In November 2016, Andrea saw that Kozelek was playing a show near where she lived. He had contacted her a year before, and their correspondence had been cordial. “Seeking some sort of closure,” she says, she asked him if they could hang out after the show. After the concert, “He started being pretty forward sexually, again. And I was like, I’m not really interested. I just wanted to see how you were doing,” she says. “While asking me questions about how I was doing, he was like, can we have sex? And I said no. And he was like, can you give me a hand job? And I said no. And he was like, well, can I jerk off in front of you? And I said no.” Pitchfork reviewed Facebook messages from Andrea to Sarah in which she describes the alleged exchange in detail.
Though Andrea’s involvement with Kozelek was longer and more complicated than Golden’s, they share the sense that they were violated, and that Kozelek leveraged his stature as a musician in his interactions with them.
“Since I had so little experience in relationships previous to him, I assumed some of his behavior, such as his jealousy issues which I now realize were toxic, was normal, especially since he was so much older,” she says. “Seeing him again in 2016 was a real eye-opening moment, because I realized at his core the only thing he saw in me was sex. I’ve spent years trying to unlearn these things. And while I feel that I’m in a really good spot now in understanding how a normal relationship should function, it has been a long road from the end of our relationship to now.”
Sarah Golden avoided Kozelek’s music after her experience with him in Portugal in 2017, and says that she didn’t become aware of “Soap for Joyful Hands” until Pitchfork pointed it out to her in the process of reporting this piece. She began contacting reporters with her story about the 2017 incident several months before This Is My Dinner was released. She has photos from that night, reviewed by Pitchfork, that correspond to details from the lyrics: a hotel room balcony, heavy rain after the show, and a pair of wet socks laid out to dry. In the song, the woman Kozelek meets asks him repeatedly about his passions aside from music, and he responds with a speech about his commitment to his art: “If I had any other passions, like dairy farming, or freeing animals from the zoo/I’d not be standing here right now in Espinho, Portugal, talking to you.”
The word “passions” stuck out to Golden, so she revisited her written account of the night. “He wanted to know all about my life and my passions,” it reads in part. “Kept asking me the same question.” “I feel like he totally flipped the script on that whole thing to make it seem like this woman is just some kind of groupie type who was pestering him, because she wants to get into the brain of this genius,” Golden says.
The night after her encounter with Kozelek, she awoke to a message from him in her inbox. Pitchfork reviewed the email, dated November 25, 2017, which reads in part, “You are a kind and beautiful and gentle person and i enjoyed your company. have a wonderful stay in portugal.” Golden responded two days later with a cordial message that invited Kozelek to send mail correspondence to her post office box and did not mention the alleged encounter. “I was still very much in shock at this point,” she says. “It really messes you up, and you can have thoughts in the immediate aftermath that aren’t necessarily rational. But that doesn’t change what happened.”
In February 2018, three months after the alleged incident, she sent him another email. It read in part, “Hey, Mark. I can’t swallow this anymore. Do you know that you were really inappropriate? As in, you broke me…You put my hand on your dick. I froze. I was so stuck there.” She never heard back from him after that, she says.
Later that year, Sun Kil Moon released This Is My Dinner, the album that contains “Soap for Joyful Hands.” For Golden, reading the lyrics was like “ripping open a scab.”
“It felt like I overheard him relaying it to somebody else, and it was entirely false.”