On his 2004 spring tour, John Darnielle trotted out a pair of songs influenced by the recent death of his stepfather. One of them was "Dance Music," a horrific vignette where the young narrator discovers "what the volume knob is for," namely drowning out the sound of flying plates against the door. It found its way onto last year's staggering The Sunset Tree. The other, "Song For My Stepfather," would be abandoned altogether (although its bridge bears a strong resemblance to the one found in "This Year").

Perhaps "abandoned" is too strong, since the song would ultimately set the stage for what The Sunset Tree would become. It's a first hand document of the business end of child abuse, unflinching and just this side of unbearable. Darnielle, a war veteran at the age of five -- "I'll be six years old next week" -- has already discovered the secret to survival. All you have to do is disappear: "you always feel sorry later on / when you come around to say so / I will be gone / and in my place meet my perfect body double." He understands the safety in this disassociation, bragging to his stepfather that "you can go ahead and hit him / he feels no pain at all." But there's a price to that safety, and it's given voice in the song's whispered refrain: "you erase me."

"Song For My Stepfather" is The Sunset Tree condensed, hitting harder than the one two punch of "Lion's Teeth" and "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod" at half the volume. The hope that's hinted at throughout the album (only explicated in that album's liner notes: "you are going to make it out there alive") is brought into sharper relief here, in the bridge: "took up the reigns my self all through you dug the spurs clean down to the bone." That moment is absolutely essential.

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