By Jesse Cataldo
Poetry is dead. Really. As popular music has waxed progressively in the last half century, its written counterpart has only waned. As we enter the 21st century, written poetry has all but been banished to the realm of greeting cards and sloppy teenage love letters. But don’t burn your poetry notebooks just yet, as long as you can sing, or at least pretend to, there is hope. From the moment when Dylan Thomas drank himself to death and unwittingly passed his name to a young Minnesota folk singer, the torch had been passed.
John Darnielle is a perfect example; his poeticism, while not especially beautiful or unique, works, and that draws listeners. It’s also what makes the Mountain Goats, his musical project since 1991, worth paying attention to. If you want to hear lo-fi acoustic strumming and an unremarkable, sometimes straining voice, all you have to do is head down to your local coffeehouse (or street corner, if the location is right). Darnielle separates himself from millions of other singer-songwriters with the intelligent way he approaches his subjects and characters. (He also writes his own blog, Last Plane to Jakarata (.com) which is equally interesting.)
Like Bukowski or Brautigan, Darnielle says what he wants and does it simply, eschewing meter in favor of a gritty modern realism. His lyrics may rhyme, but that’s the only similarity they share with traditional poetic structure. Darnielle’s small songs exist as little short stories, brimming with emotion and truth about the big and little failures of completely mundane lives.
Unlike Darnielle’s previous albums, The Sunset Tree focuses on his own life, specifically his childhood and the after effects of growing up with an abusive step-father. He also analyzes the complexity of emotion in “Love, Love, Love,” referencing a bevy of literary, musical and historical figures and difficult decisions they made.
Musically, The Sunset Tree is nothing spectacular. Most songs rely only on the sparse accompaniment of acoustic guitar and piano. “Dilaudid” replaces the guitar with violin to excellent results, escalating the tension before Darnielle shouts the closing line “and take your foot off the brake, for Christ’s sake.”
By providing us with a window into his own personal experience, Darnielle allows us a view of his inspiration, providing a context for 14 years of character sketches. With The Sunset Tree, Darnielle proves that his own life is as interesting and painful as any of his stories.