This Year

Some songs ask a listener to feel better. "This Year" does something harder and more useful: it describes a person bracing for another round of misery and deciding, out loud and against the evidence, to get through it. The Mountain Goats' most beloved song is built from a cheerful-sounding piano figure, a driving beat, and a chorus that is less a promise than a dare.

That tension, between bright music and a dark situation, is the whole engine of the track. It is also why the song has outlived its moment and become a kind of private anthem for people who have never heard a word about the house it came from.

Where the song comes from

"This Year" is the third track on The Sunset Tree, the ninth studio album by The Mountain Goats, released by 4AD on April 26, 2005 and produced by John Vanderslice.^[1] It was recorded in just over a week in November 2004 at Prairie Sun in Cotati, California.^[1]

The album grew out of a death. John Darnielle began writing the songs while touring Europe in early 2004, a few months after his stepfather, Mike Noonan, died.^[1] The liner notes credit the record as made possible by Noonan (1940 to 2004), and dedicate it to young people living with abusers, with the message that they will make it out alive.^[1]

Darnielle grew up in San Luis Obispo and then Claremont, California, in a household shaped by that abuse.^[5] Up through the album Tallahassee, he has said, his songs were fictional; We Shall All Be Healed and The Sunset Tree mark the point where the material turned partly autobiographical.^[5] He has since described writing The Sunset Tree as a substitute for therapy.^[1]

Critics have tended to place "This Year" at a very specific moment: Darnielle at seventeen, just starting to taste and imagine freedom while still trapped at home with a dangerous presence.^[2] The song is not a retrospective view from safety. It sounds like it is happening now.

A sound that refuses to match the situation

The arrangement is the first thing that complicates the song. A reviewer at Treble described pretty, simple piano chords and jazzy percussion, with the chorus carrying the weight of the performance.^[4] On the album, Franklin Bruno plays piano and Erik Friedlander adds cello across the record, while Peter Hughes and Alex Decarville supply bass and drums.^[1]

This is a fuller and cleaner studio sound than the band's earlier lo-fi recordings. The polish matters here. A song about enduring a bad home could have been mournful or abrasive. Instead it is propulsive, almost jaunty, and the forward motion is the point.

Stereogum describes the result as a song that thrums with anger, determination, and besieged optimism.^[2] That last phrase is the right one. The optimism is under siege, and the song knows it.

Endurance as a spoken decision

The central move of the song is its chorus, which states an intention to survive the coming year. Reduced to a paraphrase, it is a flat declaration of resolve. Exclaim's reviewer heard something sharper in the delivery: Darnielle's pointed cadence makes a chorus that might read as trite sound like a ballsy dare.^[3]

That is exactly what separates this song from a generic motivational anthem. The verses pile up the particulars of a stalled, hemmed-in adolescence: small acts of defiance, the dull logistics of getting through days in a house that cannot be left, and a persistent feeling that nothing around the narrator is likely to improve. The chorus does not deny any of this. It arrives because of it.

Treble, by contrast, read the same refrain as a triumphant declaration.^[4] Both readings hold up, and the song needs both. The statement is defiant and exhausted at once. A person who is certain of survival does not need to say so.

Specificity as the route to universality

Darnielle's writing on this record is full of precise, local detail, and "This Year" is no exception. The narrator is not an everyman; he is a particular teenager in a particular Southern California town, doing particular things to pass time and stay out of the way. Stereogum argues that this very specificity is what made the song so widely applicable.^[2]

Listeners who have never experienced anything like the narrator's home situation still hear their own hard year in it: a bad job, an illness, a breakup, a depressive stretch. Stereogum reports that the song was the band's most popular for a long stretch (until a different track went viral on TikTok) and the usual closer at their live shows.^[2] It also relays a story from a masked professional wrestler who said he used the song as a training mantra.^[2] The wrestling detail lands neatly, since Darnielle's own stepfather took him to pro wrestling matches in Los Angeles, an experience that later inspired his album Beat the Champ.^[2]

Where it sits on the record

The track order matters. "This Year" follows "You or Your Memory" and "Broom People" and comes just before "Dilaudid".^[1] Around it, the album moves between adult regret and adolescent memory, and this is the point where the record's emotional register is at its most forward-leaning. The surrounding songs look back; this one pushes ahead.

Wikipedia groups it with "Dance Music" and "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod" as songs drawing most directly on the abusive childhood at the heart of the album.^[1] Of the three, it is the only one that frames the ordeal as something still to be gotten through rather than something already survived or understood. That present-tense urgency is what gives the song its unusual heat.

A demo version also appears on the bonus LP Come, Come to the Sunset Tree, running a little shorter than the album take.^[1] It is a reminder of how much of the song's character lives in the performance: the same material, played more sparsely, still carries the same stubborn pulse.

What the song asks of a listener

Most songs about hardship offer a retrospective calm, a view from the other side. This one withholds that comfort. It places the listener inside the stretch of time before the outcome is known and asks them to stay there, which is both its difficulty and its generosity.

There is also a quiet argument about language in the song. Saying a thing aloud, even a thing you cannot yet believe, is treated as a form of action. The narrator has few other levers available: he cannot leave, cannot change the people around him, and cannot count on rescue. What he can do is state an intention and repeat it until it starts to hold weight. That makes the chorus an act of self-authorship, and it explains why listeners in very different circumstances reach for it when their own options run short.

Singing it together

The song's public life has largely been communal. When The Mountain Goats played it on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the host joined Darnielle for the first chorus and then more or less turned the performance into a duet.^[6] The band noted that they had performed the song with Colbert a decade earlier on Comedy Central, in a segment that never aired.^[6] Craig Finn of The Hold Steady has also joined the band on stage for it, with Darnielle nodding back to a Hold Steady song at the end.^[7]

These moments point to something about how the song works. A chorus that states a hard resolution becomes different when a room full of people sings it. It stops being one teenager's private vow and turns into a shared one. That may be the closest thing the song has to a final meaning: a vow does not have to be believed to be useful, and saying it together makes it easier to keep.

Alternative readings

Not everyone hears triumph. The song can be heard as a portrait of survival at a cost, where the declared determination is a thin shield over real fear. Darnielle has said the album spoke to a situation of abuse that people gradually came to want to hear about.^[2] If so, then "This Year" is partly a document of how people talk to themselves in dangerous circumstances, with forced cheer as a coping device.

Others hear it more simply, as a song about the ordinary weight of adolescence, with the abuse a distant backdrop. Because the lyrics deal in small, concrete details rather than naming the cause of the narrator's distress, the song allows that interpretation. The surrounding album makes the more specific reading hard to avoid, but the song itself does not insist on it, and that restraint is part of why it travels so well.

Why it endures

The Sunset Tree was widely praised on release. Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker called Darnielle America's best non-hip-hop lyricist, and the album holds a Metacritic score of 83 from 28 reviews.^[1] Darnielle himself has said the record told him this was his life's work for at least the next twenty years.^[2] That is a notable thing for a songwriter who, at the time, thought he might not be a professional musician much longer.^[2]

"This Year" sits at the center of that turn. It is what happens when a writer decides to stop hiding behind invented characters and instead write plainly about a hard home, and discovers that a very personal story can become a general tool. The song does not promise that things will get better. It promises only that the narrator will still be here when the year ends, and for a lot of listeners that smaller promise is the one that matters.