Carry Me Ohio

"Carry Me Ohio" occupies the territory where folk music meets something older and harder to name — not quite country, not quite rock, but somewhere in the grain of both. By the time Kozelek recorded this under the Sun Kil Moon name he had shed some of the dense slowcore texture of Red House Painters, and what emerged is slightly more open, more plainly melodic, while remaining just as emotionally exacting. The acoustic guitar has a country-adjacent warmth, and there's a quality to the song's construction — the way it follows its own elliptical logic rather than any conventional verse-chorus architecture — that feels like driving a state highway with no particular destination. The subject is a relationship that has passed, or that the narrator is failing to hold onto, rendered against the flat specific geography of Ohio in a way that makes the heartland feel simultaneously real and mythological. Kozelek's voice here is slightly more worn, more comfortable in its own weathered register, and that weariness suits the material perfectly — this is not young grief but the older kind, the kind you carry and eventually learn to describe. The song unfolds slowly enough that it asks something of the listener, a willingness to settle into its pace rather than moving at your own. It rewards that willingness by the time it ends.