“Song for My Stepfather” wasn’t included on The Sunset Tree, but you can hear the same pain in both.

Track: “Song for My Stepfather”
Album: Unreleased

I almost didn’t want to include this one because it’s so obviously personal. John Darnielle’s story of abuse and his stepfather is one you can follow through The Sunset Tree and extensive other sources, but it’s never as direct as it is on “Song for My Stepfather.” The song speaks for itself in that it details abuse and the protective shell that a young Darnielle found for himself to survive and to become another person in the future, not influenced by that abuse but having survived it. There’s really no other word for it, so forgive the double usage of “survive.”

Darnielle has linked this song with “Pseudothyrum Song” when introducing this one and notes that they have the same chord structure and are both about his stepfather. When I wrote about that song in 2017 I did not even consider what is very obvious in retrospect. I have always been guilty of hearing romantic pairings in songs, but these are about a more painful, more personal kind of damage between two people. Darnielle has his reasons for leaving this song off of The Sunset Tree, but you can hear the characters in those songs reckoning with this same kind of despair.