The beating begins, and Darnielle sings, “then I’m awake and I’m guarding my face / hoping you don’t break my stereo / because it’s the one thing that I couldn’t live without / and so I think about that and then I sorta black out.” Darnielle describes being “held under these smothering waves” by his stepfather’s “strong and thick-veined hand.” But he remains hopeful that eventually – “one of these days” – he will “wriggle up on dry land.” He arrives home to find his stepfather asleep, so he sneaks up to his room knowing that if he awakes his stepfather, “there will be hell to pay.” But he does wake up, and he bursts into Darnielle’s room to find him sitting with his headphones on oblivious. “Dance Music” reveals more as Darnielle at 5 or 6 years old is getting “indications that there’s something wrong.” As he sits watching TV, his stepfather is yelling at his mom, then “launches a glass across the room, straight at her head, and dashes upstairs to take cover.” He turns on his “little record player on the floor” and makes a discovery: “so this is what the volume knob is for.”Ī similar scene unfolds in “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod,” only this time Darnielle is the victim. However, the scene begins to unfold in the second track, “Broom People,” as Darnielle seems to be describing his childhood living conditions: “all sorts of junk in the unattached spare room,” “dishes in the kitchen sink,” “floor two foot high with newspapers,” “white carpet thick with pet hair.” He also sings of “friends who don’t have a clue well meaning teachers,” and how he would “write down good reasons to freeze to death in spiral ring notebook.” Thus, the storytelling in The Sunset Tree isn’t always direct. Heavy topics are kind of the Mountain Goats’ thing.ĭarnielle’s lyrics are highly poetic and often nebulous – the listener is left to fill in the gaps. The Sunset Tree describes growing up with an abusive stepfather. The album that preceded The Sunset Tree, entitled We Shall All Be Healed, was about Darnielle’s teenage years as a methamphetamine user. The Sunset Tree is the Mountain Goats ninth studio album and only the second album featuring songs that are primarily autobiographical. It could be said that John Darnielle is synonymous with the Mountain Goats, as Darnielle is the chief songwriter and at times has been the only member of the band. The Mountain Goatsare a folk rock band formed by John Darnielle in 1991. Well that and, believe it or not, I do enjoy many non-plant related things, and this gives me an excuse to write about those things on a plant-centric blog. And that is the impetus behind this series of posts about botany in popular culture. Just a fleeting mention of something plant related in any type of media will catch my attention, no matter how ancillary it is to the major themes. My obsession with plants means that I see botany everywhere – in the music I listen to, the shows I watch, the books I read, whatever.
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