An Ode to Youth’s Folly – The Sunset Tree by The Mountain Goats

Living in a fraught family situation with an abusive stepfather, Darnielle’s adolescence was a time of immense suffering and the album The Sunset Tree is his attempt to overcome his past.

the Mountain Goats tare an indie-folk outfit with a unique focus on songs as self-contained narratives. The Sunset Tree, then, is a series of vignettes that offer a glimpse into the defining moments of Darnielle’s adolescent life.

The album begins with the song You or Your Memory, in which Darnielle considers suicide. In two minutes, sung over soft guitar and melodic piano, Darnielle tells us a story about checking into a motel with nothing but booze and painkillers to keep him company. In the dark he ponders whether life is worth living anymore. Eventually, he decides to keep going, “And down there in the dark I could see the real truth about me/ As clear as day, Lord, if I make it through tonight/ Then I will mend my ways/ And walk the straight path to the end of my days”.

The theme of Darnielle’s potential suicide extends into the next song, Broom People, where he reveals that the only good thing in his life keeping him going was his teenage girlfriend. In the song we are giving a description of his teenage home: cramped, filled with junk, dirty. A place that offers him scant relief. “Floor two foot high with newspapers/ white carpet thick with pet hair.” But, despite all of this, the love he shares with his high school sweetheart is enough comfort for him: “But in the long tresses of your hair/ I am a babbling brook.”

I’m Going to Make it Through This Year

After Broom People, the album changes tone and we are greeted by the magnificent opening to This Year. The song opens with three notes on the piano and drumsticks clacking together. As the drum line kicks in and the acoustic guitar begins to play, you can feel your spirit lifting as Darnielle spins us a tale of resilience and overcoming the past. “My broken house behind me and good things ahead/ A girl named Cathy wants a little of my time.” And then the core message of the album is captured in This Year’s spectacular chorus: “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me/ I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.”

The next few songs continue this theme. Dilaudid sees Darnielle trying to hold on to the pleasures in his relationship, sung over a tense violin section. In DanceMusic he tells us about his attempt to use music from an early age to escape his stepfather’s abuse.

After this section the album slows down to a more reflective moment in Dinu Lipatti’s Bones. A song about Darnielle and his teenage girlfriend spending the summer in a room considering death. “I went downtown, sold off most of what I owned/ and we raised a tower to broadcast all our dark dreams/ from Dinu Lipatti’s bones.”

The next four songs are all about Darnielle’s alcoholic, abusive stepfather. This section starts with the uplifting guitar ballad Upthe Wolves , a song about the revenge he wished to take against not only his stepfather, but the system that did not protect Darnielle and his sister from their stepfather’s abuse.

Revenge

The next song, Lion’s Teeth, is a revenge fantasy in which the young Darnielle dreams about standing up to his stepfather to stop the abuse. “The king of the jungle was asleep in his car/ When chances fall in your lap like that/ You gotta recognise them for what they really are.”

After being introduced to the idea that Darnielle wants revenge, the next song explains why. Hast Thou ConsideredtheTetrapods tells the story of Darnielle coming home to find his stepfather passed out, and going to his room to listen to music, which wakes up his stepfather, who lashes out at Darnielle in a rage. “But I do wake you up and when I do/ You blaze down the hall and you scream.”

The final song in the quartet, Magpie, explains what it is like having someone in your life who takes more than they give – a direct reference to his stepfather. Taken altogether the four songs paint an extremely intimate picture of what life with an abusive parent is like.

The last three songs of the album are a return to the reflective and slow pace of the opening songs. Song for Dennis Brown sees Darnielle use the death of a reggae singer (the eponymous Dennis Brown who died on 1 July 1999 from a collapsed lung) as a means for Darnielle to explore what his death might be like. Sung over a mournful guitar Darnielle considers how everyone else’s lives keep going after someone passes. He suspects that when he passes it will be much the same.

The penultimate song, LoveLove Love, weaves together disparate stories of the evil that people can commit in the name of love. Mentioning people from Rodion Raskolnikov (a character in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment) to Kurt Cobain (the lead singer of Nirvana, who committed suicide in 1994): “Some things you do for money and some you do for love love love.”

The final song of the album, Pale Green Things, is a perfect ending. While the rest of the album is punctuated mainly by Darnielle’s pain and anger towards his stepfather, Pale Green Things is a song about the repressed emotions and memories that he felt upon learning of his stepfather’s death. Sung over gentle guitar and melancholic violin Darnielle tells us about the memory of going to watch the horse races with his stepfather.

Older

The song is from the perspective of an older, more mature Darnielle, who recognises that his stepfather was human and flawed, not the evil monster he had thought his stepfather was during his adolescence. “My sister called at 3am/ Just last December/ She told me how you’d died at last/ at last/ That morning at the racetrack/ Was one thing I remembered/ I turned it over in my mind/ Like a living Chinese fingertrap.”

The Sunset Tree is a deeply personal album. In each song, Darnielle’s lyrics stand front and centre, with minimal accompanying instruments. The album captures in painful detail the anguish of growing up in a broken home, yet it is also an ode to the power of rising above your past.

You are not who you once were, you can be better and life can be better – that is the core of the album. In the liner notes of The Sunset Tree Darnielle captures this sentiment perfectly: “Made possible by my stepfather, Mike Noonan (1940-2004): May the peace which eluded you in life be yours now.”