Mark Lennon, who followed a long stint as lead vocalist for the proto-grunge band Screaming Trees, with a distinguished career as a passionate solo singer-songwriter and daring collaborator with Queens of the Stone Age and others, has passed away. The cause of death was not declared, although he was reported to be suffering from COVID-19 and kidney ailment last year; He was 57 years old.
"Our dear friend Mark Lengan passed away this morning at his home in Killarney, Ireland," reads a statement on his Twitter account. “A beloved singer, songwriter, writer and musician, he was 57 and is survived by his wife, Shelley. No further information is available at this time. The family asks everyone to respect their privacy at this time."
Our beloved friend Mark Lanegan passed away this morning at his home in Killarney, Ireland. 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
— mark lanegan (@marklanegan) February 22, 2022
Sometimes recording under the nickname "Dark Mark", Lennon lived up to his work, focusing on the continuing themes of "harm, longing, mortality and chemical dependence" that were originally written in music. The songs alternated between loud, unfiltered. Shakti and a quiet lyricist. Some of his dark material was inspired by a harrowing life of disenfranchisement, crime, and addiction.
In 1985, Lengan was already a blackout alcoholic with a long juvenile arrest record. He was taking back rented video cassette players for a video store in his hometown of Ellensburg, Wash. - a small rural town southeast of Seattle, where he was born on November 25, 1964 - when he started a band with his boss's sons, guitarist Gary. Lee Conner and bassist Van Conner.
The lure of fame and the rock 'n' roll road attracted the rebellious, disgruntled Lennon. "I wanted excitement, thrill, decadence, depravity, anything, everything," he wrote in his harrowing 2020 memoir "Sing Backwards and Weeps," adding, "I'll never find anything like this in this dusty, isolated city If the band could take me out, take me into the life I so longed for, it was worth any humiliation, any hardship, any torture.
With Lennon serving as their influential baritone front man, Screaming Trees was a psychedelia-tinged hard rock entity whose heavyweight early albums predetermined the explosion of grunge rock in Washington state. The attention-grabbing record for Southern California punk label SST Records was preceded by a major-label contract with Epic. After the group's 1990 debut for the label - which was co-produced by Chris Cornell of Soundgarden - their single "Nearly Lost You" featured prominently in Cameron Crowe's celluloid love letter to the Seattle scene, "Singles". and had become an alternative-radio break. Driven by that single, Trees' second major-label debut "Sweet Oblivion" propelled the band to national prominence.
By that time, Lennon had embarked on an embryonic solo career: his 1990 sub-pop debut "The Winding Sheet" featured Kurt Cobain and Nirvana's Krist Novoselic (who would later sing Lead Belly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night"). Lengan's arrangement). in their "MTV Unplugged" form).
In his 2017 collection of songs "I'm the Wolf", Lengan released a list of artists who influenced that album's music – including his friend and Gun Club idol Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Leonard Cohen, John Cale. , Nick Cave and Ian Curtis. Joy Division - the impact of which will be felt again and again during a 30-year solo career.
He made his solo debut with guitarist Mike Johnson (Dinosaur Jr.) and several Seattle grunge notables, and three additional, low-key sub-pop releases favoring blues, folk, soul and gospel styles: "Whiskey for the Holy Ghost". (1994), "Scraps at Midnight" (1998) and the cover collection "I'll Take Care of You" (1998).
Lengan's period writing reflected his continuing battle with drugs: in 1997, with the help of the Musicians Assistance Program, he entered rehab in Southern California for his heroin and addictions after a period of homelessness. Her ongoing conflict with Gary Lee Conner, which often turned into a physical altercation, eventually led to the breakup of Screaming Trees, who failed to capitalize on the success of "Sweet Oblivion" in 2000. The band released just one album, 1996. "Dust," in his last eight years.
In the immediate aftermath of the split, Lennon appeared as a featured vocalist on "Rated R", the first release from Southern California band Queens of the Stone Age led by Josh Homme, who served as Screaming Trees' touring guitarist. has worked. Late '90s. He appeared on four more Queens albums, and established close relationships with other members of the area's "desert rock" cadre, including Masters of Reality's Chris Goss, Dave Catching, Nick Oliveri and Queens multi-instrumentalist Ellen Johannes, who produced. Most of Lennon's later solo records.
While Lengan released two solo records at the start of the new millennium – the affected, lean "Field Song" (2001) and the groggy "Bubblegum" (2004) – most of his activity focused on collaboration.
He recorded three albums with singer Isobel Campbell of the Scottish band Belle & Sebastian. He continued to work on Afghan Whigs leader Greg Duley's side project Twilight Singers, and collaborated with singer-guitarists under the Gutter Twins rubric for an all-pop album and EP. He appeared as a vocalist on two albums by the transoceanic electronic duo SoulSavers in 2007 and 2009. (Later, in her twenties, she cut two albums in partnership with British musician Duke Garwood.)
In 2012, Lennon hit another bottom. He wrote in his song collection, "After the near-death experience, music had no effect on me anymore. I had seen no white light or tunnel to heaven, but instead as if after five days in the ICU." Woke up from sleep…. It was as if I was exhausted by all the emotions and there was zero desire to even listen to music.” However, urged by his teenage nephews to start writing again, he began working on new songs. did.
Thus, eight years after the release of "Bubblegum", Lennon returned to solo work with the once-compelling and soundly eclectic "Blues Funeral" for 4AD of England. After a long association with the UK's Heavenly Recordings; Beginning with the album "Imitation" of Covers, the company released five acoustically diverse albums between 2013 and 2020; Although the U.S. Received only limited attention in the U.S., these releases – which ranged from pop and country to disco and krautrock – made the musician a highly acclaimed artist in England, where his work regularly appeared on the charts.
The most recent of his late albums, 2020's "Straight Songs of Sorrow," served as a musical companion to Lengan's unfiltered, often-terrifying memoir "Sing Backwards and Weep." Graphic and frankly honest, the widely acclaimed book - called "scary and brutal" by The Washington Post - followed the singer's painful path through addiction and took her friends Cobain, Pierce, and the Alice in Chains singer. Staley's drug-related deaths followed.