“Broom People” uses specific images to talk about the general feeling of young love being the only damn thing you need.

Track: “Broom People”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005)

Most of The Sunset Tree is a very personal look at John Darnielle’s abusive stepfather. Songs like “Lion’s Teeth,” “Dance Music,” and “Magpie” get right at the heart of the fear and the sadness of what it’s like to be young and afraid. The album is also concerned with the entirety of sad childhood in a lot of ways, and that’s where songs like “Broom People” come in.

While “You or Your Memory” and “Pale Green Things” offer John’s stepfather a chance to be a more complicated character than the brutal villain he is through most of the album, it’s in “Broom People” that we really get to know the boy himself. His stepfather doesn’t even make an appearance. The closest the song comes to the album’s dark center is in lines where he’s suggested, like “I write down good reasons to freeze to death” or the appearance of “well meaning teachers.”

“Broom People” is about the ways we hide. He’s on the record about the song and he says it’s about a girl that he slept with three times a day when he was 14 years old. She’s not Cathy, which only matters for the narrative because it’s not the same name from “This Year.” In that fact we find a little commentary on the fleeting nature of “love” as a teenager. Everything is intense immediately, but that doesn’t cut into the reality of lines like “down in your arms // in your arms, I am a wild creature.” This is a place for John to hide from a life that he can’t find any other way to process.

All of The Sunset Tree is about making the best of bad situations, but only “Broom People” ends with — at least temporarily — a happy protagonist.