PicoBlog

In December 2003, Darnielle’s sister, Theresa, called to tell him that their stepfather had died. Back in 1972, their parents, Mary and Max, had gotten divorced, and Mary had moved in with a family friend named Mike Noonan. In the apartment in San Luis Obispo, California where Mary, John, Theresa, and Mike first lived, things got crazy fast. One of John’s early memories, from when he was around six years old, was of Noonan throwing a drinking glass from across the room at his mother’s face. Noonan started hitting John, as well as his mother, around that time, and he was verbally abusive to everyone in the apartment. When John was about 14, Noonan hit him so hard on the side of his head that the stud in John’s ear was driven into his neck.

A month or two later, while touring We Shall All Be Healed in Europe, Darnielle started writing lyrics that came directly out of his memories of his life with his family, something that he had only done once before, in “You’re in Maya.” He finished four of the lyrics—“Dance Music” (saved for later), “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod” (saved for later), “Broom People,” and “Magpie”—but didn’t do anything with them musically. Just before an April 2004 BBC radio session with the legendary DJ John Peel, he and Hughes came up with the chords and arrangements for the songs and played all four of them on the show. With Hughes’s encouragement, Darnielle kept writing in that mode for several more months (mostly in a house in Durham, North Carolina, where he and Lalitree had moved at the end of 2003). In November 2004, Darnielle and Hughes went into Prairie Sun Studios in Cotati, California, to record The Sunset Tree, the album that will probably always be the Mountain Goats’ defining achievement. Not all of the songs are directly about Darnielle’s stepfather, but each of them bears the mark of the fear and wildness that Noonan had provoked in him.

It’s hard to talk about the songs on this album in the same way that you talk about the songs on other Mountain Goats albums. The Sunset Tree provoked responses from fans that went far beyond anything that Darnielle had experienced at any other point in his career, and he had already gotten a pretty good sense of the degree to which his songs were affecting people’s lives. The critical responses got more effusive too. In a New Yorker essay that appeared in May 2005, a month after the album’s release, Sasha Frere-Jones called Darnielle America’s “best non-hip-hop lyricist.” By lyricist, Frere-Jones meant something a little different than usual; he defined lyricists as people “writing lyrics in complete sentences and delivering their songs emphatically, as though the point of making music is to communicate.” But the line gets quoted in a sort of free-form way by a lot of people writing about the Mountain Goats—mainly, I think, because it is a useful placeholder for the feeling that Darnielle is doing something better than anyone else has done it, something that is inseparable from his lyrics but maybe also larger than them.

The album starts with Darnielle’s voice running up a scale: “I checked into a”—followed by a guitar/bass/piano chord that kicks off the rest of the line: “bargain-priced room on La Cienega/Gazed out through the curtains at the parking lot.”

Lyrically, there’s no obvious dramatic action: after gazing through the curtains, the speaker goes down to the corner store, and when he gets back to the motel room, he spreads out his supplies on the bathroom counter. But there’s something unnamed that all this is circling around. “St. Joseph’s baby aspirin,” he sings in the chorus, “Bartles and Jaymes/And you/Or your memory.” Partly because this comes right after We Shall All Be Healed, it seems likely that he’s bought some weak meth (which he’s cutting with weak aspirin and kicking with wine coolers) and that the title of the song, “You or Your Memory,” refers to meth (“you”) and the pale-shadow-of-meth drug in him now (“your memory”). But something in Darnielle’s voice makes me feel like there’s more to it than that. Maybe there was a You, a human You, who damaged him and got his systems running way too fast? Maybe this is a re-enactment, with needles and dope, of that damage, something that the speaker does, at least in part, in Your Memory?

And maybe the next song, “Broom People,” has a similar relationship to the looming Stepfather of The Sunset Tree.

It’s teenage sex this time, not drugs (Down in your arms, in your arms/I am a wild creature), but there’s something behind all of the itemizations in the song that seems to infuse them with an insane, sad, furious force. The song’s two verses begin the same way: with a list of the things that the speaker saw at his girlfriend’s house and a metaphorical evocation of their impact on him.

’36 Hudson in the garage 
All sorts of junk in the unattached spare room 
Dishes in the kitchen sink 
New straw for the old broom. . . .

Floor two-foot-high with newspapers 
White carpet thick with pet hair 
Half-eaten gallons of ice cream in the freezer 
Fresh fuel for the sodium flares  

All of the differences between her place and his—ancient car, storage-space spare room, unwashed dishes—are being put to imaginative use; they’re new straw for the broom he sweeps with, new materials for his mind to work on. Same with the piles of newspapers, the pet hair, the incontinently eaten ice cream: they’re all different in some way, and when he senses them into himself, vividly, his internal signal flares burn brighter. Part of the reason why he’s so wild in her arms is because he’s discovering, through sex, that sex isn’t the only thing that’s arousing him, that all of the unfamiliarity around him is unexpectedly bringing the familiar to mind. Why else would his voice veer slightly out of control when he sings “Dishes in the kitchen sink”? Why else would he take the last word of the song—“brook”—and sing it so loudly and long that its word-status begins to vanish and its sound-status begins to appear? Something more than either her or him is coursing through him and making itself felt.

It’s everywhere on The Sunset Tree: in the way he sings “Till my cheeks are hot and red and soaking wet” in “Lion’s Teeth,” for example, or the way he sings “You will go down on all fours” in “Magpie”—or, in the greatest of the album’s outtakes, “The Day the Aliens Came (Hawaiian Feeling),” the way he sings, “The house behind me and the people in it/Will all go up like steam in just a minute.” Something is putting pressure on him from inside and in response he’s almost violently alive. Listening to the roar and whine of the car’s engine in “This Year” (saved for later) is like listening to his own suddenly amplified vitality (six cylinders underneath the hood crashing and kicking) and listening to the engine “screaming out” when he downshifts into the driveway is like listening to the sound of the anger and fear to come. In “Up the Wolves,” too, we’re there to feel the strange, crazed energy just as much as we’re there to hear a monologue or witness a scenario.

The energy is directed, in this case, toward the mother, who is, for the song’s speaker, like the wolf who rescued and raised Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome. But up the wolf, up all wolves, in fact, because wolves don’t protect their young (in his mind, anyway, and the mind of anyone who has ever used the phrase “raised by wolves”). The day of wrath is coming (I’m gonna bribe the officals, I’m gonna kill all the judges/It’s gonna take you people years to recover from all of the damage). It’ll swallow up the stepfather who harmed him and the mother who never really interfered: “Our mother has been absent/Ever since we founded Rome/But there’s gonna be a party”—and not a nice party—“when the wolf comes home.” It’s an awful thing to even think: the mother tried, the mother did her best, the mother was suffering too. But you can think it, you almost inevitably do think it, even if you’re 100% committed to the project of never letting the thought see the light of day.

“My mom got mad when she found out I was making [an album of songs about Noonan],” Darnielle said in a May 2005 interview. “It’s a very long story and really hard to explain, but my mother doesn’t really hold what he did in the ’70s and ’80s against him. As soon as my stepfather died, she and my sister sort of forgot about anything bad he did. . . . Things with my sister are still complex.” Darnielle had at least two good reasons to not write and record these songs, in other words, but he did it anyway. He was drunk for a lot of the vocal tracking, partly in order to get past the prohibited feeling of the whole thing. No wonder there is such a wild energy on the album; no wonder it finds expression so often in the writing and the singing.

In “Dilaudid,” for instance, over aggressive cellos, Darnielle issues a series of curt statements:

The reception’s gotten fuzzy
The delicate balance has shifted
Put on your gloves and your black pumps
Let’s pretend the fog has lifted 

The tension rises toward the end of the verse (So kiss me with your mouth open/Turn the tires toward the street/And stay sweet) and then the second verse just takes off:

All the chickens come on home to roost 
Plump bodies blotting out the sky 
You know it breaks my heart in half, in half 
When I see them trying to fly 
’Cause you just can’t do
Things your body wasn’t meant to 
Hike up your fishnets  
I know you 

If we live to see the other side of this 
I will remember your kiss 
So do it with your mouth open 
And take your foot off of the brake 
For Christ’s sake!

That last line, a pure intensifier, sends his voice into a tremor-filled shout, and then the agitated cellos pause, resume, and stop for good. What has just happened? “[W]hat have I seen, what have I seen,” thinks the grandmother in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, after an unexpectly vivid experience of the world outside her house. “The earth and the sky and the garden, not as they always are.” It’s as basic as that: two people in a car, not as they always are, because of the dialed-up energy of the writing and the singing. That’s what has happened, and it has happened, in large part, because Darnielle is treating each new line as an occasion to surge forth.

At times, those surges uplift me in a very strange way, a way that makes me feel like something deeper and broader than my personality has been set in motion. In the last lines of “Song for Dennis Brown,” for instance:

And when the birds come home in spring, we will fill them full of buckshot
And jets of contaminated blood will cloud the rivers and the lakes
It took all the coke in town 
To bring down Dennis Brown
On the day my lung collapses 
We’ll see just how much it takes

And in the second chorus of “Pale Green Things”:

Sometimes I’ll meet you out there 
Lonely and frightened 
Flicking my tongue out at the wet leaves 
Pale green things 
Pale green things

At moments like these, Darnielle is making a language meant for ordinary use do more (“shoot them” => “fill them full of buckshot”; a boy meeting his stepfather in no-man’s land => a toad or something zipping its tongue toward wet leaves) and supercharging that expressiveness with his voice. “I’ve always connected to things you can really experience in their raw state,” he said in a 2010 interview. “I felt all the power that’s in poetry, but at the same time, it’s not usually a super-immediate power. . . . To me, music is where that happens.” I feel it like a groundswell in the ocean, a change in my standpoint that comes from somewhere beneath my surface, because of whatever it is that Darnielle is doing to the language that he and I share. Something larger than either me or Darnielle, something that feels like pure motion, affects me, and all of a sudden I have a little more awe in my life, a little more curiosity, a little more interest in my surroundings.

In “Love Love Love,” the next-to-last song on the album, Darnielle gives that “something” a name.

Love isn’t moral, for Darnielle; the first verse is about King Saul’s suicide, Joseph’s brothers selling him into slavery, and Sonny Liston trying to win at all costs (the second and third verses are about Raskolnikov’s murder and Kurt Cobain’s suicide). Love has no worldly value (Some things you do for money, and some you do for love, love, love). Love’s effects are inevitable but unknowable (the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one). Love exists in the moment, not for all time (Some moments last forever, but some flare out with love, love, love). “We think of love as this, you know, thing that is accompanied by strings and it’s a force for good, and if something bad happens then that’s not love,” Darnielle said in a May 2005 interview on NPR. “I don’t know so much about that. I don’t know that the Greeks weren’t right. I think they were—that love can eat a path through everything, that it will destroy a lot of things on the way to its own objective, which is just its expression of itself, you know.” When he or anyone else pushes language harder, or allows even the most asocial feelings to take shape, the motive force is never simply personal, never simply a matter of choice. There’s something else pushing, something pushing in all of us. “Abusive people are not monsters,” he said elsewhere in the NPR interview. “They’re people who have problems, terrible problems. . . . [My stepfather] mistreated us terribly quite often, but he loved us. And, you know, well, that to me is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing a lot of what I perceive as terrible damage in the way people talk about this—love is this benign, comfortable force. It’s not that. It’s wild, you know?” Every time I reach the end of The Sunset Tree, I do.

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