Mark Lanegan

Singing with a nicotine-ravaged growl that was deep, strong, and sensuously forbidding, Mark Lanegan rose to fame when his band the Screaming Trees won a taste of mainstream recognition in the ’90s. Carving out a strong individual identity as a vocalist and songwriter, Lanegan’s music was nearly always informed by the blues, and the singer was willing to take his darkly poetic sensibility to whatever style his muse pointed him. His solo work veered from the semi-acoustic atmospherics of 1990′s The Winding Sheet, 1998′s Scraps at Midnight, and the adventurous hard rock of 2004′s Bubblegum and 2012′s Blues Funeral, to the clean electronic surfaces of 2014′s Phantom Radio and 2020′s unsparingly confessional Straight Songs of Sorrow. Lanegan was also a frequent collaborator with a number of noted artists, among them Greg Dulli, Queens of the Stone Age, Isobel Campbell, Soulsavers, and Duke Garwood.
Born in Ellensburg, Washington on November 25, 1964, Lanegan, by his own estimation, grew up in a dysfunctional household and developed a powerful appetite for liquor and drugs in his teens that led to scrapes with the law. When he was 18, he struck up a friendship with Van Connor, who shared Lanegan’s interest in music. Lanegan originally agreed to play drums in a band with Van and his brother, Gary Lee Connor, but when it was decided Lanegan was a better singer than a percussionist, Mark Pickerel came on board to play drums with the band that became known as the Screaming Trees. The band released their first album, Clairvoyance, in 1986, but it wasn’t until 1992 that they scored a commercial breakthrough when their song “Nearly Lost You” — which appeared on the soundtrack to the movie Singles as well as their own album Sweet Oblivion — became a surprise hit thanks to extensive MTV play.
By the time “Nearly Lost You” hit the charts, Lanegan had already launched a solo career. He and Kurt Cobain shared a passion for the blues, particularly the music of Lead Belly, and the two formed a side group with Krist Novoselic and Mark Pickerel known as the Jury, with a plan to record an EP of Lead Belly tunes. While the Jury project soon fell apart, Lanegan used a recording of Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” with Cobain and Novoselic as the launching pad for his darkly atmospheric solo debut, 1990′s The Winding Sheet. The album earned enthusiastic reviews, but after the success of “Nearly Lost You,” Lanegan and the Trees hit the road for a long tour; by most accounts, the group had a strained relationship in the best of circumstances, and as weeks turned into months on the road, the hard-drinking band clashed frequently. After the Sweet Oblivion tour ran its course, the group took a break and Lanegan cut another solo album, 1994′s Whiskey for the Holy Ghost, a more dynamic set that once again impressed critics with Lanegan’s powerful vocals and deep lyrical visions. In 1996, the Screaming Trees finally released their follow-up to Sweet Oblivion, but Dust failed to live up to the commercial success of their breakthrough album, despite the modest success of “All I Know” as a single and the band joining the bill for the 1996 Lollapalooza tour.
In 1998, Lanegan released his third solo album, Scraps at Midnight, followed by I'll Take Care of You, a collection of covers, in 1999. In 2000, after playing a show to celebrate the opening of the Experience Music Project in Seattle, the Screaming Trees announced they were breaking up. With his main band out of the picture, Lanegan began to dive deep into collaborations with other acts; he’d already contributed to tribute albums honoring Willie Nelson and Skip Spence and appeared on Mike Watt’s solo debut, Ball-Hog or Tugboat?, and in 2000, he performed guest vocals on the breakout album from Queens of the Stone Age, Rated R. While Lanegan was never an official member of QOTSA, he became a valuable ally to leader Josh Homme, contributing vocals and collaborating on songs for 2002′s Songs for the Deaf, 2005′s Lullabies to Paralyze, and 2013′s Like Clockwork. In 2003, Lanegan worked with former Afghan Whigs frontman Greg Dulli on the sophomore album from Dulli’s project the Twilight Singers, Blackberry Belle, and he would also appear with Dulli on two subsequent Twilight Singers albums, 2004′s She Loves You and 2011′s Dynamite Steps. Dulli and Lanegan would also record a collaborative album under the name the Gutter Twins, 2008′s Saturnalia. In 2005, Lanegan recorded an EP of duets with Isobel Campbell, formerly of Belle and Sebastian, entitled Ramblin' Man; the pair would go on to record three full albums together, 2006′s Ballad of the Broken Seas, 2008′s Sunday at Devil Dirt, and 2010′s Hawk. The U.K. electronic group Soulsavers brought Lanegan in to sing on their albums It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way You Land (2007), Broken (2009), and The Light the Dead See (2012). Lanegan became a regular contributor to the Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project, an ad hoc ensemble that interpreted songs by the late Gun Club frontman; Lanegan appeared on the albums We Are Only Riders (2009), The Journey Is Long (2012), and Axels & Sockets (2014).
While some of Lanegan’s collaborations got more press than he did during this period, he hardly had his solo career on the back burner. 2001′s Field Songs offered the sort of dark, roots-oriented songs that were his trademark, and 2004′s more rock-oriented Bubblegum was the first album credited to the Mark Lanegan Band, though instead of a set band, the tracks featured a rotating variety of accompanists including Josh Homme and PJ Harvey. A second Mark Lanegan Band set, Blues Funeral, appeared in 2012, while Lanegan dropped two albums in 2013, a collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Duke Garwood titled Black Pudding, and a second album devoted to covers, Imitations. 2014 brought a third full-length from the Mark Lanegan Band, Phantom Radio, and in 2015, Lanegan partnered with a handful of producers and remix artists (including Moby, UNKLE, Soulsavers, and Mark Stewart) to create A Thousand Miles of Midnight: Phantom Radio Remixes. By this time, Lanegan’s solo career had generated enough music to merit two different retrospective releases; in 2014, Light in the Attic issued the career-spanning compilation Has God Seen My Shadow? An Anthology 1989-2011, while in 2015, Sub Pop released One Way Street, a vinyl-only collection that featured new LP pressings of Lanegan’s first five solo albums.
In 2017, Lanegan released Gargoyle, an album written with his frequent collaborators Alain Johannes and Rob Marshall; it also featured guest appearances from Josh Homme and Greg Dulli. 2017 also saw him publish his first book, a collection of lyrics and essays titled I Am the Wolf. Lanegan and Duke Garwood teamed up once again to record 2018′s With Animals, a set dominated by spare and evocative electronic accompaniment. 2019′s Somebody's Knocking was another project that teamed Lanegan with Johannes and Marshall, while Greg Dulli contributed guest vocals on the song “Letter Never Sent.” In April 2020, Lanegan published a memoir, Sing Backwards and Weep, an unsparing portrait of his life in music and his struggles with addiction. As Lanegan revisited some of the lowest and most desperate moments of his past while completing the book, he channeled his emotions into a set of original songs. This personal material formed the basis of the album Straight Songs of Sorrow, released in May 2020. In 2021, Lanegan, who had left the United States to settle in Ireland, guested on a variety of projects from Manic Street Preachers (The Ultra Vivid Lament), Moby (Reprise), the Soulsavers with Dave Gahan (Imposter), and Cult of Luna (The Raging River). He also joined forces with Joe Cardamone of the Icarus Line to launch a new project, Dark Mark vs. Skeleton Joe, whose self-titled album, a brooding exercise in rock-influenced electronics, was issued in October 2021. He published a second memoir, Devil in a Coma, in December 2021 that focused on his severe health struggles after he was hospitalized with the COVID-19 virus. This would prove to be Lanegan’s last work as an artist; he died at his home in Killarney, Ireland on February 22, 2022, at the age of 57. ~ Mark Deming