“America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist”
–The New Yorker
“Bob Dylan proved that Vitriol and acoustic guitars could go together, but the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle has taken confessional folk music to angry new depths.”
– Rolling Stone
“John Darnielle’s written some of the toughest and most open-souled music of his lo-fi outlet’s oft-brilliant history.”
– SPIN
“Mountain Goats auteur John Darnielle continues to write songs that could inspire a season’s worth of TV-movie melodramas… the results can be extraordinary. Get the man an orchestra now.”
– Entertainment Weekly
“The Extraordinary new Mountain Goats CD is ‘The Sunset Tree’, and it may be Mr. Darnielle’s best album so far.”
– The New York Times
On April 26, 2005, John Darnielle’s third 4AD full-length album as The Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree, presented a deeply confessional and emotionally vivid narrative drawn from the depths of the prolific songwriter’s turbulent personal history. Twenty years on, Darnielle revisits the career highlight record with a reissue dubbed The Sunset Tree (20th Anniversary Edition) — composed of 2025 Abbey Road Remasters and featuring original artwork and a new OBI strip designed by Chris Bigg, it is due for release digitally, and on CD, Cassette, and Limited Edition Apricot Coloured Vinyl, out today. In further celebration of the anniversary, an upgraded version of the music video for ‘This Year’, directed by Rian Johnson (Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Knives Out), was released earlier this year.
Upon its arrival, The Sunset Tree — recorded with producer John Vanderslice in Northern California towards the end of 2004, and featuring performers Peter Hughes (bass, backing vocals, guitar), Franklin Bruno (piano, guitar), Erik Friedlander (cello), Alex DeCarville (drums), and Scott Solter (keyboards) — emerged as the most coherent and richly rewarding album in the Mountain Goats’ wildly extensive discography, and it retains that legacy now.
It’s a mark of Darnielle’s extraordinary fertility that, of the 800-plus songs he has recorded, only a handful directly concern his own life experience; The Sunset Tree’s 13 tracks, written after Darnielle’s stepfather passed away in December 2003, are the bulk of this small subsection. It’s a collection of songs about the house that Darnielle grew up in and the people who lived there — an ensemble cast which includes Darnielle himself, an ex-girlfriend, his mother, stepfather, and sister; old friends and old enemies.
“I’ve put off writing about this stuff for years,” he said at the time of its release, “because I’m a little squeamish about milking my own trauma for art, and getting good songs rather than cry-fests from these experiences is a really excruciating process. And also because my stepfather was still alive.” Experienced as a whole rather than as a series of terrifying, frozen moments, The Sunset Tree is a redemptive rather than a remorseless record. As the liner notes say : “you are going to make it out of there alive.”
In 2023, The Mountain Goats shared their 22nd album, Jenny From Thebes, a direct sequel to the 2002 record All Hail West Texas, Darnielle’s last release before signing to 4AD that same year. Subsequent Mountain Goats releases on 4AD include: 2002’s Tallahassee (from which the 2021 TikTok viral track “No Children” originates), 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed, 2006’s Get Lonely, 2008’s Heretic Pride, and finally 2009’s The Life Of The World To Come. Over the band’s tenure, even beyond their years with 4AD, The Mountain Goats have also maintained significant cultural relevance, accruing fandom among the likes of Jack Antonoff (who celebrated the anniversary of The Sunset Tree via his Instagram this year) and Stephen Colbert (who joined the band in a televised 2019 performance of “This Year” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert). The band’s storied career is also documented and celebrated in Darnielle’s new book, This Year: 365 Annotated: A Book of Days — an almanac of the Mountain Goats: one song for each day of the year, accompanied by commentaries, explanations, and obfuscations by Darnielle himself.
The Mountain Goats– The Sunset Tree (20th Anniversary Edition)
1. You or Your Memory
2. Broom People
3. This Year
4. Dilaudid
5. Dance Music
6. Dinu Lipatti’s Bones
7. Up the Wolves
8. Lion’s Teeth
9. Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod
10. Magpie
11. Songs for Dennis Brown
12. Love Love Love
13. Pale Green Things
Following a recent co-headline tour with Guster this summer, The Mountain Goats will also continue touring into late 2025 with a string of headline dates across the US, including three new October dates.
November
29th – Metro Music Hall, Salt Lake City, UT
30th – The ELM, Bozeman, MT
December
1st – The Wilma, Missoula
3rd – Neptune Theatre, Seattle, WA
4th – Neptune Theatre, Seattle, WA
5th – Knitting Factory, Spokane, WA
6th – Treefort Music Hall, Boise, ID
8th – Revolution Hall, Portland, OR
9th – Revolution Hall, Portland, OR
10th – The Fillmore, San Francisco, CA
12th – Teragram Ballroom, Los Angeles, CA
13th – Teregram Ballroom, Los Angeles, CA
14th – Teregram Ballroom, Los Angeles, CA