the sunset tree

429. Love Love Love

Alex Russell Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, The Sunset Tree , , , , , , , ,

Through several painful references, “Love Love Love” tells a story about the complex ways we react to loss.

Track: “Love Love Love”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005) and Come, Come to The Sunset Tree (2005)

You do not get what you’re probably expecting with a song called “Love Love Love.” Love is a very complicated emotion that’s often made simple through artistic expression. John Darnielle is not interested in this approach, thus you have “Love Love Love.” The song is a dozen references, all difficult and painful, tied together as a story about John Darnielle’s own life. He’s said that it’s about feeling good when his abuser passed away. It calls to mind the “you died at last // at last?” question from “Pale Green Things” on the same album. You might want to be a person who can rise above, but it’s, as always, more complicated than that. Is it even wrong to take joy in a moment like that? Your experience may vary.

The Mountain Goats have played “Love Love Love” hundreds of times. I always wonder, when I scroll through a list like this of so many shows in so many cities over so many years, if John Darnielle thinks about the origins of songs like this when he sings them. You can tell when you see a song like “Spent Gladiator 2” that he’s in the moment every time. The Come, Come to The Sunset Tree version of “Lion’s Teeth” opens with Darnielle saying it’s a hard song for him to play. I hope, to some degree, that isn’t the case with this one. I don’t have the life experience Darnielle does, so my connection isn’t the same as his, but “Love Love Love” is a beautiful song all the same. It’s just one best enjoyed with a little distance.

428. Song for Dennis Brown

Alex Russell Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, The Sunset Tree , , , , , , , ,

“Song for Dennis Brown” isn’t really about Dennis Brown, but it references him to make a point.

Track: “Song for Dennis Brown”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005) and Come, Come to The Sunset Tree (2005)

The choice to pitch “Song for Dennis Brown” so high has always been an interesting one to me. I don’t think there’s anything to this, but the longest songs on The Sunset Tree are all ones that John Darnielle sings much higher than the others. You get a chance to sit with a song like “Song for Dennis Brown” in a way you do not sit with “Magpie” or “Dance Music.” There’s a lot of room to breathe here, despite the subject matter of a death from a collapsed lung.

Dennis Brown was a reggae singer who was held in high esteem. Bob Marley loved him. He was a legend, though I’ll admit I’m going on some recent research here and I’m not all that familiar with the genre. It’s easy enough to hear what people love, though. Brown’s voice is incredible. He died of an overdose that collapsed his lung, but you can hear that in the lyrics. There are a lot of Mountain Goats songs about famous people who died tragically and unexpectedly and you might just say this is one more of them. You might say that, though the self-insert asks you to go a little deeper than that. We’re in similar space to “Dilaudid” here or even “This Year,” though we’re asked to draw a slightly different conclusion. “We’ll see just how much it takes” is a threat, read one way, and you realize this isn’t about Dennis Brown as much as it is about what might happen if you lean into your worst impulses.

427. Lion’s Teeth

Alex Russell Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, The Sunset Tree , , , , , , , ,

“Lion’s Teeth” serves as a revenge fantasy for people who know that it will have to remain a fantasy.

Track: “Lion’s Teeth”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005) and Come, Come to The Sunset Tree (2005)

The version on Come, Come to The Sunset Tree opens with John Darnielle saying “this is a hard song for John to play.” You can hear it in his voice when he says it, but you can also hear it in the song. I don’t find myself coming back to “Lion’s Teeth” as much as I do most of the rest of the album. One of my five favorite Mountain Goats songs opens The Sunset Tree, “You or Your Memory,” and it’s largely about the same thing, if through a different lens and at a different time. The song that closes the album, “Pale Green Things,” is even closer to the subject matter, but it looks back at abuse rather than living within it.

I have to assume The Sunset Tree means a lot more to a survivor of abuse. Much of the album feels universal even though it’s written from a specific perspective. The songs of triumph could be about generic triumph even though they stem from one explicit place. The songs of despair, like the revenge fantasy “Lion’s Teeth,” don’t always need to be about what they are actually about. This is why you see couples swaying tenderly to “Woke Up New.” It’s what it is to you, not what it actually is. I find it harder to abstract “Lion’s Teeth” because it’s so explicit. That’s fine, of course, and it makes it stronger for what it is. As with many songs like this I hope that you never need this one, but I am glad it is here if you do.

426. Magpie

Alex Russell The Sunset Tree , , , , , , ,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5xWFaTdkvo

An intense metaphor consumes “Magpie,” a story about something bad on the horizon.

Track: “Magpie”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005)

I must thank the people at the Mountain Goats Wiki, who I thank often but should thank even more, for finding this article from Willamette Week. The conceit is that the interview asks questions about every song on The Sunset Tree in haiku form and John Darnielle was asked to respond. The questions find romance in “You or Your Memory” and John Darnielle asks, essentially, how they got that out of that song. In response to a question about if the narrator of “Lion’s Teeth” really pulled the tooth, John Darnielle tells them he learned to drive stick in a parking lot. The responses are genuine, but they are very John Darnielle. They also show how difficult it is to get off of “your” version of a song, which always reminds me of an old friend’s insistence that the cannibalism in “Golden Jackal Song” was literal. Maybe it is!

For “Magpie,” the question asks directly what the meaning of the magpie is, and John Darnielle says “only a traitor // undresses his metaphors // as if they were whores.” This speaks to a few things, but mostly it suggests to me that the point is that you figure it out yourself. Magpies, as far as I’ve ever heard, supposedly like shiny things and are easily distracted into thievery. I doubt that’s true, but it suggests a reference to someone that steals indiscriminately. There are some jumping off points there for The Sunset Tree that make sense to me, but I refer you back to the songwriter on this one.

425. Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod

Alex Russell The Sunset Tree , , , , , , ,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTrDJm_70BE

The heavy punctuation in the vocals of “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod” forcefully demands your attention.

Track: “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005)

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’d heard “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod” hundreds of times before the first time I considered the title. I originally wrote “there’s something about it,” but it’s that there are so many things about it. The balance is incredible, with thunderous percussion and guitar that would ordinarily feel too loud except that John Darnielle’s vocals are especially piercing. I’m sure there are people who don’t like that whine over “deep in the dream chamber” but I can’t imagine them. I think there’s a case to be made that this is his best vocal performance.

It’s easy to speak in hyperbole with the Mountain Goats. A few years back they released a shirt and series of stickers that said “I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats,” which gave way to the podcast of the same name. It’s a joke, but is it a joke? Hyperbole aside, I make the case for this as the strongest vocal performance not because it’s the best empirical performance, but because it’s so well suited to what’s happening. He grits his teeth and overemphasizes for impact. It feels like a series of gut punches, with that percussion like a tense heartbeat in the background. I’ve never been able to listen to it casually, it draws me out of whatever I’m doing. It’s really worth seeing live, as well. The studio performance here is crisp, but it gains another level with the drawn out last line as it bleeds into exuberant dance music. It’s the moment that you allow yourself to hope it can get better when all evidence points to the contrary.

424. Dilaudid

Alex Russell Come, Come to the Sunset Tree , , , , , , , ,

Over a haunting cello, the story of hard drugs and running away mentally plays out in “Dilaudid.”

Track: “Dilaudid”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005) and Come, Come to the Sunset Tree (2005) and Dilaudid EP (2005)

Dilaudid is technically the marketing name for hydromorphone, an opiate that’s typically used to treat intense pain. I’ve only personally come across it once, when a friend in college scratched his eye so badly they gave it to him alongside several serious warnings. He turned out fine, but as I listened to a public radio report this morning about the ongoing opiate crisis I thought about that moment and how it could have gone both ways.

John Darnielle has played “Dilaudid” hundreds of times. It’s one of the most popular songs from The Sunset Tree and it does an incredible job of conveying the intensity of the moment but also the seriousness of what lies underneath. A fan went even deeper some years ago and asked John Darnielle on Tumblr if this character is the same one from “Attention All Pickpockets,” which Darnielle confirmed and commended their “sleuthing.”

If you are into “sleuthing” like that, which I assume you must be if you’re reading this, I encourage you to dig into live performances of “Dilaudid.” The screams at the end really pop with an audience, but the banter shines here, as well. Dilaudid is serious stuff, which Darnielle mentions trying recreationally at a very young age. Obviously you would not assume from The Sunset Tree anything else, but it helps sometimes to remember how old these characters really are. None of that is to say that there is an age where these things become better, but The Sunset Tree feels familiar to an adult, but really try to remember that these people are kids.

349. The Day the Aliens Came (Hawaiian Feeling)

Alex Russell Come, Come to the Sunset Tree , , , , , , , , , ,

When you run out of people to count on, you look to the stars for hope in “The Day the Aliens Came.”

Track: “The Day the Aliens Came”
Album: Come, Come to the Sunset Tree (2005)

The last track on the companion album to The Sunset Tree is called “The Day the Aliens Came,” which John Darnielle introduces in an aside to Peter Hughes and John Vanderslice as also being, probably, called “Hawaiian Feeling.” You can unpack that any number of ways. The last line of the liner notes says “respect to the flying man: we’ve got your back.” You can also unpack that, though I am going to assume, almost assuredly incorrectly, that it’s a reference to the anthropomorphized version of your courage called Flying Man from the Super Nintendo game EarthBound. I’m sure that’s not it, but that’s sort of the space you find yourself in on this side of The Sunset Tree. You’re a boy and you must deal with forces that seem too big to deal with.

The narrator of “The Day the Aliens Came” imagines they can get away from this. It’s a fantastic notion that supernatural forces will come blast away your problems, and, indeed, your memory of your problems, but that may be all you have in the end. Mountain Goats albums don’t always end with exuberance, but the ones that do tend to end with this explosive, overstated joy. It’s a great place to leave and it’s delivered with such fury and such hope. We couldn’t be in more different territory than The Sunset Tree with “Pale Green Things,” but this isn’t about reflection. This is about closing your eyes in the middle of it and calling to anyone, anywhere, to come save you. I’m really reaching with the EarthBound reference, but if you know John Darnielle and you know the game, can’t you almost see it?

336. Pale Green Things

Alex Russell The Sunset Tree , , , , , , ,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBla7yCx9Yk

“Pale Green Things” closes The Sunset Tree with an open question about how to remember a complex figure in your life.

Track: “Pale Green Things”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005)

It is a helluva thing that John Darnielle was willing to create The Sunset Tree at all. It’s common to call an artist’s work “personal” and that word applies to a lot of what the Mountain Goats make, but this album requires a further examination of that term. It’s possible to listen to much of the album without squaring yourself in John Darnielle’s personal experience, but that is not true of the closing song “Pale Green Things.” By the time the album ends, the journey through abuse and the challenges of youth has been through a number of experiences. It ends with a difficult, conflicted note.

The line that unlocks everything is in the final verse, where John Darnielle describes a phone call about the death of his stepfather as “she told me how you died at last // at last.” The repetition is important because of the implied question mark on the second part. How could you say it that way, on the one hand, but what if that’s the only way to say it?

This is the album with “This Year” and “Up the Wolves.” The Sunset Tree is largely an album about sad, distant memories and how they can be both difficult and important. It’s a wonder that he was willing to go this deep and that he was willing to share it. You probably relate to some of it broadly, which is why the general, fast, loud ones have been played hundreds of times and endure to such a degree. “Pale Green Things” is a song for one person about one time.

333. You or Your Memory

Alex Russell The Sunset Tree , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle finds himself with dark thoughts in a motel in “You or Your Memory.”

Track: “You or Your Memory”
Album: The Sunset Tree (2005)

You can look up the motel that’s described in “You or Your Memory.” You can piece it together from live shows and figure out where this real place is and go see it. I normally would defend you doing so as a part of connecting with any Mountain Goats song. This is the only case where I would say you don’t need to do it. I think you can picture it when you hear it and if you go seek to verify if you were right or not, you will only be disappointed. Trust me when I say that you’re right, you don’t need to go see.

“You or Your Memory” is a song that challenges you to discuss it because it is so self-evident. It’s a song about what it is. Someone comes home to a motel and lays everything out and has to make a choice. John Darnielle has said it’s a Hobson’s choice, a term for a situation where someone can either take what is available or choose to take nothing. It’s all a way of talking around the situation, in that the narrator is dealing with loss and isn’t sure how to approach the next day.

The Sunset Tree is about loss. It’s a complicated loss, a death where in “Pale Green Things” the narrator, John, even says “they told me how you died ‘at last’ // ‘at last?'” Loss is never easy, by sheer nature, but it is harder with other things layered on top. “You or Your Memory” is a song about the layers in yourself that you bring to how you process loss.

322. Collapsing Stars

Alex Russell Come, Come to the Sunset Tree , , , , , , , ,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bY0Vdo0z18

John Darnielle shows us two young warriors ready for blood but not sure if they’re going to go through with it in “Collapsing Stars.”

Track: “Collapsing Stars”
Album: Come, Come to the Sunset Tree (2005) and Dilaudid EP (2005)

“Collapsing Stars” isn’t on The Sunset Tree. It’s one of the three unique songs to the companion album Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, along with “High Doses #2” and “The Day the Aliens Came (Hawaiian Feeling).” They all share some DNA with the album and they wouldn’t feel weird to be on the main tracklist, but they are left off for a reason. My best guess with “Collapsing Stars” is that it’s a direct revenge fantasy and you already have “Lion’s Teeth,” which fits more thematically with the rest of the record.

All that said, “Collapsing Stars” is fantastic. John Darnielle’s delivery is sharp and crisp as he hits lines like “the grim particulars of poisoning the swimming pool.” These characters, who we know from other adventures on The Sunset Tree, are steeled to go through with a grim act. We have to infer why, but we know enough of this story to have a pretty good picture of it. The most interesting part of the song to me has always been the reveal at the end that they don’t go through with it. So many Mountain Goats songs hold the camera on the boats burning or the screaming argument or the dark revelation at the end, but here our young characters decide the best revenge is living well. That may explain why it doesn’t fit on the album, as that revelation would be doubled up with more space and a different sense of remorse in “Pale Green Things.”