The Confessional Turn
A repost from Broad Sound Spotlights: The Sunset Tree at 20
Good morning from sunny North Shields! I’ve been planning out the next few episodes (2012-14), but in the interim an essay on mine has just been published over at Broad Sound which I thought you might like to read here too, if you don’t mind travelling back to 2005 for a while. It was written as a chapter for their song-by-song collection working through The Sunset Tree to mark the album’s twentieth anniversary, and you can buy the whole thing here. This also builds on an invited talk I did a couple of years ago at Campbell University, so big thanks to Eric Dunnum for planting the initial idea and Broad Sound editor Ethan Warren for putting together the special issue and allowing me to share it here.
John Darnielle never checked into a bargain-price room on La Cienega—or if he did, he didn’t write a song about it. One online database, the Annotated Mountain Goats, laconically notes that “John has clarified that the motel in this song, the Royal Hawaiian, is not actually located on La Cienega,” a major road in Los Angeles, on at least four separate occasions. The Sunset Tree, the album that “You or Your Memory” introduces, is often billed as the songwriter’s most overtly self-revealing. It opens with a stark a cappella vocal run—an exposed singing style that itself sets up the idea of intimate disclosure—but what the first lyric we hear tells us is not exactly the truth. It’s a small decision that immediately complicates the idea of “confession,” creating a space for larger questions about the mysterious processes of both art and healing.
The previous year’s album, We Shall All Be Healed, had aimed in part to dispel an image of the writer as “a very innocent professorial guy,” as Darnielle commented on Seattle radio station KEXP, lifting the curtain on his teenage experiences of addiction to methamphetamines and heroin. What the singer, in a 2019 Portland live show, called his “confessional turn” was a deliberate about-face from his earlier attitudes. In the liner notes to the 1998 reissue of Zopilote Machine, he mocked the idea of the soul-baring singer-songwriter: “these songs are all pages ripped from my diary, which drips blood. I have been alive for over 2000 years … I was born in at least seven different countries … None of these songs were written. They are all spontaneous eruptions of directly experienced personal pain, deeply felt and wholly unvanquishable. Each time I sing any one of them I further aggravate a wound which will never heal.”
We Shall All Be Healed drew openly, for the first time, on stories about real wounds: events that had taken place in Pomona, California, close to the college town of Claremont where Darnielle grew up, and particularly during the nine months he spent living in Portland, Oregon in 1985-6, when his father’s bid to get him off to college and away from bad influences back home ended up exposing him to a still more intense drug scene. Many of the narratives the album explored were relocated and fictionalized, however; looking back, Darnielle described its experiments in “cloaked autobiography” to interviewer Helena Fitzgerald as a sort of “dry run” for the deeper vulnerability of The Sunset Tree.
The closing number of the 2004 album seems partially to point the way forward. Much like Darnielle when he appeared in court to defend himself on cocaine possession charges in December 1988, the narrator of “Pigs That Ran Straightaway into the Water, Triumph Of” seems to be trying to do whatever he can to stay out of prison. “Please don’t fit me for that orange jumpsuit,” he sings, in the imposing shadow of a “big bus headed southeast from the courthouse.” This character is explicitly not Darnielle—he proudly announces that he comes “from Chino,” birthplace of the song’s bassist Peter Hughes—and yet the only way to escape from this situation and deliver on the singer’s determination to live in freedom appears to be a return to Darnielle’s own origins: “even if I have to go to Claremont/Well I guess I’ll just have to go to Claremont.”
The next album would do just that, treating material from the songwriter’s life head-on, and more extensively than had been the case in any of his previous work. But right before it came out, Darnielle drew a straight line between The Sunset Tree and his recent approach in a conversation with Amazon.com’s Leah Weathersby:
The last [CD] was… we were very heavily in an autobiographical direction, but it was still pretty well masked and I was messing with details and stuff. And of course I’m still doing that. I don’t really believe in straight confessional stuff because I don’t think you can really do that. As soon as you decide to work in song you’re deciding to formalize.
In concrete terms, the singer explained to Kyle Harris for Westword,“Learning to measure my numbers … is much more important in my stuff than most people think … if you want to talk about what the songs are about or their subjects, those are important, too. But the formal qualities of them, I think, are what set me apart.” He’s sceptical of the tendency to “afford so much weight to [feeling] that we give ourselves a pass if we cut our craft short because the feeling was intense,” as he told Jeffrey Silverstein for The Creative Independent.
But despite this unusually sharp focus on the “numbers” of metrical patterning, if you frame the substitution of “La Cienaga” for “Crenshaw Boulevard” as purely a craft choice, you don’t get the whole picture: both phrases would have the same number of syllables. More important, perhaps, is the focus on “work”—calling to mind both Leonard Cohen’s phrase “the workers in song” in “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” (which Darnielle, a strong supporter of the trade union movement, has praised elsewhere) and the term’s use in wrestling (another of the singer’s obsessions, where it signifies the convincing “selling” of pre-scripted material).
Working in song means taking the raw elements of a lived experience and creating something new that exists in the world. No matter how traumatic its subject, Darnielle has repeatedly emphasized (including to Joshua Minsoo Kim for the Tune Glue newsletter) that art is a separate thing from the “prelinguistic” experience of the “wordless roils inside of you.” Against the derided concept of “spontaneous eruptions of directly experienced personal pain,” we might set Wordsworth’s phrase that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” but, crucially, “recollected in tranquility.” The artist can strive to conjure up an “alive,” “electrical” experience—think about the tangible sensory detail of “black tarry asphalt, soft and hot” under the singer’s bare feet—but however immediate a song feels, it can only be an “illusory” approach to those internal states, shaped and crafted for public display.
This is partly a point about the writer’s agency, his choice to present what he creates as “a construct,” as he told Fitzgerald: “It’s not all of me. There’s certain stuff I’m not comfortable sharing, and that stuff is almost entirely absent from my songs.” But it’s also about the independence of the work itself, as something that might draw on the author’s real memories but is now present as its own thing, governed by its own rules.
As an artist, Darnielle is exploring the choices involved in memory, creation, and self-presentation. As listeners, the fact that we know enough about those choices for me to write this essay, in turn, speaks to the importance of the Mountain Goats fan community and the online ecosystem it has generated as its own site of collective (and occasionally contested) memory. These are themes Darnielle has been thinking about from “the very earliest days of the band,” as he told Craig Finn in a 2022 podcast interview. In the song “Alphabetizing,” for instance, he picks out the following “climactic line”: “Let the years come and take away my memory/I will not forget the shock that ran through me when/I saw you.”
Characters in Darnielle’s early work have their own imperfect memories, and are partly defined by “what they choose to remember,” at times “obsessing about what they would or would not remember and using their memory as a weapon.” Rather than being a form of neutral documentation, the singer notes on Finn’s podcast, “Memory always frames, always narrates … always sort of tells a story.” And at this crucial moment, as his work continues its pivot away from fictional narrative towards something grounded in autobiographical truth—though truth told “slant,” as Emily Dickinson would have it—Darnielle offers up a song that tells two stories about memory in one.
The first level is a scene “remembered, if outlived,” in the words of another Dickinson poem from which Darnielle earlier borrowed the title “Then The Letting Go.” Again, it’s the singer’s paratextual comments, in interviews and stage banter, that put what we’re hearing into wider context: the speaking character is a version of Darnielle in 1988, two years on from his near-fatal year in Portland and two years out from making the first recordings that would eventually carry the name the Mountain Goats. Several of the new friends he had made through dancing at the City Nightclub, an all-ages queer venue in Portland, had died at the height of the AIDS epidemic; back in Southern California, Darnielle had taken a nursing job at a six-bed Catholic hospice for patients with the same disease. Fired from that role in the aftermath of the arrest described earlier, he was now left trying to work out what to do with the rest of his life: “In a new universe/Trying to find the mask that fits me,” as the Dark in Here (2021)track “The Slow Parts on Death Metal Albums,” which also recounts Darnielle’s experiences of personal suffering and reinvention in the 1980s, attests.
“You or Your Memory” itself addresses none of this, on the surface. It presents a short, simple narrative in which a figure looks out through the curtains of his bargain-price room, walks to the nearby corner store for “supplies,” gets back, spreads them out, and then looks at himself in the mirror. In the chorus, he itemizes what he sees: painkillers, wine coolers, and something less corporeal but still insistently present: “you, or your memory.”
Whatever that phrase means, it seems to set off a sequence of repetitions with a difference: having first “gazed out” through the curtains to engage with the outside world, the speaker now “ducks behind” them as if trying to hide from it. The spread-out supplies now become “loose ends” to gather in—another image of retreat and retrenchment. And the ordinary, if intense, self-scrutiny of looking at himself in the mirror turns powerfully, metaphysically inward: “Down there in the dark I could see the real truth about me/As clear as day.”
From this deep, dark, interior place, something rises, the essential recognition and recommitment on which the song turns: “If I make it through tonight/Then I will mend my ways/And walk the straight path to the end of my days.” The phrasing recalls the Gospel of Matthew, 7:13-14—“strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it”—and as in “Stench of the Unburied,” from Goths, the “foot of the ladder” can be located “way down in the pit.” As the singer told Tom Breihan for Pitchfork around the release of The Life of the World to Come, a set of songs drawing explicitly on Biblical narratives, “your ideas of God will come to rest upon you in your moment of profoundest degradation”: from here on, the only way is up.
Which is not, of course, how it feels when you listen to the rest of The Sunset Tree—but in starting here, on the far side of the events of the album, rather than with “Broom People,” which immerses the listener fully into the cluttered and chaotic world of Darnielle’s upbringing, the album’s opening track gestures to the hope of a life beyond it, experienced as a small, clear flame in the dark. This reinforces the dedication on the album sleeve to “any young men and women anywhere who live with people who abuse them … :you are going to make it out of there alive /you will live to tell your story /never lose hope.”To get to that, however, the artist and the listener will have to reckon with what “you, or your memory” means.
This is the second, more enigmatic and oblique story about memory that the song tells—one with several possible interpretations. The most obvious “you” for the speaker to be remembering, in the context of the album that follows, is the “great big you” addressed on “Lion’s Teeth”: Darnielle’s abusive stepfather Mike Noonan, whose violence towards his wife and her child has pervaded the singer’s life from his earliest memories. The Sunset Tree is to some extent about revealing what’s in the background of this moment at the Royal Hawaiian, and of the traumatic times in Portland worked through on the previous album: the horror trope of a figure apparently present in the mirror, who is only “really” there as a mark made on the person shaped by their actions, makes a certain sense.
But the “you” shifting between reality and memory could also be the recent ghosts whose presence Darnielle must have felt so deeply in the late 1980s, the friends “disappeared into the cavalcade of monsters” who were so important to him in Portland and so abruptly taken away. The “you” there in the mirror, next to the comparably low-level intoxicants, could function as the kind of self-address Darnielle experimented with on “Mole,” a track from We Shall All Be Healed where he has described flipping the pronouns to inhabit the perspective of somebody visiting him in intensive care after a close-call overdose. In that context, “your memory” might work like the figure who dogs the speaker’s steps on “Unicorn Tolerance,” as he realizes that “the thing I’ve been trying to beat to death” is “the soft creature that I used to be.”
One final possibility is that the “you” is the only other figure the song directly addresses: “Lord.” Pressed on the “theological resonance” in Goths by Justin Joffe for the Observer, Darnielle identifies “Unicorn Tolerance” along with “Wear Black” as “the sort of God songs on the record,” where “with ‘you,’ the second person or addressee … I went back and forth on whether to capitalize the ‘Y’ or not.” The late 1980s, in Darnielle’s telling, were a period when he was “seeking God” (as he told Vulture) for a way of reconnecting to the Catholic faith of his early childhood that his atheist stepfather had heavily opposed: the presence of that You in the bargain-price room, even if only in the form of a memory, would feel of a piece with the prayer the speaker makes to be restored to “the straight path” if he can last until the morning.
However open the title phrase might be—and as Darnielle told Fitzgerald, “a sense of wanting to allow the listener to impose whatever they need me to be onto me” forms part of his writing choices when approaching such material—there’s nothing ambiguous about that declaration. A version of it reappears on 2020’s “The Last Place I Saw You Alive”: “I walk the narrow path these days/I can’t see going back to my old ways.” Once again, the “you” here is unspecified, though it seems to be a figure mourned from a “special … deadly” time they and the singer spent together (there is a Gordon Street, though not a Gordon Avenue, in both Pomona and Portland). But the theme of a “bloody, stinking mess” left mostly in the past—viewed from a later, transformed perspective—is familiar from much of Darnielle’s autobiographical material: a central message of his art and his own commentary on it is that survival and renewal are possible.
“You or Your Memory” is not the first Mountain Goats song to say this, but it is probably the first that does so while a narrator modeled so closely on Darnielle looks himself “right in the eyes.” As such, it seems to say—from 1988, and from 2005, long after the events narrated on the following songs (which mostly take place between about 1973 and 1985) have occurred—that there is something beyond the desperate circumstances in which the listener is about to be immersed, a time in which those events will take the form of memories to be processed, reexamined, disputed and reworked (a theme taken up in a different key on the valedictory closer, “Pale Green Things,” which also steps outside the main timeframe of the narrative).
A true appraisal, the song seems to suggest, waits at the end of the “straight path” that is, in a sense, on the other side of the mirror. In a later song, “Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light,” Darnielle imagines “the shell of a house where my friends and me used to meet,” which he glossed on the Sound Opinions podcast as closer to the “motel room” in “Palmcorder Yajna”; the “bargain-priced room on La Cienega” is surely also therefore in the picture. That house features a “functioning mirror,” which the speaker declares he will be able to “slip right through,” experiencing a profound and longed-for transformation: “the old flesh will give way to the new.”
In Ephesians 4, the “prisoner of the Lord” is exhorted to “put off … the old man” and “put on the new man”: “let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good.” It’s typical of Darnielle to recast such concepts in a “demonic light,” but the “long trail” in the recent song leads to a “preordained place” where the singer’s “one true face” will finally be revealed—like the characters on the previous album’s “Against Pollution” who, “when the last days come … will recognize each other/And see ourselves for the first time/The way we really are.”
Seeing “the real truth about me,” “down there in the dark … as clear as day” has the contours of a similarly profound experience. Ultimately, the truths of Christian eschatology, and the idea of truth-to-self, both exist on a different plane from the kind of truth we mean when we talk about a writer messing around with street names. For an album parsing out how we work through the complexities of memory, and the complicated selves it might make of us, in a context where “Nobody in this house/Wants to own up to the truth,” they’re as good a place as any to start.