The first sound you hear on The Sunset Tree's first track, “You or Your Memory”, is John Darnielle's oddly-soothing nasal tenor, completely unaccompanied by any instrumentation. Just sort of ringing in your eardrums, all by its lonesome. It only lasts a few seconds before the band joins in – not really enough solo vocal styling to be anything dramatic or significant on a major scale. However, these may be some of the most key seconds to locating and understanding Darnielle's primary emphasis in the songwriting process: The Mountain Goats are about narrative first and music second.

That's not to say that John Darnielle is anything other than a first-rate composer and musician. But how about a hypothetical? Let's say Nazis storm into your bedroom in the middle of the night. They're hauling John Darnielle's composition abilities, musicianship, and lyrical prowess each by their scalps . Der Kommandant informs you that you must choose which of those three won't be executed with a bullet to the back of the head right fucking there. I would posit that those acquainted with the canon of The Mountain Goats, whether casual listeners or die-hard fans would take Darnielle's words over his chord progressions and arrangements. Once again, it would be a Sophie's choice, but the right answer would be instantly clear. John Darnielle is like a poet who recognizes that poetry readings are shit festivals, or a writer of short stories painfully aware of the attention deficit era in which he lives. The unruly instinct to put words together remains. But rather than confine that impetus to dusty unappreciated forums, Darnielle chooses to craft pop songs as near to perfection as such an upstart artform can reach, with lyrics that rival the short stories of Raymond Carver or Tobias Wolff in their empathy, detail, and layering.

Amid its upbeat tempo and chord progression, which sound deceptively like the point in the narrative where things starts to get better, Darnielle performs a sort of verbal mise-en-scene, gathering the props for his narrative and setting the stage rather than telling his audience directly what they should feel or interpret. . He simply tells his audience in the events of the day. The narrator checks into a bargain hotel room, walks barefoot to the corner store and purchases wine coolers and baby aspirin, which are apparently the only supplies he will need for the evening. The second verse depicts a man drawing the shades and making promises to God that if he makes it through the night, he will change his ways and hit the straight and narrow. There is no mention of an emotion by name; there are no instructions to the audience on how we should feel. The listener is therefore left to interpret what's going on, and whatever plausible conclusion one can arrive at, the situation looks bleak.

By itself, “You or Your Memory” could be about a quick frantic break-up or a half-hearted suicide attempt – the implied lack of shoes being a result of leaving the house too quickly or just not caring enough to dress up for one's own execution; the strange melange of grocery store booze and pain-killers for tots could be needed just to forget the pain awhile or to check out completely. Within the greater context of The Sunset Tree, the first track could serve as an appropriate prologue to an album that deals largely with confinement and escape.

The Sunset Tree is widely regarded by critics and fans as The Mountain Goats' most personal effort. Ostensibly dealing with Darnielle's own boyhood experiences under the hand of an abusive stepfather, many of the albums tracks speak of flight in one form or another, be it the escape offered through music; substances; love; death; petty car theft; or sheer force of will. It is through describing this constant urge to break away that Darnielle captures an emotion, as opposed to merely reciting the litany of his stepfather's abuses. In fact, throughout the entire album, we only get the specifics on what happened in small patches here and there. Yet, the longing for freedom from physical and emotional dominion is as palpable in Darnielle's narrative voice, making The Sunset Tree a bildungsroman of an album; the musical equivalent of The Cather in the Rye.

Whether “You or Your Memory” serves as a sort of prologue, a setting by which the narrator remembers the trauma of his youth, or it is a scene in medias res, depicting a youthful attempt at liberation from his home life, the song is a perfect example of a Track One Side One – it nabs the attention of the listener and prepares him or her for the overall experience of the album. Garrison Keillor is said to have observed that a poem or a story which starts off clunky never rights itself. The same would go for an album–and more than in the simple sense that you want a barn-burner of a first track to hook your audience; a first track should communicate the tone of the rest of the album, set its pace and be memorable without overshadowing the remaining songs. As such, and however you choose to interpret it, “You or Your Memory” fits with the rest of The Sunset Tree like a jeweled cog in a fine Swiss watch. In the same way that every fifteen year old boy should probably read The Catcher in the Rye, it would be essential to the emotional education of any young man to give The Sunset Tree a close study.