Notes
While We Shall All Be Healed focused on Darnielle's years as a teenager involved with other methamphetamine users, The Sunset Tree focuses on his childhood, and a recurring theme is domestic violence. The album title refers to a hymn Ernest sings as a toddler in a scene in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh; in the novel, Theobald beats Ernest for being unable to pronounce a hard C when singing the hymn.
Darnielle dedicates the album to his stepfather, by whom the album was "made possible". Many lyrics refer to Darnielle's abusive childhood – especially in the songs "This Year", "Dance Music", and "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod". The tone of the album is somber, dealing with Darnielle's longing for escape and his feelings of powerlessness, building up to the song "Lion's Teeth," which Darnielle has described as a "revenge fantasy".
The album is summed up in the final two songs: "Love, Love, Love," in which he notes the virtue and folly of doing things for reasons of love, and "Pale Green Things," in which he recalls a time his stepfather took him out to watch horses at a racetrack. Darnielle closes the song and the album with a lyric about his sister calling him to inform him of his stepfather's death.
Read more about this topic: The Sunset Tree
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