Mountain Goats

There are albums you can't just turn to at any given moment. They have the power to turn you inside out, and that's something you need to be ready for. You have to truly need it. That's why it's impossible to listen to "The Sunset Tree" as background noise: it forces you to look at parts of yourself you'd usually rather not look at. Until you feel the need to face them head-on. That's when these songs become indispensable.

For years, John Darnielle never wanted to put himself at the centre of his songs. Not directly, at least. The Mountain Goats formula was built on short stories with a rough lo-fi edge, snapshots able to capture the trajectory of a mood, recorded on the fly onto a Panasonic cassette recorder. Then came the big break: a record deal with 4AD, a professional recording studio, the chance to make a living from music.

But at first things don't go as planned: after two albums, the reception is lukewarm (even though the first, "Tallahassee", is now universally recognised as one of the Mountain Goats' masterpieces). And Darnielle is left with just one last chance with the British label: "I was convinced that my experiment in living as a musician had come to an end".

My sister called at 3 AM

Just last December

She told me how you’d died at last

At last

(“Pale Green Things”)

Certain moments tear a gash into life. For Darnielle, it's a phone call in the dead of night, his sister on the line to tell him his stepfather has died. The past comes rushing back, like a curse impossible to escape. Old wounds reopen, and the only way Darnielle knows to try to heal them is by writing. On the previous album, "We Shall All Be Healed", he had ventured for the first time into autobiographical territory, confessing the substance abuse he had sunk into as a teenager. Now it's time to dig into the story that led him to the edge of that abyss.

The songs on "The Sunset Tree" were born this way, to exorcise the demons of memory during sleepless nights on tour. "Written in Paris, Rotterdam, London, the back seat of a white van driving through Europe, and my upstairs room in Durham, North Carolina", read the album's liner notes. "I told myself: fine, I'll tell a true story on this record, because it will probably be the last one the Mountain Goats will ever get to make." A double urgency that makes every note feel more pressing than ever.

And down there in the dark

I could see the real truth about me

As clear as day

(“You Or Your Memory”)

It's precisely from the darkness of a hotel room that the journey begins: a mirror to look yourself in the eye, pills and alcohol to pretend not to see the reflection staring back. “St. Joseph’s baby aspirin/ Bartles and Jaymes/ And you or your memory”. An oppressive "you", right from the start, looms over everything, until it takes your breath away. There's no doubt who it refers to: "Made possible by my stepfather", reads the album's dedication. At night, when the grip of anguish grows heaviest, the prayer of "You Or Your Memory" unfurls over a gentle rhythm within the squalid walls of the motel: “Lord, if I make it through tonight/ Then I will mend my ways/ And walk the straight path/ To the end of my days”.

This is how "The Sunset Tree" opens. The sunset tree of the title seems to suggest an image of peace, but something else is already lurking there. Something that gets under your skin. The reference is to a scene from a Samuel Butler novel, "The Way of All Flesh", published in the early 1900s: there's a young boy who has to sing a hymn in front of his father, a hymn that begins with the line "Come, come to the sunset tree"; the boy, however, has a speech impediment that makes him stumble right on the letter "c"; every time, the line comes out of his mouth wrong. His father forces him to repeat it again and again, in an unbearable crescendo of tension. Until all that's left is the echo of screams and the dull violence of punishment.

Alright, I’m on Johnson Avenue in San Luis Obispo

And I’m five years old, or six, maybe

And indications that there’s something wrong with our new house

Trip down the wire twice daily

(“Dance Music”)

The scene shifts to the sun of Southern California, straddling the Seventies and Eighties. The boy, in this version of the story, is named John Darnielle. He's five years old when his parents divorce and he has to move with his mother and little sister into a new home. To a new father. The first time violence bursts through the ordinary facade of family life, it takes the shape of a glass thrown against a wall, a snapshot charged with foreboding recounted in "Dance Music". There are screams, there is fear. Then, even violence becomes part of everyday life.

"The Sunset Tree" is the diary of that everyday life. Intimate and raw, unsparing, somewhere between the fervor of Neutral Milk Hotel and the literary bent of Hold Steady. But it's also much more: it's the story of how it's possible to come out alive on the other side, of how it's possible to find hope even where there is none. That's why it manages to resonate deep within anyone carrying the scars of trauma. That's why its story becomes a parable that speaks to everyone.

I drove home in the California dusk

I could feel the alcohol inside of me hum

Pictured the look on my stepfather’s face

Ready for the bad things to come

(“This Year”)

The essence of "The Sunset Tree", in the end, is all contained in a single song. It's no surprise it has become, over time, the quintessential Mountain Goats anthem. It's called "This Year" and it opens with a Saturday morning, the roar of an engine, a bottle of scotch, an arcade: the illusion of escape, when you already know there's no breaking out of prison. Because the prison is your own home.

The piano notes mark the tempo, bass and drums hold the pace steady. But it's Darnielle's voice, feverish and possessed, that drives the race toward the shout of a chorus that refuses to surrender: "I am gonna make it through this year/ If it kills me". The ending already seems written ("The scene ends badly, as you might imagine/ In a cavalcade of anger and fear"), and yet there's something stronger than fate: the promise of redemption, the promise of a liberation that sounds like a biblical prophecy: "There will be feasting and dancing/ In Jerusalem next year".

During the recording sessions, Darnielle has to lean on alcohol to withstand the emotional weight of the songs. Alongside him is his longtime bandmate Peter Hughes on bass (at the time the only other permanent member of the Mountain Goats), plus Franklin Bruno on piano, Erik Friedlander on cello, and John Vanderslice producing. Their chemistry brings out new shades in the music of Mountain Goats, combining the brightness of an irresistible momentum with the most delicate intimacy of confession.

2005, when the album hits record store shelves, is a golden year for existentially-minded indie rock (from Sufjan Stevens's "Illinois" to Eels's "Blinking Lights And Other Revelations", from Okkervil River's "Black Sheep Boy" to Andrew Bird's "The Mysterious Production Of Eggs"), and John Darnielle's band finally finds its place too: "It wasn't a sudden explosion. It was only once we went on tour that we realized 'This Year' was becoming bigger than we thought". Credit is also due to the video directed by Andrew Bruntel, which stages a kind of home invasion in which the band members are taken to a house and forced to play for their captors — a perfect metaphor for that struggle against an intolerable reality that lies at the heart of the song.

If we live to see the other side of this

I will remember your kiss

So do it with your mouth open

("Dilaudid")

Who can truly understand the wounds we keep hidden? Not the obliviousness of friends, not the good intentions of teachers. Sometimes we end up convincing ourselves that only someone as broken as we are inside can share what we're going through: "But down in your arms, in your arms/ I am a wild creature", sings Darnielle over the vibrant gravity of "Broom People". And even love risks turning into a spiral of self-destruction, as the bass drone accompanies the melody traced by the piano. Two high-consumption emotional engines, sooner or later, end up destroying each other.

When dysfunctional relationships get mixed up with opioids, things inevitably get even more complicated. Over the solitary, relentless cello of "Dilaudid" (a morphine derivative, indeed), every kiss is the last plea of someone who doesn't know if they'll have another day to live. The accelerator points straight toward the abyss, toward gravitational collapse ("Collapsing Stars", not by chance, is the title of one of "Dilaudid"'s B-sides, a bittersweet dance of implosion).

The tone, as soon as the percussion and guitar of "Dance Music" kick in, shifts from sharp to light. But it's only an appearance: behind the lively movements lies a dead-end road, and the desperate need not to be left alone ("There's only one place this road ever ends up/ And I don't want to die alone").

And alone in my room

I am the last of a lost civilization

And I vanish into the dark

And rise above my station

(“Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod”)

When you hear someone say that music saved their life, it's usually just hyperbole. But not for John Darnielle: at the moment when nothingness seems to swallow everything whole, it's music that keeps him anchored to life. The volume knob as a last resort for erasing reality, as in "Dance Music". Or headphones as a dream chamber, according to the image evoked by "Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod" amid the solemnity of the keyboards and the raw chords of the acoustic guitar: a dramatic crescendo in which the one indispensable thing to protect from violence is the stereo, "the one thing that I couldn't live without". That's where the hope of the tetrapod evoked by the title comes from, with its archaic, biblical flavor: the ultimate possibility of an evolutionary leap, like the one that carried the first vertebrates from the oceans onto dry land ("One of these days/ I'm going to wriggle up on dry land").

Meanwhile, though, reality is a powerful, relentless hand that makes you feel utterly erased: "You erase me", Darnielle confesses in a song with a title more explicit than ever ("Song For My Stepfather"), performed only live over the years. It belongs to that apocryphal canon that serves as a counterpoint to the album, together with the songs from a collection of demos that has become a genuine cult object for fans, "Come, Come To The Sunset Tree": above all, the driving "The Day The Aliens Came (Hawaiian Feeling)", in which the mirage of an alien invasion becomes the only way to overturn the state of things. As in an old B-movie or an episode of "Visitors", the new friends arriving from the sky vaporize every anguish ("The house behind me and the people in it/ Will all go up like steam in just a minute"); or rather, they vaporize the human race itself along with all its meanness ("There won't be any reason left to cry/ 'Cause there won't be any people left to cry for").

There'll always be a few things, maybe several things

That you’re going to find really difficult to forgive

(“Up The Wolves”)

In the imagination, revenge solves everything. It sets things right. In reality, it's all more complicated. The revenge fantasy, over the menacing accents of "Lion's Teeth", is as simple and merciless as the law of the jungle. The drums give no respite, the cello acts as a goad, but in the end the great adversary is always there, its shadow looming over everything: "There's this great big you/ And little old me".

In the same way, the fiery unfurling of "Up To Wolves" (which suddenly reached a wider audience in 2014, thanks to a scene from the TV series “The Walking Dead“) scaglia le sue maledizioni con un grido liberatorio: “I’m gonna bribe the officials/ I’m gonna kill all the judges/ It’s gonna take you people years/ To recover from all of the damage”). The truth, though — as Darnielle admits — is that sooner or later the day comes when you have to embrace the futility of revenge. "Just when that day is coming, who can say, who can say?".

Some things you’ll do for money

Some you’ll do for fun

But the things you do for love are going to come back to you

One by one

(“Love Love Love”)

What do the suicide of King Saul and that of Kurt Cobain, Sonny Liston's attempt to blind Ali in the ring, and the murder of the old moneylender by the protagonist of "Crime and Punishment" have in common? Why does Darnielle line up these moments over the notes of "Love Love Love", the beating heart of "The Sunset Tree"? "Some moments last forever/ But some flare out with love love love". "What gets us is the legacy of the Romantic poets," explains the American songwriter. "We think of love as something always accompanied by the sound of violins. Personally, I think the Greeks had it right instead — love can also destroy everything in its path." And here is the point where the stories of the characters in "Love Love Love" become intertwined with Darnielle's own personal story. "My stepfather loved his family, and yet he often treated us horribly. Love isn't a benign, reassuring force. Love is something wild."

Amid the punctuation of the piano and the soft strums of the guitar, the voice thins out as it quotes Paul of Tarsus directly: "Now we see things as in a mirror dimly/ Then we shall see each other face to face". If revenge is too easy a path, forgiveness sometimes seems simply impossible. But no one is truly able to see the other face to face, no one is able to fully understand them: all we can do is start again from that uncertain reflection. And let the awareness of the otherness that separates us grow like a blade of grass through the cracks in the concrete.

"Pale Green Things" — a chamber-like, almost whispered epilogue that anticipates the Mountain Goats to come, from "Get Lonely" onward — is about exactly this. It's about an afternoon at the horse races with his stepfather, an almost impossible moment of respite from anguish; it's about the phone call bringing news of his death, with a tragic sense of relief; it's about pale, faded plants, still able to grow against all odds.

"May the peace which eluded you in life be yours now", reads a line inside the album. There is nothing to love in misfortune, Simone Weil would say, and yet the soul must go on loving all the same, or at least go on wishing to love. It's the only way not to surrender to hell, here on earth. It's the only way to reach the dawn of the new year awaiting us.

All we have to do is find a way to make the next day happen.

The day’s coming, the day’s coming.

We will wait for that day together and cheer its dawn

(John Darnielle, 12/31/2020)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

21/03/2026