Two decades into a career spent elaborating a redolent, sepia-tinted musical sensibility, Mark Kozelek seems uniquely unqualified to comment on this modern life. And yet here is “Sunshine in Chicago,” a single released this February in advance of the fifth album by his post–Red House Painters project, Sun Kil Moon. It is a just-before-bed-journal-entry of a song, at two and a half minutes noticeably concise (Kozelek seems to make a point of being long-winded): he arrives in Chicago, takes a walk, prepares to play a show, thinks about the passage of time. “And I looked up at the marquee / and hey, it was my name,” he murmurs with a world-weary sort of wonderment as he recalls a stroll down Lincoln Avenue. “Next to Julie Holland, / think that was her name.”

—Daniel Levin Becker