Katy Song

Mark Kozelek wrote “Katy Song” in the grip of the most famous breakup of his catalog — the one that generated half of the first two Red House Painters albums. It is eight minutes of slow, deliberately repetitive guitar and Kozelek’s low, unaffected voice documenting the exact moment he realized he was not going to recover from this and was going to have to keep living anyway.

The song doesn’t build. It accumulates. It is the sound of someone sitting on the edge of the bed at 3am doing the slow math of a missing person who is still alive and still, technically, a phone call away. The math never comes out right. That’s the song.