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Artist News
Mark Lanegan dies
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 23 February 2022
Former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan has died, aged 57. No cause of death has yet been announced.
“Our beloved friend Mark Lanegan passed away this morning at his home in Killarney, Ireland”, reads a statement on his Twitter account. “A beloved singer, songwriter, author and musician he was 57 and is survived by his wife Shelley. No other information is available at this time. We ask please respect the family privacy”.
Screaming Trees were formed by Lanegan in 1984 in Ellensburg, near Seattle, and became one of the early bands to be grouped under the ‘grunge’ genre tag. The band released four albums on independent labels Velvetone and SST in the late 1980s, before the grunge boom helped to secure them a major label deal with Epic, where they released three albums.
After parting ways with the Epic label following their 1996 album ‘Dust’, the band struggled to find a new deal and eventually split in 2000.
Concurrent to Screaming Trees’ major label career, Lanegan began recording solo music, releasing his debut album, ‘The Winding Sheet’, through Sub Pop in 1990, which included a version of the song ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’ featuring Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic. Three more solo albums – ‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’, ‘Scraps At Midnight’ and ‘I’ll Take Care Of You’ – arrived before the end of the decade.
After Screaming Trees split, Lanegan continued to release solo records, which included collaborations with other artists, such as PJ Harvey and Guns N Roses’ Duff McKagan. He also joined Queens Of The Stone Age – frontman Josh Homme having been a member of Screaming Trees in the late 90s – after contributing to the band’s ‘Rated R’ album.
While still working with QOTSA, Lanegan also began a collaboration with Belle & Sebastian’s Isobel Campbell. And the first of their three albums together, 2006’s ‘Ballad Of The Broken Seas’, was nominated for that year’s Mercury Prize.
In total, Lanegan released twelve solo albums – the last, ‘Straight Songs Of Sorrow’, coming out in 2020 – as well as seven with Screaming Trees and three with Campbell. In addition to that, he released two with Duke Garwood, one with Skeleton Joe (as Dark Mark vs Skeleton Joe), and one with Afghan Whigs’ Greg Dulli, under the name The Gutter Twins.
A prolific collaborator, he also contributed to many other projects by artists including grunge supergroup Mad Season, Manic Street Preachers, Moby, UNKLE, Tinariwen, Eagles Of Death Metal, The Breeders, Melissa Auf Der Maur, Cult Of Luna, Martina Topley-Bird and The Duke Spirit.
Through the 90s and early 2000s, Lanegan struggled with alcoholism and heroin addiction, and for a time became homeless after Screaming Trees broke up. He wrote about these and other experiences in his 2020 memoir ‘Sing Backwards And Weep’. At the time of his death, he had been sober for more than a decade – crediting Courtney Love with saving his life, by paying for a year of rehab.
Last year, Lanegan contracted COVID-19 and was hospitalised for several months, at times in a coma. Following his recovery, he recalled his experiences during this time in another book, ‘Devil In A Coma’, writing: “Whatever was in this shitwagon I’d caught a ride on, it was no fucking joke. I’d taken my share of well-deserved ass-kickings over the years but this thing was trying to dismantle me, body and mind, and I could see no end to it in sight”.
Alongside the many artists paying tribute to Lanegan on social media last night, some of the labels he worked with also posted statements. The Beggars Group wrote on Twitter: “We are seeing the sad news that Mark Lanegan has passed. His voice was one of a kind. He will be greatly missed. Beggars Banquet and 4AD had the pleasure of releasing several of his albums and we are honoured to have had a small part in the long legacy he leaves”.
Meanwhile, in a post on Instagram, Ipecac Recordings co-founder Greg Werckman said: “Mark Lanegan was an extremely talented musician. Mark was also an Ipecac Recordings artist. We worked with him on several records. But more importantly, Mark was a dear friend that we loved. I’m not a religious person but there is no denying that Mark’s voice was a spiritual device. He had a wonderful, dark sense of humour, was often grumpy and loved baseball. We were blessed to have had Mark in our lives and we miss him horribly but will celebrate our time with him and the music he created”.
