The grey skies and constant rain lately put me in a nice Red House Painters mood ... so, without further ado, top 5 Kozelek/RHP/Sun Kil Moon songs:
1) San Geronimo ("Ocean Beach", 1995)
-- this song is just fantastic ... sometimes a chorus is so good that you just want it to go on forever, and the last three minutes or so of this song is just the cathartic chorus (with that little peppy drum fill) repeated over and over and over and over an....
2) Mistress ("Red House Painters [Rollercoaster]", 1993)
-- there are two versions of this song (full band and solo piano) on the album, but i really like the full-band cut ... it's almost a little shoegazey, with this great droning guitar and the amazing central riff ... lyrics are also really good ... it would be fun to hear a full-on wall-of-sound shoegaze cover of this
3) Have You Forgotten ("Songs From a Blue Guitar", 1996)
-- this is probably my favorite Kozelek song lyrically ... great wistful tone without devolving into too much schmaltz (ok, there's some) ... there's not much going on musically, just a simple solo acoustic guitar, but it sounds great
4) Glenn Tipton (Sun Kil Moon, "Ghosts of the Great Highway", 2003)
-- similar feel to "have you forgotten", basic acoustic guitar riff on repeat, but it's a really good use of Kozelek's voice, and if you hunt down the lyrics (hard to understand on first listen), they're really fantastic
5) Japanese to English ("Down Colorful Hill", 1992)
-- i really like this album, but i usually appreciate it more as a whole rather than track-by-track ... but this song can definitely stand on it's own ... it's in the early RHP era of tons of reverb, incredibly depressing stuff, but it's more accessible than the rest of the album
