Joey Always Smiled

After spending years building a career on beautifully melancholic guitar-based compositions and lush, murmuring indie rock, something shifted for Mark Kozelek. His slow-moving rock band Red House Painters gave way to similarly majestic sounds with Sun Kil Moon, but in the first part of the 2010s, Kozelek began using Sun Kil Moon songs as wordy spoken-sung meditations on loss, memory, and the cycle of life. The floodgates opened from there, and Kozelek began a prolific string of albums in this style, under the banner of both Sun Kil Moon and his own name, as well as in collaboration with other artists. Joey Always Smiled is an interesting chapter in this ongoing saga, one that finds Kozelek meeting minds with gifted harmonist and multi-instrumentalist Petra Haden. On the surface, the seven songs here are mostly more of Kozelek's real-time rambles about memories from growing up or anecdotes from his everyday life. His mother taking him to his first concert (the Doobie Brothers), early experiences with childhood friends, playing guitar in echoey hotel rooms, and even a lengthy, detailed synopsis of the movie Full Metal Jacket are all lyrical tangents in these songs, some of which reach nearly 20-minute running times. Haden's contributions are limited to layers of overdubbed vocal harmonies and counterpoint, and however auxiliary, they complement Kozelek's slow-burning songwriting perfectly. The gentle acoustic guitars of "Rest in Peace R Lee Ermey" blend with Haden's patient melodies so nicely that Kozelek's lyrical spew just clutters the spare prettiness of the song. Without Haden's layers of cooing, wordless vocals, the meandering faux funk of "1983 Era MTV Music Is the Soundtrack to Outcasts Being Bullied by Jocks" would be far less captivating. Haden's contributions save the songs from being just more of Kozelek's diary entries. He seems aware of this, and the album ties up with a pastoral reworking of Huey Lewis & the News' saccharine hit "The Power of Love." It's one of the few moments on Joey Always Smiled that feels like an actual duet between the two artists, and it's easily the most accessible thing here. Even though an album of more-balanced collaborations between Haden and Kozelek would have been far more fulfilling, Joey Always Smiled softens the sometimes numbing journal-songs Kozelek has grown into and is far more listenable than the last few entries that led up to it.