The Sunset Tree is a 2005 album from John Darnielle's main project, The Mountain Goats. While We Shall All Be Healed focused on Darnielle's years as a teenager involved with other meth users, The Sunset Tree talks much about his childhood, and features domestic violence as a recurring theme. An alternate, limited edition vinyl featuring demo recordings and b-sides, entitled Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, was sold as a tour-only LP with 1000 copies. Darnielle has said the album name came from a hymn mentioned in a particularly brutal scene in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh. Darnielle sardonically dedicates the album to his stepfather - by whom the album was "made possible." The album contains many lyrics referring to Darnielle's abusive childhood - especially noticeable in the songs "This Year" and "Dance Music." The tone of the album gets more somber and serious as it continues, dealing with Darnielle's longing for escape and his feelings of powerlessness, leading up to the song "Lion's Teeth", which has been described by Darnielle as a "revenge fantasy". The album is summed up in the final two songs: "Love, Love, Love," in which he extols the virtue and folly of doing things for reasons of love, and "Pale Green Things," a quiet story in which the singer recalls a time when his stepfather took him out to watch the horses at the racetrack. Darnielle closes the song, and the album, with a lyric of his sister calling him to inform him of his stepfather's death.
