The Sunset Tree at 20

The Mountain Goats’ album The Sunset Tree was officially released on April 26, 2005, which means it’s now 20 years old, and I have been a die-hard Mountain Goats fan for 20 years.

The Sunset Tree is not the first Mountain Goats album I heard — that would be 2002’s Tallahassee — but it was the first I spent money on the day it came out. A digital download, not sure from where — iTunes probably, since that’s mostly what I used back then. Something that, theoretically at least, provided money to the band, because it was important to me that I do my little part to help this band that had started to really matter to me.

After falling in love with Tallahassee somewhere around 2003 or 2004, I went back and got everything Mountain Goats that I could get my hands on. All Hail West Texas was a revelation. It still is. Always on my top five favorite albums by anybody, even as the other anybodies regularly change. (I once proposed a book to the 33 1/3rd series about it and they almost let me do it. I’m glad they didn’t quite go for it, though, because the proposal was pretty bonkers and I’m not even remotely a music writer. I just wanted some way to scream out at the world, “This is a work of wonder and magic and genius and it will change your life!”)

Sunset Tree is not my favorite Mountain Goats album (they could make the greatest album in the history of all music and I’d still have to say All Hail West Texas is my favorite), but it’s the one that provokes the most nostalgia in me. It’s the album I’ve most frequently given to friends to welcome them to the cult of Mountain Goats, and more often than not this has led to memorable conversations over the years. I vividly remember a long conversation with my late friend Katherine Min about it as a beautiful example of concept-album-as-memoir. She also knew enough about my own childhood to know why this particular memoir hit home for me so deeply, and we talked about that, about the ways it’s not so much whole stories that one relates to as it is particular details, the flashes of shared perception that, in the best memoir or novel or story or poem or song, can explode from a narrative of life that doesn’t match one’s own. (Half the lines of “Broom People” take me immediately back to high school, even though the song itself is about an experience and a kind of salvation I, a terrified queer kid in only-a-couple-years-post-Reagan rural America, never had.)

It’s that magic of detail and specificity that writer Tom Breihan identifies in his Stereogum article celebrating the 20th anniversary of Sunset Tree, particularly around the most famous Mountain Goats song, “This Year”: “‘This Year’ thrums with anger and determination and besieged optimism. It turns out that this feeling, conveyed so forcefully, applies to a whole lot of people going through a whole lot of things.” Aside from the defiant chorus (“I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me!”), the song is a very specific story with characters and situations and all that jazz, not a generic Hallmark card of affirmation. But that’s the magic of writing specifically about individual experience. It blossoms in the audience’s mind in a way that generic bromides never do. A catchy, propulsive tune helps, too.

I’m one of those countless people who clung to “This Year” at a difficult time. All of The Sunset Tree, really, but it was “This Year” that I listened to nearly every day when driving home from work in bumper-to-bumper New Jersey traffic during one of the most challenging times of my life in 2007/2008 — a job I was terrible at and tormented by, my father’s death, a heart made for breaking, all sorts of stuff. One heap of crud after another. A couple years later, my mother and I were driving somewhere together and she said she admired how I had persevered, she would have just thrown her hands in the air and moved to a shack in the woods. “Hold on,” I said, and pulled up “This Year” on my phone and played it for her. “I just kept hanging on to the chorus of this song,” I said. It wasn’t only the song, of course, it was all sorts of things (like fear of bankruptcy, homelessness, prison) that kept me vaguely functional, but the song definitely helped.

Let’s not let “This Year” overshadow just how great every song on Sunset Tree is. I’m not going to go track by track here, since I’ve got other things I need to be doing right now, but I’ll just say it’s no surprise that John Darnielle is a terrific novelist in addition to being a wonderful songwriter and performer. An album like The Sunset Tree is less like a collection of short stories, which it may superficially resemble, than it is like the careful, extended pattern of a unified book-length narrative. (And I say this as a short story writer who has so far proved to be a complete failure as a novelist.)

Because of its structures and patterns, Sunset Tree is also an album that benefits from being listened to in track order. Like most folks, I make playlists of favorite songs and so end up excerpting Sunset Tree a lot, but whenever I return to it as a full album, I’m reminded that this is a complete composition, its greatest effect coming from the songs resonating with each other.

20 years. How did that happen? Some of the people I most enjoyed sharing The Sunset Tree with are gone now, a fact I hadn’t realized until I sat down to type this. My memory of those folks is also stirred by these songs, songs which bring a certain life to all that has been lost. The first song, after all, is titled “You or Your Memory”.

Put The Sunset Tree on, listen to it alone, maybe in the dark, let yourself be with it, give it the attention it deserves. Maybe it will reveal its magic to you. It’s okay if you get a bit trapped in memory, okay if you yearn for lost things and people, okay if you smile ruefully. Okay if you weep. I do, listening to it. A lot.

There’s gonna come a day when you feel better.
You’ll rise up free and easy on that day
and float from branch to branch
lighter than the air.
Just when that day is coming
who can say?
Who can say?

—”Up the Wolves”