Carry Me Ohio

Mark Kozelek starts his first Sun Kil Moon record with “Carry Me Ohio,” a patient, fingerpicked song about a place he doesn’t live in anymore and a person he doesn’t talk to anymore, sung in the low, unhurried voice that became his trademark. The band enters slowly and holds the song aloft rather than driving it.

It is a song about homesickness in the most specific sense of the word — not a longing for a place, but a longing for a version of yourself that only lived in that place. The year has turned and you are forty miles from where you grew up and remembering something you weren’t sure you’d remember again. That’s the song.