The Hanging Tree

This song has been playing over and over in my head for days. So, I thought I'd share it with you all to hopefully get it out of my head.
This song is full of sorrow and beauty. The meaning of this song can be so many things, depending on the person who reads it and the experiences they've been through. That's one of the beautiful things about music, and art in general; what one set of lyrics, paintings, words mean to me can mean something completely different to you.
To me, this song is about loss, death. Someone is waiting for their loved one to come home, though I don't think the loved one ever will. I think this song is about losing someone due to some type of self harm, be it suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, etc. The pain and sorrow the family/friends are feeling is catastrophic, and all they want is to see their loved ones ones last time.
The midnight line always leads me to this type of feeling behind the song. Midnight can also be called the "witching hour", when spirits, demons, ghosts, and other supernatural beings can appear. If your loved one is dead, midnight is the perfect time to meet because that's when they actually can come and see you, and maybe help clarify why they did what they did. So many times, we never really know the true thoughts and feelings of the people we love until after they're gone; sometimes we will never know. Getting a chance to meet with them one final time, and find out what they were thinking/feeling/going through that led them to this would bring about so much closure.
Unfortunately, that is something we may never get to accomplish. We can speculate, but never truly know how they felt after they're gone from our lives forever. The beauty of this song, to me, is that it captures the sorrow we all feel after we've lost someone incredibly important to us. The shock that they're gone, sorrow of them leaving, the anger that they left so suddenly, the sadness/depression that lingers. Each stanza has a different emotion tied to it, and each emotion I've felt after losing incredibly important people in my life.
To me, this song is so many things. Sad. Beautiful. Emotional. Painful. Real.
What is it to you?