Mark Lanegan: Deepest Shade (of Blues)

Absolutely sublime art by Rhys Cooper

I saw an interview with Josh Homme recently - Queens of the Stone Age leader, long-time friend of Lanegan - where he described the man as a "complex, multilayered junkie", and while that's not wrong and he obviously knew the flesh and blood Mark Lanegan better than I ever will, I hereby intend to capture the essence of the man, which paints him in a much different light. Anyone who has ever heard Mark Lanegan's music - specifically his voice - knows what I mean when I say it is an almost primordial experience. The best example being the introduction to his own memorial concert which featured a recording of him covering Presence of God, a song orginally sung by the legendary-in-his-own right Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode. Lanegan's voice reverberates the entire space from the moment it accompanies the somber guitar that opens the track. It is profound in a way that's hard to describe without experiencing. Unfortunately the official recording has yet to be released.

As the title of this article alludes, the expression of consciousness known as Mark Lanegan was the essence of the Blues pushed to the their darkest. He existed to embody that in our reality. His life reflected it, his energy exuded it. He was the Blues incarnate, with all the sorrow and strife such a thing would inevitably entail... To quote the Philosopher and foremost scholar of Introverted Feeling, Soren Kierkegaard: “What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.'”

Lanegan's very existence deconstructed this theme. Sure, nowadays our poets don't really hide their "deep anguish", in fact they wear it, as armour or as branding, or both. As identity; a flag of which themes they belong to for other compatriots of said themes to find community. Lanegan was in some ways no different, and yet in some important ways, he could not have been more so. He no doubt internalised a lot of the musical image that formed around him but there was definitely no pretense to his artistic expression. And he didn't seem to care about fostering a community nor being part of any but I don't think he was overall ungrateful to his fans by any means.

In his youth, all he wanted was to get away from his little town, his abusive mother and symbolically impotent father who never defended him. Fame became his escape; his lifeline, and anyone who knows anything about the concept of fame knows how dangerous that inherently is. And oh man did it live up to that reputation. Trauma + fame + the natural ignorance of youth gang-banged the poor young man before he could even register what had happened; which from what I can tell he started coming to terms with around the time of the Blues Funeral LP in his late forties, when he started making music he truly enjoyed instead of music he was compelled to make by the themes that ran his life.

[That's where the Kierkegaard quote becomes super relevant; how many of us fans find Lanegan's most tortured work the most compelling? I know I do, for the most part. Riding the Nightingale is a prime example. That song makes me feel in ways few other songs have, and it could only be accomplished in his distinct voice (or Jeff Buckley's, more on that later). It really make you question yourself when you're confronted with the notion of: "would I rather this person hadn't suffered the way they did or would I rather benefit from that?"]

Rock music was one of those themes, which is why his split from QotSA was wholly both necessary and inevitable. If Lanegan was a character I was writing, that would be considered a canon event in his timeline. I remember my first time hearing the Phantom Radio LP and being way more excited than I should have been that a man I didn't really know at all sounded like he was truly having some musical play-time for the first time in his very prolific career. There were elements of this in Blues Funeral and even the collaboration bonanza of Bubblegum, but those albums open with The Gravedigger's Song which is one of the most (delectably) sinister pieces of music ever recorded, and the equally ominous When Your Number Isn't Up, respectively. Meanwhile Phantom Radio opens with Harvest Home which is more lighthearted than anything since his days with the Screaming Trees... the difference in energy is palpable to say the least.

One of the elements that sets Lanegan apart from other poets and 'scene leaders' such as Chris Cornell, Layne Stayley or Chester Bennington, is his specially-tailored voice. You'll find it described in many ways - 'soulful', 'gravelly', 'whiskey-soaked' etc. but what all these descriptions miss is how impossibly perfect his voice naturally was to carry on the spirit of the Blues and evolve it, which is something the man himself stated as his intention in a 2008 interview:

"[it's] blues music but not in the traditional, 12-bar blues sense... that's become trite and boring"

Not to mention, there is almost (at-least-)1-song-per-album and an entire album itself named after the concept. But this evolution was not just in a musical sense, it's also in the depth of the theme. Original blues music is simply nowhere near as raw and grimy and 'to-the-bone' as Lanegan went, even if they could be argued as equally dark at times such as Leadbelly's Where did you Sleep Last Night, which coincidentally was the song Kurt Cobain and Lanegan covered together on the latter's first solo EP and the former would go on to make 100x it more publically known by covering live on Unplugged. The Blues were already in Lanegan's soul even before tragedy struck his life unrelentingly. And again, his voice mirrors all of this. People often remark that his voice was the result of cigarettes and whiskey or whatever, but it was far too supple and controlled to mere conditioning by his lifestyle. That voice was more than natural, it was destined.

The Blues are of course no stranger to addiction, either. Which he chronicles with often-uncomfortable clarity in both his music and his autobiography Sing Backwards and Weep, the only veneer being his signature gothic poetry style of writing. And last but certainly not least is the Blues' connection to Gospel, and therefore to Christianity, and... Well, if you were to play a drinking game based on how many times Lanegan references Christian iconography or mentions Jesus by name you'd probably die pretty quickly, sooo... don't do that. It goes without saying that he was probably enthralled by the concept of redemption and forgiveness that Christ embodies, because it's clear, to his last work, he could never truly forgive himself.

Lanegan was also known for his understated yet towering stage presence. Image credit ??

I mentioned Jeff Buckley earlier because I believe they were two sides of the same coin, thematically. Both were almost certainly INFP and both wrote incredibly candid music about their emotional experience, but they were on opposite ends of the spectrum of that archetype. Buckley was 'light'; his thematic focus was soft, ethereal, his only full LP was called Grace and his voice is renowed for it's powerful upper range. He had a short, powerful impact and gained huge notoriety. Lanegan was, of course, 'dark'. So dark in fact that he bore the nickname "Dark Mark". His work bears titles such as Whiskey For the Holy Ghost, Gargoyle and Straight Songs of Sorrow, yet despite being a grizzled veteran in the music scene with an extremely potent low register that should have earned him a lot more attention from the public, he never became anything close to a household name. Lanegan endured the pain of his sordid past while Buckley died too young and relatively innocent.

Imagine what it'd be like if they covered some choice selections from each other's catalogue? Personally I'd request Buckley to do Riding the Nightingale as I alluded to earlier, while I think Lanegan could do amazing things with Eternal Life, where Buckley's voice is a bit too soft to be forceful enough to match the song's intent. That's what Heaven must be for, I tell you!

In any case, here was a very special human, with a very special role to play in the Human story, though not a very pleasant one both for himself and those caught in his wake over the years. I wish he was still here to read this and perhaps see himself in another perspective, but he'd probably try to argue I'm being way too generous with my assessment, for Lanegan's greatest failing was always his inability to see past the perception of self, as is the case with most Introverted Feeling-driven characters. It kept him stuck in shame that his child-self never deserved to endure in the first place.

But I think dying on 2/2/22 makes any argument against his cosmic importance completely moot, personally!

I'd like to end by adding what he personally meant to me, something the music only reflected. He was a fellow traveller of the darkest and most perilous uncharted territory of the unconscious, the very same of which I aim to be the cartographer. And, even more than that, he had to actually experience it tangibly, which I thankfully never will. He served as its voice, and gave me a window into an aspect of life I simply could not have processed and understood without him. I might only have met him once, and briefly at that, but I wouldn't be who I am without him.

Thank you, Mark Lanegan, for being who you were. For shouldering the role you did. For alchemising your difficulties into exquisite art and for helping others such as myself, alchemise their own.