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Mark Lanegan: Sleevenotes

Mark Lanegan

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Musicians choose favourite tracks from their back catalogue and provide telling insights into their creation, meaning or mood.

A founding member of Seattle rock band The Screaming Trees, Mark Lanegan's solo career started in the late 1980s when he began writing and recording The Winding Sheet with contributions by Kurt Cobain. In the 30 years since, he has established himself as an artist as protean as he is prolific.

Collaborating with everyone from Moby to Queens of the Stone Age, Dean Ween to Greg Dulli, he has generated a body of work that is, by turns, mournful, lusty, brutal, comforting, nihilistic, hopeful, grieving, but always deeply human. Known to his friends as 'Dark Mark' or 'Old Scratch', Lanegan is a legendary hardass - stony on a good day, explosive on a bad one. A difficult interview who takes shit from no-one. Here, he cleaves himself open about the few things he loves: music, art, creating with his friends.

GenresMusic

80 pages, Paperback

First published November 4, 2019

About the author

Mark Lanegan

15 books163 followers

Mark Lanegan (born November 25, 1964 in Ellensburg, Washington) was an American rock musician and songwriter. Lanegan began his music career in the 1980s. In 1985, he became the vocalist for grunge group Screaming Trees; the group broke up in 2000. Lanegan would start a low-key solo career, but in 2004 Lanegan released his big breakthrough album Bubblegum. In addition to leading the The Gutter Twins, Lanegan has also been involved in other musical projects, including hard rock band Queens of the Stone Age, longterm collaborations with Isobel Campbell; and undertaken some surprisingly eclectic collaborations, such as co-writing and providing vocals for "Black River" by the electronic outfit, Bomb the Bass. He also lent his vocal talent to the highly regarded album, "Above", by supergroup Mad Season.

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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews

Courtney

820 reviews48 followers

December 11, 2020

After reading his memoir Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir I didn't think it was possible for Mark Lanegan to devastate me anymore yet here we are. The man just doesn't weave heartbreak and melancholy into his music but also his words. A solid brick to the back of my head.

Also the art was pretty nifty too.

music

Andrea

1,150 reviews93 followers

January 15, 2020

Insight into the inscrutable Mark Lanegan and his songwriting. Covers his solo work and his side projects. Really enjoyed reading this—it will tide me over until his memoir is published—supposed to be out this year.

Killian

140 reviews6 followers

August 22, 2019

Any Mark Lanegan fan will lap this and belt through this book. It's an interesting insight into Lanegan, his life and his songwriting.

Aleš Baszczynski

21 reviews5 followers

August 27, 2019

Love there are flowers along the avenue
All things perfectly in place
I build a shrine
I set a monument
Because you're fire
Because you're a fire escape

Sam Samuels

9 reviews1 follower

March 31, 2020

What a fantastic and insightful read, i even made a playlist to reflect the tracks written about

Gavin Hogg

42 reviews1 follower

August 28, 2022

Lanegan's book is a series of small chapters for a selection of songs, explaining the circumstances behind them, what inspired them and how they were written. A fun read it isn't. Most of the chapters detail his dark addictions and bleak lifestyle - living in rat-infested houses or knackered cars and attending a lot of funerals. For the casual reader like me it's interesting if rather grim fare. I'm not sure it made me want to seek out many of the songs, though Ode to Sad Disco did sound intriguing.