Mark lanegan last photo
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Mark William Lanegan (November 25, 1964 – February 22, 2022) was an American singer, songwriter, and poet. First becoming prominent as the lead singer for the early grunge band Screaming Trees, he was also known as a member of Queens of the Stone Age and The Gutter Twins. He released 12 solo studio albums, as well as three collaboration albums with Isobel Campbell and two with Duke Garwood. He was known for his baritone voice, which was described as being "as scratchy as a three-day beard yet as supple and pliable as moccasin leather" and has been compared to Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, and Nick Cave.
Lanegan began his musical career in 1984 with Screaming Trees, with whom he released seven studio albums and five EPs before their disbandment in 2000. During his time with the band, he also started a solo career and released his first solo studio album, The Winding Sheet, in 1990. He subsequently released a further 10 solo albums, which received critical recognition but only moderate commercial success. Following the end of Screaming Trees, he became a frequent collaborat
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In contrast, Lanegan’s father, Dale, is depicted as a stoic, and more stabilising influence, who shows moments of real, understated love towards his son. His presence in Lanegan’s life – and therefore throughout the book – is intermittent but, despite the emotional repression involved on both sides, the pair bond over music and appear to share a similar melancholic outlook on life.
Despite Lanegan’s stark assessment of his own behaviour, warmth is in plentiful supply during key passages in the book, most specifically when he writes about the music that moves him (none of which is his own). He describes the awe that he feels when he sees a fledgling Nirvana play a show for the first time at the Ellensburg Public Library where their show is cut short after a mere four songs. At that point, Mark is one of the North West’s rising stars and Nirvana are nobodies, yet he is aware of being in the presence of a band that are “touched by greatness”, as he and Kurt Cobain swap numbers after the show. “I walked back to my depressing hovel with electricity in my step and a newfound buoyancy o
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Book Review - Sing Backwards and Weep - Mark Lanegan
‘Sing backwards and weep’ by Mark Lanegan is as tough and unflinching an autobiography as I've ever read. This shouldn't have been a big surprise to me, slightly familiar as I was with Mark’s excellent solo musical output, but I wasn't prepared for the amount of pain and self-destruction within these pages.
In his own words, he was born a 'garbage can of a drug fiend', a teenage thief and alcoholic, the town drunk even before he was of legal age to drink. I did get the feeling he was eager to move on from his early years, though he does return to discuss his parents at later stages. We do get to read about his musical influences and how they shaped him.
Screaming trees
The bulk of ‘sing backwards and weep’ concerns his life as a recording artist and a drug addict in the nineties, mostly in Seattle. It's not a book for those faint of heart, as you'd expect - drug taking is described, rightly, in all its unglamorous detail. As Lanegan tours the states and the world and sets out to score drugs, you can't hel
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