Favorites of 2005 – Part I
Record of the Year: The Sunset Tree by The Mountain Goats
John Darnielle’s collection of songs reflecting on life growing in the presence of an angry alcoholic stepfather is probably his strongest collection of songs yet. Much has been written on his deliberate attempts to not write autobiographically; instead he tries to tell stories through his songs the way a short story writer or novelist would.
But a writer’s perception and ideas do not come out of a vacuum and the fact that the same themes keep appearing in his material I don’t believe is accidental. Ideas that appear in records like Tallahasse could quite likely come from his exploration of love and human relationships in all their complexity, which may have been informed by his upbringing. A record like The Sunset Tree is kind of like the autobiography of a writer talking about the origins of his work. That doesn’t make all Darnielle’s work autobiographical, but it perhaps gives us a sense of where it all comes from.
Thematically, The Sunset Tree has more in common with 2002’s Tallahassee, rather than the obvious We Shall All Be Healed, Darnielle’s other autobiographical record, which mainly details with the destructiveness of the years he spent doing meth.
Tallahassee is a song-cycle that details the breakdown of the marriage of a middle-aged couple in Florida, the so-called Alpha Couple. In songs like “Game Shows Touch Our Lives”, “See America Right”, “Oceanographer’s Choice”, and “The Old College Try”, they recognize that their relationship isn’t built on love, but rather familiarity and co-dependence, with tender words spoken mostly through alcohol.
The Sunset Tree builds on similar themes. His songs of survival in an abusive house where the children were probably unwelcome baggage are raucous (“This Year”), bitter “(“Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod”) and the dissonance of the deceptively spunky “Dance Music” with its dark lyrical content suggest the range of emotions he may have experienced during his childhood and adolescence: Defiance, anger and denial. Here, alcohol isn’t the lubricant for tenderness, rather it’s the opposite.
I believe, though, near the end of the CD, he starts to understand his stepfather and while he never comes to truly accept him, he comes to a peaceful conclusion where, in the quiet, contemplative “Pale Green Things”, upon hearing of his death, he doesn’t celebrate, he focuses on a memory of a trip to the racetrack his stepfather took him on when he was young. The memory isn’t positive or negative, it is simply the memory that surfaced:
My sister called at three a.m.
Just last December.
She told me how you’d died at last
(At last?)
And that morning at the racetrack was one thing I remembered.
I turned it over in my mind
Like a living Chinese finger trap.