On April 26, 2005, a few days shy of my 19th birthday, I arrived at the record store to purchase new work from two of my favorite artists: Bruce Springsteen (Devils & Dust) and Ben Folds (Songs for Silverman). But as I plucked those discs from the “New Release” rack, something caught my attention. I had never heard the voice playing on the store’s stereo, but I knew immediately that I wanted to hear it again. That voice was reedy and excitable, joined to a melody that was jubilant and urgent. I’m listening to dance music, the singer relayed, and I wanted to dance, too. I rushed to the counter to ask the clerk what was playing. And so it was that alongside Bruce and Ben’s CDs—which I would listen to and enjoy, but never cherish—I walked out with one more of that day’s new releases, and a future lock for my shortlist of favorite albums: the Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree.
I find that Mountain Goats fans often have this sort of treasured origin story with the band—though it’s funny, and a little tricky, to refer to the Mountain Goats as a band. An ensemble has coalesced over the years, but the moniker only consistently refers to John Darnielle, who’s been recording under it since his debut tape, Taboo VI: The Homecoming, in 1991. Darnielle—once rather notoriously described in a New Yorker profile as “America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist”—inspires close and passionate relationships between his fans and his music, and you tend to remember when his voice collided with your life. His lyrics—witty and literate, often oddball, and usually startlingly emotional—are only half the story, though. Beginning with a string of predominantly-solo acoustic collections recorded alone with a boombox, Darnielle’s musicianship has always been as much about pounding chords and soaring vocals that can surge into a scream. The Mountain Goats offer a full-package sound even when “they” are just a man, a guitar, and a pretty shoddy mic.
The lo-fi era reached its apex with the Mountain Goats’ first unambiguous masterpiece, 2002’s All Hail West Texas. Darnielle had by now amassed a cult that followed him as he made the leap to more conventionally-polished studio recording with 2002’s Tallahassee, a song cycle focused on “the Alpha Couple,” a pair of miserable characters Darnielle had long enjoyed tormenting. From there, he made a pivot to more personal songwriting with 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed, a series of reflections on the years of hard drug use that predated his songwriting career. Again, it would be no stretch to call this album a masterpiece; it’s a record—as described by Heather Phares in AllMusic—“burning with righteous anger that is fueled by Darnielle’s sardonic humor.”
We Shall All Be Healed was the second of three albums that the Mountain Goats were contracted for by their label, 4AD. Believing in his heart that the third album was likely the end of the line for his studio career, and prepared to return to his life as a psychiatric nurse with a side hustle in music, Darnielle decided—as he recounted onstage in 2013—to “[open] up and [say], Well, I’m gonna tell a story that is true.” Spurred by the death of his abusive stepfather, Darnielle began composing the songs that would make up The Sunset Tree, a collection inspired by his adolescence. Some of the pieces touched on physical and emotional abuse, while others recounted teen romance and substance experimentation. They were dense with Classics references, and nodded at figures as diverse as Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov and Kurt Cobain. The songs were often frighteningly raw—by the time of the studio sessions, Darnielle would take to getting drunk before laying down vocals, just to make it through the pain associated with the material—but they were possessed of an essentially Darniellian ferocious optimism. I am going to make it through this year, rang out the album’s eventual anthemic refrain, a promise that was chased with a punch: if it kills me! The liner notes came with a promise of their own: after dedicating the album to any young people experiencing abuse at home, Darnielle offered “the following good news: you are going to make it out of there alive/you will live to tell your story/never lose hope.”
The Sunset Tree was greeted warmly, if not with unanimous rapture. While Spin congratulated Darnielle on “some of the toughest and most open-souled music” of his career, and Mike Powell of Stylus lauded “an album sprawling vivaciously across the spectrum of emotion and intellect,” David Browne’s B-grade Entertainment Weekly review accused Darnielle of “wasting” some of his own painful stories “on coy indie-folk,” and Pitchfork’s Brandon Stosuy awarded the album a hesitant 7.2/10 after being left “cold” by initial listens. Darnielle’s opus would grow on this latter publication, though: Pitchfork’s 2009 rundown of the decade’s 200 best albums would place The Sunset Tree at number 102, with Mike Powell again going to bat for the record, now arguing that it was “the first [Mountain Goats album] where a fan could say, ‘that is my life and hearing someone sing about it makes me feel better.’” In 2014, Emily St. James of the A.V. Club selected the album as the ideal gateway to this sprawling, daunting discography, and “likely the Mountain Goats’ best singular work.”
My relationship to The Sunset Tree has shifted since that first ecstatic day at my local record shop. Then, I was not too far removed from the vantage point Darnielle was inhabiting; I responded most to “Dance Music” and “This Year.” Now, I listen to the album as a parent, and I’m haunted by the ghost in this machine: Mike Noonan, stepfather to John Darnielle. The album was dedicated to him, as well, with Darnielle wishing him “the peace which eluded you in life.” It’s clear from these songs that Noonan left little peace in his wake. Tracks like “Lion’s Teeth” now grasp and terrify me; when I’m listening to “Dance Music,” I envision not the little record player on the floor, but the glass launched at Darnielle’s mother’s head. My connection to the album has only deepened as I find new corners of its emotional landscape to map. As I continue to navigate the responsibility of caretaking, any story of lapsed care functions as a striking cautionary tale. Our children deserve the best of us, and The Sunset Tree is one of the most affecting documents I’ve heard testifying to the impacts of abandoning that responsibility.
Darnielle isn’t shy about the fact that people wait in line to tell him The Sunset Tree has been transformative for them. This, he told Terry Gross in 2014, “is an honor so profound that I don’t know how to talk about it. How often does a person get to feel like, Well, this was worth living for—this was worth coming this way for?” Ruminating on the same theme with Marc Maron in 2013, Darnielle marveled that someone who “sucked ass at being a person” for as long as he did, could make good with such a widely meaningful piece of art. Maybe sucking ass was essential to the process. Or maybe the past is all pale green things.
Darnielle has continued composing song cycles, though they have rarely been as personally raw as We Shall All Be Healed and The Sunset Tree. Still, from a tribute to local wrestling (2015’s Beat the Champ) to a prospective soundtrack for an action movie that doesn’t exist (2022’s Bleed Out) to a rock opera tracing the fate of a character glimpsed 20 years earlier on All Hail West Texas (2023’s Jenny From Thebes), the Mountain Goats spirit of restless experimentation appears ceaselessly active. Darnielle’s interdisciplinary interests, meanwhile—read his novels; check out his guest spot on a 2023 episode of Poker Face—indicate a voracious curiosity with little sign of slowing down.
The idea for a Mountain Goats edition of Broad Sound came from Carmen Paddock, who’s contributed an essay on “Magpie” to this collection. A casual poll of favorite songs among past Broad Sound contributors yielded a surprisingly high number of Mountain Goats tracks, and Carmen idly noted how many contributors we could obviously find for an all-tMG volume. The idea was immediately compelling to me. I had a strong feeling that if any fanbase could be counted on to deliver eclectic work of a high caliber, it must be Mountain Goats fans, and when I realized that the 20th anniversary of The Sunset Tree was coming up, the idea came together quickly: a sort of tribute-cum-covers album, with one piece of new work—be it an analytical essay, a personal reflection, a short story, or beyond—tied to each track. I put out the call on Reddit, Tumblr, and the 13,000-member Facebook group Mountain Goats Shitposting, and the results far exceeded my expectations. In this volume, you’ll find what I hoped for: you’ll read analysis placing this album in the context of Darnielle’s career, you’ll read about what these songs mean to the hearts and minds of thoughtful writers, and you’ll read a neo-noir short story inspired by “Dilaudid.” But you’ll read things I would never have dreamed up, too—a one-act play, a visual interpretation of “Lion’s Teeth,” and more. I didn’t dare imagine this edition turning out as spectacularly as it has, and I couldn’t be prouder that it’s now in your hands (or hard drives).
At the Mountain Goats’ August 1, 2024 show at Boston’s House of Blues, there was one consistent call from various corners of the crowd: people wanted to hear “Up the Wolves,” the seventh track off The Sunset Tree. The band saved it for the encore—after they’d closed their main set with “This Year,” which instigated a joyous, hands-in-the-air, mass-jumping event—and when they did play “Up the Wolves,” it provided one of the night’s most unified and cathartic singalongs. I’m gonna kill all the judges, this diverse and passionate crowd declared together. It’s going to take you people years to recover from all of the damage. It felt like a rallying cry—I had met people in line whom those judges were working to legislate out of existence, and among those few thousand evangelists, there was now a unified call to arms. The odds may seem stacked against a better tomorrow, but as John Darnielle wrote two decades ago: never lose hope. Talking to—and working with—Mountain Goats fans makes me hopeful.
Broad Sound Spotlights: The Sunset Tree at 20 is available in paperback via Amazon. Select content will be featured at BroadSoundMag.com throughout July.
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