I’ve frankly struggled to process the death of the great rock vocalist Mark Lanegan since his passing at the age of 57 this past February. When someone has essentially been your musical spirit animal for 30-odd years it’s very difficult to say goodbye, particularly as Mark’s passing was just the latest in a numerous and dispiriting series of deaths of all-time greats in the music world. It wasn’t the extreme gut punch of Chris Cornell’s painful and unexpected suicide back in 2017; or the shock of Prince’s sad and seemingly pointless OD in 2016; or the extreme melancholy of a stoic David Bowie succumbing to liver cancer that same year. Lanegan was, by his own admission, a long-time hardcore drug and alcohol abuser, as well as a chain smoker, even if he had been reportedly sober for some years now. Then, he also had an extremely nasty case of COVID that put him in the hospital and even into an induced coma for far too long a spell in 2021. (A true artist, Mark wrote two emotionally honest, raw and well-received autobiographical books about those horrible experiences of addiction and illness, Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir and Devil In A Coma.)
Borracho
A standout track from just his second solo effort, 1994’s Whiskey For the Holy Ghost , the barn burning “Borracho” shows a young artist already nearly fully formed.
So, hearing he had died suddenly in late winter of ’22 was not exactly a complete surprise. A total bummer, yes, but one couldn’t be surprised that his extreme lifestyle, born out of a brutally unhappy childhood in rural Washington, had caught up with him and that the bill had finally come due. It wasn’t really any more surprising than Kurt Cobain cashing his check back in 1994. Mark Lanegan was every bit the self-destructive rock poet Cobain was and at least he beat the curse of 27 by about 30 years, not to mention somehow outliving his other doomed contemporaries, Andrew Wood, Layne Staley, Scott Weiland and Cornell. Though that time still seems far too brief now that he’s passed, he put it to astonishingly good use. His longevity and prolific output of exceedingly high quality material, as well as his unflinching honesty as an artist and aversion to self-indulgence, make him one of the towering if woefully underappreciated figures in Rock history. While he was often primarily noted for his work as the Screaming Trees frontman way back in the ’90s, or compared as a solo artist to Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen in a facile, shorthand way, the long view shows many more similarities with Jim Morrison (and even Rimbaud), from the brooding, almost unfathomably deep and textured baritone that could all at once rise to a banshee’s wail, to that craving for riding to the very edge of self-destruction in search of some sort of twisted enlightenment and then — for a long while, at least — returning to tell the tale as only a debauched survivor can.
Because of This
An 8-minute, raga-inflected mini-epic from his third solo album, 1998’s Scraps at Midnight, shows Lanegan’s virtuosic understanding of dynamics in songwriting and within his own vocal range.
Lanegan put his time on this earth and his haunting and beautiful instrument to good use. If you only know Mark Lanegan from Screaming Trees or even just the hit single “Nearly Lost You” then you are really missing out. To get first things out of the way first, though, Screaming Trees themselves were way more than that one big hit from the Singles soundtrack, no matter that Mark held little fondness for his first band. They started well before most of their grunge brethren, back in the mid-1980s, and were key pioneers of that Seattle scene even if never quite fully a part of it. Their earlier recordings are well worth seeking out and show a band rapidly evolving into a semi-psychedelic hard rock powerhouse, with 1991’s Uncle Anesthesia being a particularly tight precursor to their big breakthrough, Sweet Oblivion.
Dollar Bill
Not “Nearly Lost You” — one of the many ‘hidden gems’ hiding in plain site on Oblivion.
Oblivion, which featured “Nearly Lost You” as its breakthrough hit, is a total ass-kicker from opening to closing track. But the toxic band dynamics and the record label’s condescending view of the Trees as “inferior” to their labelmates, Alice in Chains (perhaps the Trees were not really “Grunge” enough), squelched any momentum they should’ve had. The fantastic, technically impressive follow-up four years on, Dust, failed to build any kind of commercial momentum. That doesn’t stop Dust (1996) from being a gorgeously produced album with a admirably unfashionable baroque classic rock romanticism amidst the more expected shredding guitars and pounding drums.
Sworn and Broken
Harpsichord solo, anyone? A baroque Trees touch that Lanegan probably loathed but damn if it doesn’t work. And the song’s stark, bereft themes are typical of those that he would continue pursuing.
Although the Trees were essentially toast after this, Lanegan had been doing impressive solo work from the get go, with two highly praised efforts — The Winding Sheet (1990) and Whiskey for the Holy Ghost (1994) — that seemed mature beyond their years in their authentic mining of blues and folk traditions miles away from what one would expect from a hard rock frontman. Those opening solo slavos were the indisputable clues that Mark Lanegan was something special even among peers such as Cornell, Staley, Eddie Vedder and Cobain. In fact, Cobain, who was close to Lanegan not only as a fellow musician but also as a fellow junkie, famously “borrowed” Lanegan’s menacing growl to banshee wail interpretation of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”, initially an impactful success for blues great Leadbelly in the mid-1940s, for Nirvana’s iconic MTV Unplugged album.
Idle Hands
With kindred spirit Greg Dulli in the intoxicating gloom rock of The Gutter Twins.
In retrospect, that is probably the thing that set Lanegan apart from his admittedly super-talented peers: the Blues. Mark had it and the other white boys from the Pacific Northwest didn’t really, per se. When Lanegan covered a song like “Please Consider Me” or “I’ll Take Care of You” it just worked on a soulful level in a way that the other dudes in his milieu simply couldn’t pull off. Whether that was from pure self-destructive insight or his eclectic and encyclopedic tastes in different forms of popular music, the result was a depth of connection to the material that very few other artists could master. While sharing their world weariness in spades, he had more vocal range than Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave or Tom Waits, emotionally as well as tonally, being able to growl and scream on the one hand and gruffly croon on the other, both modes seeming to offer up glimpses of an alluring vulnerability in equal measure. And his lyrical prowess was probably as great as any of those three seminal writers while also being somehow more natural and less stylized. His ferocious introspection and scathing, self-flagellating honesty produced original songs of haunting power and ragged beauty with recurrent themes like addiction, broken relationships, fatalistic hopelessness, searching for the holy in the profane and, sometimes, a glimmer of redemption.
God Is In The Radio
God is definitely in the radio for Lanegan’s vital contributions to Queens of the Stone Age’s 2002 blockbuster, Songs For the Deaf
Like many of the very best musicians, Lanegan was also a serial collaborator, finding satisfying and happy alliances after the very choppy years with the Trees among such kindred spirits as Josh Homme in the hard rocking Queens of the Stone Age and Afghan Whigs’ Greg Dulli in the glorious gloom rock of the Gutter Twins, as well as perhaps the most unlikely collaborator in Belle & Sebastian’s angel-voiced Isobel Campbell. If you had that one on your bingo card I tip my hat to you, but their strange partnership produced startlingly tender and lovely results . That pairing of the wee Scottish lass with the tall, gaunt rock lifer from the great Northwest may just have helped Lanegan come to terms with his dark habits, as he was still struggling mightily with pill and substance addiction at the start of their years together and seemed to stay clean after, even if it didn’t end well between them (see her heartbreakingly beautiful tribute to her fallen musical partner here at the Guardian).
Some Misunderstanding
A late career collaboration with British electronica experts Soulsavers showed that Lanegan could still generate goosebumps with his raw honesty and raggedly beautiful instrument.
Finally, a word on the awesome body of work with his eponymous Mark Lanegan Band. As I’ve mentioned here in the past, Bubblegum (2008) and Blues Funeral (2014) are two of his finest works. The former is an astonishing advancement on his early, haunting solo work, given depth and expansiveness by the quality of the rotating cast of collaborators that made up the “band”, notably the marvelous PJ Harvey and QOTSA bandmates Homme & Nick Olivieri, as well as semi-permanent members like ace musician-producer Alain Johannes (later, musical Swiss Army knife Rob Marshall would also join this loose rotation of frequently recurring bandmates for 2017’s Gargoyle and the Lanegan Band’s subsequent albums). All of Bubblegum is magnificent but the almost film noir fatalism of “One Hundred Days” and the closer “Out of Nowhere” are pretty hard to beat as not only some of Lanegan’s finest but some of the best rock songs ever recorded in terms of the music matching the lyrical mood to perfection. Released six years later, Blues Funeral leans into electronica and techno grooves with surprisingly successful results. From the hard-edged electro blast of the opening “The Gravedigger’s Song” where Lanegan menacingly intones “With piranha’s teeth/I been thinking of you” to the plaintive, Georgio Moroder-inflected “Ode to Sad Disco” to the clear-eyed self-savaging of “Phantasmagoria Blues,” there’s one compelling track after another on Funeral.
One Hundred Days
One Hundred Days is never enough — You can play this one at my blues funeral, too.
In fact, when you look back at the totality of Lanegan’s output, it’s downright astonishing in both its quantity and quality. The guy just never stopped writing, singing and collaborating, doing great things on his own and with more well-chosen partners like Soulsavers in the late 00s/early 2010s right up until the end of his line. If you only know “Nearly Lost You” you should listen to all of Sweet Oblivion. If you only know Sweet Oblivion, check the rest of the Screaming Trees output. If you only know the Trees, dig on Lanegan’s solo work and then explore his collaborations with Queens of the Stone Age, The Gutter Twins, Isobel Campbell, Soulsavers and probably a hundred other people. It’s really all that good and worthy of your attention and at least some of it is going to move you to your core.
I Am the Wolf
The Wolf nearing the end of the road — from 2014’s Phantom Radio
The voice is silenced now but the true depth of Mark Lanegan’s accomplishments are only coming into focus upon his departure from this mortal flesh. From the 1980s until 2022, Lanegan the artist roamed this earth like a weatherbeaten but still fierce wolf and set down music as honest and brutally beautiful as any in the rock canon, imbuing it with the hard living authenticity of a William Burroughs or Charles Bukowski. Dead or alive, there is no better companion for the dark hours of the soul, the pleasure of bathing in the pain and the joyous exultation of turning oneself inside out but still coming through the other side to see another day with all its potential glories and dangers. The man is gone but I have no doubt the music will live on and come to be seen as some of the greatest made by late 20th and early 21st century artists. He was just that fucking good. I’ll miss my musical spirit animal, Dark Mark, The Wolf himself. But there will be few days in my life when I won’t be playing, singing or just having one of his many, many fantastic tunes running through my head, because that’s the way it’s been ever since I first heard the Trees way back in 1992. That ain’t ever changing and I will keep riding Lanegan’s Deep Black Vanishing Train into the depths until the day comes when my lights go out. And then you can go ahead and play him for me on a loop in the afterlife.
Out of Nowhere
As it begins, so too it ends…