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Tuesday, February 22, 2022

MARK LANEGAN,
1964-2022

Mark Lanegan, a singer/songwriter associated with the early days of the Seattle scene whose career was marked by a wide range of collaborations, died Tuesday at his home in Killarney, Ireland. He was 57.

A statement on his Twitter account read: “Our beloved friend Mark Lanegan passed away this morning at his home in Killarney, Ireland. A singer, songwriter, author and musician, he was 57 and is survived by his wife, Shelley. No other information is available at this time.”

Lanegan experienced a life-threatening battle with COVID-19 last year, which he detailed in Devil in a Coma: A Memoir. He also suffered from kidney disease.

His initial fame came as the lead singer and songwriter for Screaming Trees, which he co-founded in his hometown of Ellensburg, Wash., about 100 miles southeast of Seattle, where the band thereafter played alongside The Melvins and Mudhoney amid the coalescing of grunge. After releasing an EP and LP locally, the quartet signed with Southern California’s SST. The label released three of their albums and put them on the national stage.

They subsequently signed with Epic, releasing Uncle Anesthesia in 1990 and scoring the alternative hit “Bed of Roses.” Its follow-up, 1992’s Sweet Oblivion, was their biggest seller, buoyed by the single “Nearly Lost You,” which was featured in the 1992 film Singles and on its double-platinum soundtrack. Screaming Trees released Dust in 1996 and disbanded in 2000.

In 1990 Lanegan issued the first of his dozen solo albums, The Winding Sheet (Sub Pop), with guest appearances by Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic. He released two albums with Afghan Whigs frontman Greg Dulli (the two were billed as The Gutter Twins), three albums with Isobel Campbell and two with Duke Garwood. His final project, Dark Mark vs. Skeleton Joe, came out in October.

He also performed with Dulli’s Twilight Singers and UNKLE and sang on two Soulsavers albums.

Lanegan began working with Queens of the Stone Age for their Rated R and joined the band full-time in 2002. (QOTSA’s Josh Homme had been Screaming Trees’ touring guitarist in the late ‘90s). With Lanegan in the lineup, QOTSA scored their most-successful album, the gold-certified Songs for the Deaf. He left the band in 2005 but continued to sing and co-write with them until 2013. That year, Lanegan and Homme wrote and recorded the theme to CNN’s Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.

Light in the Attic put out a three-LP anthology of Lanegan's solo work, Has God Seen My Shadow?, in 2014.

In 2020, he released Straight Songs of Sorrow as a musical companion to his memoir Sing Backwards and Weep, about his struggles with addiction and the deaths of friends such as Cobain and Alice in Chains' Layne Staley.

 
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