Are ever going to sell more come, come to the sunset tree? It’s all I want in life.

johndarnielle:

So, why not, here is the deal with those. When I made The Sunset Tree, I kinda figured the Mountain Goats were headed back to part-time-world; I’d scaled back my day job during the Tallahassee year, and I’d been trying to make touring-and-record-sales work as a rent-maker after we left Iowa. I was managing, but it’s really important to me to pull my weight around the house, and it was getting increasingly harder to sell records with the general rise of the internet, period. See-the-difference-in-your-pocket harder. Tallahassee and We Shall All Be Healed had both found their partisans, but it wasn’t a big audience at all, and when I listened to the mastered Sunset Tree, I honestly had no idea how people were going to take it. So I assumed it wouldn’t do very well, and I thought, well, I may have a little bit of time on my hands between the release of this record and finding a day job, it’d be cool to do something cool with the demos, old-school heads will probably be stoked to hear them and that’s when I got the outstanding idea to press up 1,000 copies of them and paint and/or collage the sleeves.

We were on tour when the blank sleeves, with the vinyl in them, arrived on the porch. My wife hauled them all into the house. I got home and looked at all these boxes and went to work, and honestly it’s amazing to me that I finished as many as I did during that first year or two, because the album actually did surprisingly (to me) well, and I didn’t end up looking for a job or going back to nursing school to finally get my RN. I just kept touring. You can’t really make good CCTST sleeves on tour (you can bring a lot of blank ones and have big plans to work in hotel rooms, but it doesn’t really pan out), and when you get back from tour, you may or may not feel inspired to sit down for eight-hour days of sleeve-decorating where you finish maybe ten if you’re lucky.

Still, I got a bunch done; Lalitree & Perry helped a lot; life just kept getting busier. We moved across town. The ones that’d been sold at shows started turning up on eBay for absurd amounts of money. That bugged me, because it means that if I go sell some at shows, some shmoe tries to buy three and swears he’s got two bros who wanted to be here but they’re at a funeral or whatever and me being me I have a hard time hearing a sad story and not wanting to help and of course you see where this is going, inside of 24 hours those records are up for auction and getting 200 bucks a pop, and who, really, can blame the merch table bro who lied and laid down 75 bucks and turned it into 600, things are tough all over, gotta get over how you can. Still to me it meant I didn’t feel super-driven to finish them, because it’s a bummer to have dudes lie to your face, right? It is a bummer. And it’s no fun to go “I don’t care about your imaginary funeral bros, one per customer,” either. 

But it breeds ill will, people thinking “I’ll never be able to afford one,” it’s a drag, honestly the only way to do something like this is to have all 1,000 ready to go before you put ‘em on sale. Live and learn. The last three years running, FINISH SUNSET TREES has been on my New Year’s Resolutions list, but I have become a dad to two magnificent young men, the most I can finish in a day and get all my other stuff done is three. Three. That right there is a sad number. 

But I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately (hence the wordiness of this post), because it’s the 10th anniversary of the album this year, I’d like to have them done before the year’s out. If I hand-decorate ‘em, that’s not gonna happen. But if I silkscreened the remaining ones (there are about 250 of them), I could be done, and plus, the silkscreen edition would actually be rarer than the handmade ones, which is kind of perverse in a way that’s appealing to me. 

So this is in my thoughts. I have an idea for a design and have raised the question with Alyson, who helps me keep business stuff organized. If I don’t do that, then the answer is shorter: yes, I’ll probably finish maybe 10 a year tops for the next twenty years and they still won’t be all done and I’ll throw in the towel.

But a 10-year silkscreen edition of the remaining blanks seems the likeliest possibility.