A rite of passage in early adolescence is the feeling that nobody else in the entire history of the world has ever felt what you feel.
There are albums that define stages of my life, to the extent that my memories are intertwined in the lyrics. I’ve sometimes thought about classifying periods of my life like a painter would. Picasso had his Blue Period, and mine was Pink (picture: a crop of pastel-toned hair, a box of French jazz CDs found at a yard sale, and sunsets over the Santa Monica Mountains).
My Sunset Period, eponymously named for The Mountain Goats’ 2005 LP The Sunset Tree, refers to the year and a half I spent in middle school skipping my online classes to wander the California desert.
For those unfamiliar with the indie-folk-rock legacy of The Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree is an outlier in their vast corpus. The majority of their discography consists of concept albums (on Dungeons and Dragons, goth music, and Italian soap operas, to name a few). Earlier pieces resembled poetry set to a simple chord progression, laden with biblical and mythological references.
Out of their 30 plus officially released albums, only two are autobiographical; We Shall All Be Healed, describing the methamphetamine and heroin addictions that befell lead singer/guitarist John Darnielle in his late teenage years, and The Sunset Tree, which explores Darnielle’s relationship with his abusive stepfather through childhood and high school.
Though I have scant photos of myself during my Sunset Period, there are several memory cards from my hand-me-down Canon EOS 20D filled with snapshots of the places I visited. These images (and the lyrics) are the foundation of my memories from this time.
The Sunset Tree is about the little slivers of escapism you find solace in when you’re young and troubled and struggling with things that you are far too young to understand. When you are small and angry and afraid, you get really good at wiggling your body into the space between your broken twin bed and the wall, because nothing can hurt you there.
A popular vote named “This Year” (the third song on The Sunset Tree) as the #1 song on The Guardian Australia’s Good Riddance 2020 playlist. “This Year” tells the story of a day in the 17-year-old life of Darnielle “breaking free on a Saturday morning” and using alcohol, video games, and a relationship with someone just as damaged as him to escape his broken home. In a resounding, triumphant chorus, he proclaims: “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me. I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.”
“This is a song about when you are having a year that you need to see it through to the end of,” announced Darnielle during a 2011 show at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. The song is for the years where it feels like there’s no end in sight, and nothing ahead of or behind you.
Remember the bright blue sky on a July day in Joshua Tree, California, where everything was still and quiet, the heat emanating out of cracks in the dusty ground. You could walk for miles without seeing a single living thing.
You wake up in different places, on someone’s couch, or outside, or on the cold bathroom floor, and still every day, the horrifying, empty ache inside you sits like a rock at the bottom of your stomach, refusing to go away.
Eventually, though, enough days become a year.
The final rendition of the chorus in This Year expresses that “there will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year.” This is a line from my childhood– lifted straight out of yearly Passover seders with my grandparents. Though it’s invited discussion on its meaning in the last few years, we murmur “next year in Jerusalem” all the same.
It’s the idea of escape; it’s the hope of salvation, to the land of Milk and Honey.
I didn’t believe it when I was 13, but one day you’ll wake up, and you’ll realize that every single make-it-through-today of the last half decade has added up to a whole life. That you are a real person, and this is the body that, despite your destructive efforts, you are going to inhabit.
During live performances, John Darnielle often closes out This Year singing/screaming.
“And it almost killed me.”
It almost killed me at 13 and then again at 15, but miraculously, I am here. I can see my future expanding before me, going on forever, like the desert sky.
There will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year.
