Singer, songwriter, author, poet, and grunge icon Mark Lanegan would have turned 61 years old today. The frontman for Ellensburg, WA, proto-grunge band Screaming Trees left an incredible artistic legacy behind when he passed away in February 2022 at the age of 57, and to honor Mark Lanegan, we’re looking back at the life of one of alternative rock’s greatest cult figures.
Like nearly every band that got lumped into the “grunge” movement of Seattle in the ’90s, Lanegan and the Trees resented the label. Screaming Trees started in Ellensburg, a rural farming town in central Washington with a population of just under 21,000 in the 2024 census, far from the Northwest’s eventual music capital of Seattle.
Formed in 1984 by brothers Gary Lee and Van Conner on guitar and bass, respectively, Lanegan on vocals, and Mark Pickerel on drums, the band spent its early years rooted in the ongoing ’60s psychedelic garage rock revival. Around the time Lanegan started writing lyrics for Screaming Trees—on their sixth album, Sweet Oblivion—their sound had aligned more with the “grunge” movement. Additionally, the band appeared in the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe‘s 1992 film Singles alongside Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. The romantic comedy about the Seattle music scene included “Nearly Lost You”, Screaming Trees’ biggest hit, which reached #5 on the U.S. Alternative Airplay and #12 on the U.S. Mainstream Rock charts.
Screaming Trees — “Nearly Lost You”
But the Screaming Trees, Sweet Oblivion, and “Nearly Lost You” are only a small part of Mark Lanegan’s story. He goes into far greater detail in his 2020 memoir Sing Backwards and Weep, an autobiography as gritty and raw as the author’s low, cigarette-hoarse growl, but as the Trees were blaring alternative rock at festivals around the world, Lanegan was exposed to the softer music of Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Tom Waits, and Nick Cave. This approach would define his 1990 solo debut, The Winding Sheet, and remain an ever-present creative force through all 12 solo studio albums he would release in his lifetime.
“Prior to this I had sometimes written words with the other members of my first band, or, more often, had tried to change their lyrics to fit me in a more personal way,” Lanegan wrote in his 2017 book, I Am the Wolf: Lyric and Writings. “This was a tedious, frustrating routine that was never enjoyable, and so The Winding Sheet became my first attempt at going it alone.”
Despite his hard-ass outer shell and bloody knuckles aesthetic, the solo albums he released in the ’90s—The Winding Sheet, Whiskey for the Holy Ghost (1994), Scraps at Midnight (1998), I’ll Take Care of You (1999), and Field Songs (2001)—carried a bruised vulnerability. Digging into his childhood, Lanegan describes being not just unloved by his mother but openly despised. An apathy toward school, contempt for authority, and becoming the town drunk at age 12 drilled into him his identity as a social pariah. Fights followed him everywhere he went—violence a daily occurrence on tour with the bickering Conner brothers—but Lanegan’s early solo albums reveal a deep desire to be loved, buried over layers of scorned ambivalence.
Mark Lanegan — “Stay”
Around the same time the Trees blew up only to wind down, and he began issuing solo albums, Lanegan fell deep into heroin addiction that would eclipse his music career for years. It wasn’t long after Screaming Trees broke up that Mark was back in Seattle, making and selling crack cocaine to fund his heroin addiction. He vividly writes in Scream Backwards and Weep of the daily depravity of surviving, with appearances from close friends Kurt Cobain and Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley. When his music career went on the back burner in favor of active addiction, Lanegan also kept up his habit by procuring heroin for touring musicians in Seattle or for his friends who were too famous to go outside and cop. In his book, Mark recalls how Cobain called him “the night porter” when he would come deliver drugs, a line he’d use in the 2004 song, “When Your Number Isn’t Up”.
Mark Lanegan — “When Your Number Isn’t Up”
After his addiction left him homeless on the streets of Seattle and out of options, Lanegan entered a yearlong drug rehabilitation program in 1997, financed by Courtney Love. Many friends and musicians helped Lanegan along the way in his early days of recovery, including Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan. Lanegan carried the scars of addiction (some literal) with him through the rest of his life, his pain of spiritual desperation a constant throughout his solo catalog.
Mark Lanegan — “Harborview Hospital”
Shortly before the Screaming Trees broke up at the turn of the millennium, the band picked up a second guitar player. He had just come from a band that, though it garnered little mainstream attention at the time, would become hugely influential in the years to follow. The band was desert stoner metal forebear Kyuss, and the guitarist was Josh Homme.
Lanegan recognized the young Homme’s talent from the start, and when Josh left the Trees after two years to start Queens of the Stone Age, he and Mark kept in touch. Lanegan would go on to appear on five of the seven QOTSA albums released during his lifetime, missing the band’s 1998 self-titled debut and 2017’s Villains. Mark’s cement mixer of a voice is found throughout the band’s classic albums, starting with “In the Fade” from Rated R (2000) and the quintessential “A Song for the Dead” from 2002 masterpiece, Songs for the Deaf.
Queens Of The Stone Age — “In The Fade”
Queens Of The Stone Age — “A Song For The Dead” — Werchter, Belgium — 2002
[Video: BAMpeR]
Following the acoustic nature of his first five albums, Lanegan took a major departure with his 2004 double album Bubblegum, considered by many to be his masterpiece. Though Lanegan and longtime producer Alain Johannes filled Bubblegum with electric elements, it retains the minimalist spirit that ran through his first albums. The eerie chill of his early records remains, but with an electric edge. As Homme put in a 2008 interview with Magnet Magazine, “It’s as if Mark is sitting with a shotgun on his lap waiting for someone to come home.”
Mark Lanegan — “Methamphetamine Blues”
Mark Lanegan — “Message To Mine” (w/ Dean Ween)
This new musical direction would run through the remainder of his musical career (Bubblegum coming smack-dab in the middle of his 12 studio albums), as well as another theme that would define Lanegan’s musical back nine. Bubblegum boasted an inordinate amount of collaborators, among them Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri of QOTSA, PJ Harvey, Duff McKagan and Izzy Stradlin on Guns N’ Roses, Dean Ween (on a song that didn’t even make the original album), Greg Dulli (Afghan Whigs), and Wendy Rae Fowler, Lanegan’s ex-wife whom he was divorcing at the time of the album, who sang “Bombed” while hearing the song for the first time.
After decades as a cult figure and molding an artistic image as a grizzled loner, Lanegan became a sought-after collaborator in the latter half of his career. He’d release three albums with Scottish singer-songwriter Isobel Campbell of Belle & Sebastian fame, two albums with British blues rock multi-instrumentalist Duke Garwood, and an album with Joe Cardamone (a.k.a Skeleton Joe) of L.A. post-hardcore band The Icarus Line four months before Lanegan’s death on February 22nd, 2022, from complications due to COVID-19.
Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan — “Come Undone”
The legacy of Mark Lanegan is a lifelong story of subverting expectations. Written off as a malcontent town drunk before he was old enough to drink, he (only somewhat begrudgingly) was part of an artistic movement that took over the entire country. Lumped in with an increasingly corporatized rock concept, he turned around to make daringly vulnerable acoustic records. He worked with hard rock icons and underappreciated folksingers all the same. He evolved from acoustic music into biting lo-fi electric albums that somehow maintained the same level of intimacy.
Mark Lanegan — “Quiver Syndrome”
No matter how much you’ve heard or read from Mark Lanegan, there is always something completely different that you have yet to discover. Farewell, Night Porter.
Mark Lanegan — “Strange Religion” — Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown
[Video: Iakov Iaroslavich]