Medicine Bottle (9:50)

Mark Kozelek was a different person back then. In his early twenties, he saw the world in tragic, even melodramatic, terms. He and a girlfriend parted ways and the nine minutes and fifty-one seconds of ‘Medicine Bottle’ followed. The obsessive-compulsive need to work through the details, to relive the experience, to make it seem less dead, made the song an epic. There was no standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure that could hold such sentiments. Instead, Kozelek unfolded the songs at their own pace. There’s no denying the power of such emotional catharsis. All Red House Painters songs have the urgency of someone who believes.