Recently Pitchfork published an article talking about/comparing two albums I like a lot, The Mountain Goats’ Sunset Tree and Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie and Lowell.

Here’s a link to the article: http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/738-familial-bond-mountain-goats-sunset-tree-and-sufjan-stevens-carrie-lowell/

The main point of comparison, and it’s a pretty easy one, is that both the albums were deliberately and divergently autobiographical, John Darnielle (leader and core of tMG) writing powerfully about his tough childhood and abusive stepfather and Sufjan writing accurately about the death of his mother.

I say powerful for John and accurate for Sufjan because the two albums are really doing something quite different. In a sense, John has always been writing autobiographically. I have this general idea that all writing is always only autobiographical, but without going too off topic, John’s autobiography can be traced by the consistent emotional bent of his songs. Each tMG song can quite roughly be categorised into a one of those emotional categories. For some quick examples, there’s the “Bad things are happening but I’m ecstatic and almost insanely positive about it in a very sustained way” song- for example, Going to Georgia (first album), Quito (album between first and sunset tree), and Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod (Sunset Tree). Or maybe the “Youthful Defiance” song- “The Best ever Death Metal Band in Denton” (before tST), “Up the Wolves” (Sunset Tree), lots of Transcendental Youth (e.g. Amy) (after tST).

The point I’m trying to make is that tST can be seen as a closer revealing of the sort of events that have provided John with his emotional foundations to write from. Nothing’s different on that album from earlier or later ones, and if you gave someone ever tST album and asked them which the “autobiographical one” was they wouldn’t be able to, because all the albums feel personal and emotionally powerful, because they draw from strong things that John himself has felt.

Carrie and Lowell stands out as accurate because the gutpunch depends on recognising through human familiarity the accuracy of his descriptions, which reveal that he’s writing from something he remembers very well and cherishes in that painful, absorbing way. For example in Eugene: “The man who taught me to swim, he couldn’t quite say my first name”, or the closeness of childhood and the comforting nicknames a mother might give: “Shall we look at the moon, my little loon, Why do you cry?”. Although we can almost definitely trace similar emotional categories in other Sufjan songs they are generally pretty different to the CaL stuff, but moreover, there’s a crucial difference:

Sufjan described the album, very correctly and precisely, as “artless”- it’s a direct attempt to get as close to a description of feelings as possible, and it feels from the sound of the album that only as many plucked strings, ambient synths and lyrics that are needed are used to get there in comparison to the maximalism of something like Chicago. Sunset Tree doesn’t make that sonic distinction from other tMG albums. You have to know it’s different, but with CaL you can feel that something has changed.

So with that out the way lets turn to the article. The opening paragraph states that being “candid” and “entrusting fans” is something new for John- it’s not, as I’ve suggested, the rawness and unembarassedness of tMG records is there from the beginning.

“Their music, while intensely personal, had never been directly autobiographical until then”- this only makes the “directly” used sound pointless as a word. The autobiography in the lyrics becomes kind of redundant if you admit that the “intensely personal” overall bent of the music had already been there. Who cares about the choice to be directly autobiographical if you kind of already admitted that it hasn’t newly impacted the music? I mean, that’s the case for tST at least.



“The parallel demons these two singers carried into adulthood loom large in their artistic lives”- this is more or less classic bad writing. “Parallel demons” is obviously very tryhard, and “carrying it into adulthood” sounds like the writer is only just catching up with the idea that folk singers like these will clearly always write from emotional experience. This makes the rest of the paragraph pointless, as he just lists off reflection on the part of the listener, and “healing through the catharsis of song”. This is all pretty well accepted and basic.



Then comes a reading of “You or Your Memory” as being “haunted by the spectre of his stepfather”. Again, that’s fine, but it doesn’t help his overall tST argument because it depends on outside knowledge. Furthermore, isn’t part of the point of a relateable song that the story in the song might be so universal as to not need additional information? Shouldn’t there just be something about being in a hotel room and laying out your supplies that should resonate regardless? The writer is actually undoing the cathartic strength he detects in the songs by tying that strength to something outside the universality of the emotional experience created. He’s saying “look how universal it is”, but then saying “this is a good example for autobiography though because you need to know it’s autobiography to have a punch”- you don’t, though, so it’s a bad example for his argument.

The paragraph also ends with “Sometimes there is no way to escape a memory”- like the “parallel demons” line the article seems hellbent on sounding smart by having cool, climatic phrases without having earned them. This is what I used to do when I was a kid and thought essay writing was super cool (I still do). I’d stack conclusions with awesome sounding resonant phrases in the delusion that that counted as making an analytical point, without having earned that “cool” sentence through valid analysis and hard work.

“Carrie and Lowell mirrors the self-examination”- I’ve already disagreed with this, I think the albums are very different.



Then the piece ends kind of abruptly because he just lists things in Carrie and Lowell that are good lyrics or powerful moments- “A desire for maternal intimacy hangs, forever unresolved”- but any listener could pick out those moments and write that sentence. There’s been no insight or analysis. And then he rounds off with another one of those “awesome so cool man” sentences: “It takes the strongest and most introspective lyricists to do so, ones powerfully drawn to the blood from which they came.”- which ends up being kind of cringey.

Here’s the problem then: an essay or a piece, to be worth any time, has to offer something new. If you’re ever struggling with what to write in an essay, just start with a deliberately difficult presumption: “What if Dickens IS actually good at writing women?” “What if the ALL the lavish sounds of Tennyson have real purpose?” “What if The Sunset Tree ISN’T really overwhelmingly autobiographical, but CaL is?”. Then you start to get into their differences and what they do differently that makes them feel different. You will end up writing a cool essay. If there isn’t some contention or issue in the fabric of the question the essay is asking then you end up just stating the obvious: “Both albums are kind of similar if you just assume that being autobiographical makes them the same”, so the essay has nowhere to go and nothing interesting to say.

Even within the writer’s misconception of the albums, it doesn’t make for a good pitch: “I have an idea for an article saying that both these american folk records about tough stuff with parents are basically very similar”. It’s nice to spot connections, but not interesting to write about them without any upsets or insights.

Love,

Alex