The Mountain Goats is the long-running project of the prolific John Darnielle. After building a cult following throughout the '90s with a stream of boombox-recorded releases Darnielle signed to 4AD in 2002. It marked a major shift: for the first time, he embraced the studio as a creative tool. Between 2002 and 2009, 4AD released six Mountain Goats albums, the band is still active today and are on their 22nd release.

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 it's 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."