On April 26, 2005, John Darnielle’s third 4AD full-length album as The Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree, presented a deeply confessional and emotionally vivid narrative drawn from the depths of the prolific songwriter’s turbulent personal history. Twenty years on, Darnielle revisits the career highlight record with a reissue — composed of 2025 Abbey Road Remasters and featuring original artwork and a new (vinyl only) OBI strip designed by Chris Bigg.
Upon its arrival, The Sunset Tree — recorded with producer John Vanderslice in Northern California towards the end of 2004, and featuring performers Peter Hughes (bass, backing vocals, guitar), Franklin Bruno (piano, guitar), Erik Friedlander (cello), Alex DeCarville (drums), and Scott Solter (keyboards) — emerged as the most coherent and richly rewarding album in the Mountain Goats’ wildly extensive discography, and it retains that legacy now.
It’s a mark of Darnielle’s extraordinary fertility that, of the 800-plus songs he has recorded, only a handful directly concern his own life experience; The Sunset Tree’s 13 tracks, written after Darnielle’s stepfather passed away in December 2003, are the bulk of this small subsection. It’s a collection of songs about the house that Darnielle grew up in and the people who lived there — an ensemble cast which includes Darnielle himself, an ex-girlfriend, his mother, stepfather, and sister; old friends and old enemies. “I’ve put off writing about this stuff for years,” he said at the time of its release, “because I’m a little squeamish about milking my own trauma for art, and getting good songs rather than cry-fests from these experiences is a really excruciating process. And also because my stepfather was still alive.”
Experienced as a whole rather than as a series of terrifying, frozen moments, The Sunset Tree is a redemptive rather than a remorseless record. As the liner notes say : “you are going to make it out of there alive.”
