeton, which was not a big university town. It was an old classical and jazz record store, which was famous around the world. It was old and tiny. Originally it was a storage room with a tiny front. What they originally did was make copies of what they had and send them to Germany and Japan and people would order it by mail-very rare jazz records and pristine classical records. Eventually one of the guys who worked there was a punk rock guy and it started carrying punk rock records. They would be beside the counter on some crates. There were no pop records in the store, you had either rare classical and jazz or weird punk records. There were record stores in the mall that had like Billy Joel records. So that was it. You just go to get punk records, there was nothing else so it was kind of great.

So did the records there save your life?

Oh sure. It just made it a little bit easier. Now, if you are growing up in a small town you have the Internet but you don’t know, it is so, um, it is too free. I mean it’s too unfettered. There’s too much music and there are too many opinions.

It’s like a haze of information now?

Yeah. It’s like the loudest opinion will win or the most clearly defined opinion. When you’re a kid you’re pretty immature about stuff like that so you end up listening to a lot of shit. I listened to a lot of shit when I was a kid and I still do. But having a really good store was nice as there was an opinion in that store that was something local. It was something you could argue with, you could embrace it or be against it. You were dealing with something localized that seemed more manageable and when you discovered something from outside it was kind of a revelation.

Like what?

I remember the college radio station didn’t like The Smiths when they first came out but WTR-a harder station to get- did. I heard the first Smiths record there and the Princeton record store didn’t have it so I took a train to New York. I was like 12 or 13. I skipped school and went with a friend and found a record store with it. I was made fun of in the store cause I got the name wrong. I said “The Smiths Brothers” and I kept saying that and they were saying “I don’t know what you’re talking about”. I said “Well this song- This Charming Man” and they were like “Oh! The Smiths! Duh!” and I was really embarrassed. But then about five years ago I told this story to a friend of mine and they were like “You were from a foreign town and you took a train to New York. You were like 12 or 13 and you found a record store and you got the Smiths first record on 12” import and the guy made fun of you because you didn’t know what you were talking about?! Well that’s pretty cool!” I was like “Yeah! Well fuck that guy!” Then I felt great, as I was the only guy with the song. But I feel now there is a difference. There is so much information and so many records coming out.

You have been in other bands before like Pony and Speedking and now you’re in LCD Soundsystem. Is LCD Soundsystem just another stage or are you in this for the long haul?

I don’t know. The big difference to me is the bands that I was in before, I was a guitar player and singer and I was terrible. In Pony and Speedking I decided I was going to be a drummer. That seemed really dignifying. That was always going to be temporary as I cold never deal with people super- well in bands. Like, I don’t collaborate well. I get too frustrated and get panic attacks and have to leave. I used to lock myself in the bathroom during Pony and Speedking practices ‘cause people don’t listen to each other and there’s no hierarchy. I just can’t be around that. So LCD is easier, it suits my personality. I have been able to make dance records by myself and able to go on tour with the band. If I just wanna be by myself working on stuff in my house, it’s fine.

Thinking about that,you made a Fabriclive CD. What was that like?

Well, I hate doing mix CD’s for various different reasons. They are hard to do because eh, I used this analogy a few times before. It’s like acting a movie on the phone. The thing for me about Djing is playing records to people. I am able to react to how people are responding and without that you’re just, well, you could just go home and do what you want. But this was fun as Pat (the drummer) and I have been Djing on these tours regularly. We wrote them down and sent them in and got most of them approved.

Your new album Sound of Silver is a lot more seamless compared to the jagged sounds on the first album. Would that be true?

Well I looked back at the first record and I was a little disappointed that the songs sounded a little too different from each other and not like there was too much variety. It sounded like, incongruous. I made this song and then I made this other song at a different time. I was just really obsessed about making this album more similar and more cohesive and more as a piece if that makes any sense.

One of the songs is called North American Scum. Were you afraid some people, especially North Americans may take the wrong impression when they heard it first and saw the title?

I’m not really afraid. I am quite sure people do get it. It doesn’t really bother me in theory. It’s not something I get too worked up about. I get somebody who will say something and it’s very presumptuous. It’s funny because I thought my presumption was that people in the U.S would get it and people in the U.S would get mad and I was shocked to find that it was almost the complete opposite. Americans totally got it, people outside the States didn’t get it at all. What I think is outside the U.S people think they have a good grip on American culture because it is such a diasporadic thrust. There’s American TV and films everywhere. You think you have a really good grip on what American culture is like because I am inundated with it in a way Americans are not inundated by other places. But all that stuff is Hollywood and media, which is completely different to what actual people are like. It’s the most unapologetic and simplistically overconfident part of the culture, an unreflective, overconfident part of the culture.

It’s weird when you think of that cause you go “wait a minute!” In the seventies we had American film, pre-Star Wars which was incredibly thoughtful and incredibly introspective and filled with identity questions. All American punk rock is about identity questions and the same with American indie rock to a certain degree. So those people totally understood the feeling of growing up and wishing to be from somewhere else. Most of the Americans who were in the position of hearing the record were definitely the people who went through that phase. They understood the double meaning. I was surprised and kind of proud of my brethren not really needing to ask about it. They weren’t like “So are you criticizing Bush?”

That’s what you must be getting over here (in Europe)?

Yeah, like every French interview. I love France and I get on really well there. The people are very welcoming and accepting but that one song…. I was getting “You’re not really American. You’re from New York and I would just say “What the fuck are you people saying?!” That’s a European classic. I go “ have you been to New York?!” It’s not a European city. It’s a very specific American city. That’s a really common perception that New York is not American.

I am always stunned when people say that to me and think it’s a compliment. It’s like “Wow!” It usually comes in the same breath that Americans don’t usually know other places other than America and think they know everything. What they are basically telling me is that they think they know all about my country but they don’t.

And you’re not really from New York anyway!

Yeah. I grew up in a small town that changed a lot. When I was born it was a farm town with a couple of suburban houses. There were no trees and it was built around very tiny towns from the 1600’s. My town became bigger and overtook those. So growing up it was half of these low-rent suburban kids and farm kids. My neighbourhood also was forty percent Taiwanese, which was really strange. It was just a weird little place. There were a lot of drawbacks for a lot of the kids like the small mindedness but on the plus side people just didn’t mouth people off. People didn’t get away with this kind of psychological cruelty without getting a punch in the face.

What do you mean by psychological cruelty?

Like these kids and friends I know who went to fancier prep schools. The viciousness of kids always trying to outdo one another, always saying the smart ass things, always trying to make you look stupid, always trying to humiliate you. That sort of thing was very alien to me. Where I was brought up if someone tried to humiliate you, you punched them in the face. But these kids would go “Oh you got to resort to violence?” and I am like “Yeah! You’re being an asshole! You are going to continue being an asshole so I am gonna punch you in the face so maybe next time you’re not going to be an asshole to someone bigger than you”. That was sort of my childhood.

I suppose you still get that now?

Yeah. Like, I was in London and was Djing and this guy goes like “I like some of your records but I think your set is shit”. I just grabbed him by the collar and said: “This is what it is going to be like. I am going to come over the fucking barrier and I am going to kill you. I am going to beat the shit out of you”. First of all I thought to myself “You think you are being clever. You think you have a deep sense of irony. You think you’ve got me. That’s what you think but you are wrong”. This had already happened to me there like thirty times so he was at least thirty deep in the same fucking hole. I was going “You have never met me before and you come and talk shit to me like that, thinking it’s ok cause I’m famous?! You presumptuous ignorant fuck!” He was shitting in his pants and saying I should be able to take criticism. I said I could take criticism from people I know and my friends and are you really telling me that you would walk up to someone in the street and say “You look like a fucking idiot” and not expect to get punched?

This guy obviously grew up in a cruel environment where you got respect from humiliating somebody and showing others that you were just not a simple person. Everyone else was enjoying themselves there and if he didn’t like it he could just go.

So what did you do?

I told him “You are going to look at the floor and walk out. If you so much as make eye contact with me or say a fucking word I am going to come up and beat the shit out of you in front of everybody”. So he left. It was a very satisfying moment!

So you lost your temper. On that note, thinking stupidly, are you afraid of loosing your own edge?

Not really. I think it’s a natural curve to things I am comfortable with.

Are you going to age gracefully?

Nah! I am 37 and I am still doing this. I think I missed that opportunity! Now I actually wanna do even more embarrassing things that I am too old to do. I am training to fight. I am doing Brazilian ju-jitsu!

Craig Thorn, Mark Kozelek, and the Red House Painters

If you’re browsing a music shop, or for that matter a music magazine, it doesn’t take long to learn the first law of art: the world is full to the brim with failed geniuses. The right combination of talent and drive is rare enough. But with mass media, the talent doesn’t matter much anymore; whether you’re hawking “pop” albums or reviewing “indie” albums, it’s often the image, not the music, that is being sold. This brings us to the second law of art: the world is equally full of the successfully talentless. The amount of pure luck and coincidence involved in commercial success makes it virtually impossible to predict, much less understand.

The musical situation thus becomes painful for everyone involved. Record companies turn down the best albums, because they’re too risky. Reviewers, DJs, and the dwindling owners of great record shops exhaust themselves looking for something obscure enough to seem cool, but good enough to justify. Consumers of music — people who want to experience perhaps 60 minutes of timeless human joy on which no price can be placed, other than €18.99 at HMV — are lost in the supermarket. We are told to buy an album because it’s played at Starbucks, or because the single opens that TV show that we like, or because the magazine owned by the conglomerate that recorded, marketed, and distributed it thinks it’s a masterpiece.

This is why we have friends. In an offhand remark in the acknowledgements of his book Mystery Train — a book good enough to read the acknowledgements — Greil Marcus wrote this line: “As much as anything, rock ‘n’ roll has been the best means to friendship that I know.” I always misremember this line as stating something like the equation “music = friendship.” While Marcus doesn’t quite say this, I feel I should attribute the idea to him. Friendship might indeed arise from sharing the music, but in my life it often led me to the music in the first place.

I met Craig Thorn eleven years ago this autumn, when I moved to Boston from Texas to attend boarding school. He ran my dormitory, where he made epic barbecue and brilliant jokes, as well as the English department, where he taught a class on junk (of all kinds) in American literature. Our first conversation was about music; this was how he learned about each of the 38 guys to whom he had to be a father each year. In that conversation, I revealed my interest in an English band called Catherine Wheel, one of the great underrated rock combos of the nineties. If this earned me a modicum of his respect, the ensuing dialogue earned Craig my undying admiration, tinged with a kind of terror; he promptly named five other more obscure (but technically related) bands that I might enjoy if I liked Catherine Wheel. Basically, he was Pandora, in the days before the internet.

Craig’s boundless musical knowledge and record collection were intimidating to encounter for the first time, but I quickly realized that they were made to share. He ran a student magazine — Backtracks — in which he wrote lengthy, almost philosophical music criticism; he was a manager and legendary DJ for the school radio station. It was impossible to meet him and not find your horizons expanded. While this might have started with something as simple as borrowing a CD, the real horizons in question were not musical, but human. More than simply a means to friendship, music held the possibility for Craig of an encounter with the whole world, a catalogue of experience wider than his own. Music was a means to, and a definition of, family and community. Both were his reason for living.

Such a man does not have a favourite band. Nonetheless, in the late nineties, Craig was a missionary of the Red House Painters. He wrote about them, it seemed, at every possible opportunity, in school publications as well as major magazines. I have none of these articles anymore, but I remember a blizzard of eloquence that convinced me to knock on his door one day and borrow everything they had ever recorded. I saw Songs for a Blue Guitar on sale in 1998 in Chicago, at a record store that no longer exists, and bought it immediately. Gradually I collected every disc, somewhat because I liked the music, but mainly because of Craig.

The Red House Painters formed in 1989, the same year that the Pixies came to take the kids. They made a decade’s worth of albums in San Francisco, after which the lead singer and driving force, Mark Kozelek, went amicably solo. Their quiet and introspective music was never quite in step with the times, which were more defined by loud introspection; the poor reviews said that the Red House Painters were about despair, while the good ones said they were about nostalgia. Success on a massive commercial scale eluded them, partly because Mark Kozelek is that kind of genius who finds self-promotion painful, and partly because he insisted on making the music that was necessary for him. If others see him as a failed genius, it is not how Kozelek sees himself; on the contrary, his album was in stores when he was 25, and he felt like a rock star. In 1999 a two disc Retrospective was released; regardless of sales, this doesn’t happen to just anyone.
The first label to press a Red House Painters album was the formidable 4AD, which released Down Colorful Hill (1992) on the strength of some reverb-soaked demo tapes. It was followed with two self-titled albums, better known by their brooding cover images, Rollercoaster (May 1993) and Bridge (October 1993). The stunning Ocean Beach was released in 1995, and then abruptly — in the face of a small but obsessive fan base, excellent critical reception, and growing popularity in Europe — the label opted not to release Songs for a Blue Guitar, and dropped the band.

For those DJs, reviewers, buyers, and label owners who are prospecting for gold, it’s usually a pretty good sign when a label drops a band over an album. As Robbie Robertson said of The Band, “Music should never be harmless.” A fight over a recording signals that something actually different has just appeared, and that someone in power is scared; Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a classic example, but the final two Red House Painters albums each did time in legal purgatory. Supreme Records, an Island subsidiary, snapped up Songs for a Blue Guitar and released it in 1996; the follow-up Old Ramon was scheduled for 1998, but was withheld by Island during the merger wars of the late 1990s, and wasn’t released until 2001 on SubPop, after Kozelek bought it back. These struggles also ended the band, and the next four releases were of Kozelek playing alone.

Songs for a Blue Guitar was the first true synthesis of Kozelek’s many influences and moods. The opener seems to fit the pattern of the back catalogue, with a singer-songwriter formula and emotive, autobiographical lyrics. The second song, one of two title songs, is the same but different, featuring the only female backing vocal in the whole Kozelek discography. Nothing in that discography could possibly prepare you for the third song, “Make Like Paper,” which is rumoured to be one of the two songs on the disc which ended the relationship with 4AD. It is 12 minutes of fierce backbeat and Crazy Horse guitar distortion. It features a 5 minute guitar solo after the first chorus, a solo so rich and daring it suggests Hendrix, Robert Johnson, and Mahler. After the Gibson screams and is possibly in flames, Kozelek goes on singing as though nothing out of the ordinary has just occurred. It is out of the ordinary on a folk label. It might as well be hip-hop.
This is one of many moments on the album that explodes preconceptions. There are covers of songs by Yes (“Long Distance Runaround”), the Cars (“All Mixed Up”) and Paul McCartney (“Silly Love Songs”). An aptly titled, trifling piece of work, this last piece is totally resurrected in the retelling; this time, the five-minute display of absurd guitar virtuosity is at the beginning of the song. The expressive rage and unadulterated beauty offered here properly earns the opening line, “you’d think that people would have had enough of silly love songs,” and when we hear the chorus that McCartney made insipid — “I love you” — we actually believe the Red House Painters. Mark Kozelek brings real artistry to his covers; his solo album from 2001, What’s Next to the Moon, consists entirely of Bon Scott-era AC/DC songs, which are tender and unrecognizable, and his most recent project with Sun Kil Moon — a kind of Red House Painters 2.0 — is the album Tiny Cities, composed of twelve Modest Mouse songs transposed into Kozelek’s reflective and minimalist style. As these seemingly insane career moves suggest, Mark Kozelek is remarkably adept at avoiding irony, even when singing songs that seem to need them. On Old Ramon, he pulls off a love song to his cat.

In 2003, Kozelek and his drummer Anthony Koutsos reformed as Sun Kil Moon, releasing first Ghosts of the Great Highway and then Tiny Cities in 2005. Ghosts continues the best traditions of the Red House Painters, but with the illusion of a new band; it was Kozelek’s most successful album to date, if someone is counting by sales. It is a lush and unified album, telling stories about famous boxers who died young; obsessed with death, the album celebrates life. The old fascinations with memory and geography are firmly in place, but the singer has become a bard, and moved well beyond simple autobiography and despair. This is no more failed genius by any measure; this is a man doing what he loves as though it were second nature.

Sun Kil Moon sounds for all the world like Kozelek has “grown up.” Somewhere between the first time I heard them and now, as I’ve moved around the world carrying the albums with me, so have I. Kozelek’s joys, sorrows, landscapes, and women have accompanied me. As always happens with great music, the sounds and words are now bound up with my own memories. I’ve done my best to pass this music on to friends so that they can carry this reflection of the world, and perhaps a piece of me. I’ve tried to make friends with the music, and music with the friends.

I also continue to listen to Kozelek’s work to carry a piece of Craig, who passed on down the great highway on 12 June 2006, at the age of 47. He left behind such a cacophonous legacy of sounds in the hands and minds of those who knew him that it hardly would be accurate to say that he is gone. The lives of those that knew him — and their CD collections — are the Retrospective that confirms his place. In his case, music finally did become the friendship, since the music is all I can encounter down the old pathways where he was. Even though the song is not about him, I have never listened to “Make Like Paper” without thinking of the first autumn that I met Craig, or the last summer that I saw him.

Leaves are turning brown
All over the ground
Leaves make like paper
Make like paper sound

[5-minute guitar solo]

Way back, back then
I considered you my best friend
But the last time I saw you
I knew I’d never see you again.

‘That was the tea arriving’, he says, leaning into my microphone, pours us both a cuppa in the Village’s downstairs bar.
‘Got to keep it civilised, you know?’

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