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June 10 - Dilaudid

Everything about listening to this makes me tense in the best way. The staccato strings and the urgent nature of the lyrics add up to the feeling of something constrained, desperate, vulnerable, and passionate. This song has some of John's best lyrical content, moving effortlessly from the urgent paranoia of the world going wrong to the horny desperation of an early girlfriend where lust is taking over from love, and the way these two things crash into each other. it's a song of fumbled encounte...

June 9 - Scavenger Babies

It's never not going to be a good time when you have a rolling guitar, John in trembling voice, and a list of things to do. A good John List Song feels like a properly conducted ritual. These are the things that make you good or pure or proper or maybe just will reduce the feeling of dread in your heart for five minutes. This is both an odd song and a perfectly sensible song to drop in Sunset Tree Month. This is how you keep it together afterwards. This is how you stay as the person you became. ...

June 8 - Broom People

I mean, shit. I have coherent things to say about this song, but friends who don't have a clue, well meaning teachers is a fucking novel in a line. Solace in a chaotic life, beauty in the wild and the cold, rage and despair turning into power through pressure and releasing in the right places. The transformative power of having someone who care when nobody did.

June 7th - Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod

If Song For My Stepfather is John's pain at its most naked, this is perhaps John's pain at its most transubstantiated. Both songs describe blunt and unforgivable violence upon a child, but the points of view and the way the reality of it are processed couldn't be more different. This song, and its huge and soaring organs, aren't about the violence that was experienced, painful and traumatic though it was. This song is about the not the consolation that it might end but the consolation that one d...

June 6 - Magpie

The most consciously folksy song on a not-very-folksy album, and one of the only ones to fit the Mountain Goats trope of list of things you must do which is one of my favourite tropes. Remember what we had here when there was something left to save is the kind of line that I'm always going to regret not being good enough to write myself. This is a song about reckoning, and scavenging, and paying prices that might well be too bad. There's no reasoning with the magpie, he will take what he takes a...

June 5 - Song For My Stepfather

This small beautiful song, a simple chard structure, a voice and a guitar, is the purest distillation of everything that John elaborates and explores in The Sunset Tree. It's quite shockingly painful, a story of smallness, helplessness, and the places people go in their heads when bad things happen. It's no wonder to me at all that this didn't make the album. My understanding is that John plays it from time to time to keep it alive, but I can't imagine the pain that playing this every night on a...

June 4 - Dance Music

This gorgeous song is two vignettes of two different types of trauma. Both told in the same stream of consciousness moment-of life style, as if jumping straight into a memory already in progress. The first and simplest is about the fear of physical harm: harm to the self, harm to a loved one, from the moster living in the house. Here the dance music coming from the record player is escape and guilt and shelter all at once. The second is more complex, although it's built on the trauma of the firs...

June 3 - Abandoning My Father Talking Blues

This is, as John says, when it starts, a sad one. It's about people who have no choice and the choices that get made for them. It's about things that are presented as opportunities and are actually just mitigations. It's about sandboxes in parking lots and the ever present silent threat of things being worse. I've been through many things in my life. Everyone has, that's why they call it a life. But I'm quietly glad that I've never felt unsafe in the place where I've lived. I've felt depressed a...

June 2 - You Or Your Memory

God, this is going to be a month. The first thing to note about this song is that by the standards of the Mountain Goats it's incredibly simple. A narrative without allusion, without hiding. The events of a young man in pain contemplating something. The rest of the album is there to explain how he got here, but this song is painfully simple and to the point. The second thing to note about this song is that it's basically fucking perfect. A rolling, almost sweet song that carefully packages how d...

May 31 - Porcile

End of the month, time for a rarity, and this feels very much like a song that acts as a portent of times yet to come. The conceit of this song is that it's written from the point of view of a person who is changing into a pig, and the violence they unleash upon themselves in trying to cope with it. A simple theme we've heard a thousand times before as I'm sure you'll agree. The part where this sing feels like a portent is in its fear of violence. The idiot, caught in accident, expecting punishm...

May 30 - Cotton

Is whimsical catharsis a thing? This song is light and beautiful and soft, a gentle account of the things we hang onto, the memories that pain us, the scabs we pick at, the guilt we tend and maintain, and an easy instruction to do the hardest thing possible. Leave it behind. It's not forgiveness per se, it's not even forgetting. It's just... not hanging onto things.

May 29 - Rose Quarter Drifting / We Shall All Be Healed

This is a fragment, an unreleased song that only exists in versions from radio stations and live shows. And as such it's easy to see the ideas that started here and came out later. The line stared down demons, came back breathing felt like a preview of You Were Cool or Spent Gladiator 1. And those are two of my absolute favourites. This is a song about being a ghost, about visiting ghosts. About going back to old places, which is not something you can ever actually do. There's a town I can never...