It’s impossible to talk about the legacy of Mark Lanegan without talking about his band Screaming Trees. The Seattle group predated the city’s early-’90s grunge explosion by a good half-decade but were still in a good position to benefit from it, however briefly, by landing a coveted spot on the era-defining Singles soundtrack. For many of the million-plus people who bought that record in the months after its 1992 release, the Mark Lanegan story begins and ends with the Trees’ contribution, a roiling rocker called “Nearly Lost You.” But the amazing thing about Lanegan was how, with each passing year, the singer made that commercial milestone seem more and more like a footnote in a journey that saw him outlast grunge and outlive his more famous friends in the scene to become one of rock’s most venerable vagabonds.
Throughout his life, Lanegan had seen and experienced so much fucked-up shit, he needed two memoirs to cover everything. But for all the tales of substance abuse that permeate his backstory, Lanegan’s focus on music never wavered. He made a lot of it, with a lot of different people, and often in surprising contexts. While his guttural voice, menacing stage presence, and piercing death-stare earned him an unshakable reputation as a post-grunge grim reaper—kind of like Nick Cave with knuckle tats and a beaten-up ball cap—Lanegan’s sprawling discography presents an artist constantly striving for the beauty that life so often denied him. He was always seeking new ways to unlock the sanctity of a song—be it through folk, blues, metal, hardcore, funk, trip-hop, or electronic music. Trying to condense a career as vast and varied as Lanegan’s into a brief list may be a fool’s errand, but here are eight songs that served as crucial pit stops on his never-ending road to redemption.
Mark Lanegan: “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (1990)
Even before Screaming Trees broke big, Lanegan was eager to carve out a musical identity distinct from his main band’s psych-rock throwbacks (most of which were penned by the Trees’ fraternal founders, Van and Gary Lee Conner). For his first extracurricular outing, Lanegan attempted to cover a batch of songs by blues legend Lead Belly with the help of some other fledgling local musicians named Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, alongside Trees drummer Mark Pickerel.
The project, dubbed the Jury, didn’t last beyond two sessions in 1989, but their ominous interpretation of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”—featuring Cobain on backing vocals—was salvaged for Lanegan’s simmered-down solo debut, The Winding Sheet, released the following year. The album largely flew under the radar, and its cornerstone cover was all but forgotten when, three years later, Cobain made the song his own at Nirvana’s legendary MTV Unplugged taping. But as Dave Grohl would later tell Rolling Stone, that performance was as much a tribute to Lanegan as Lead Belly: “The Winding Sheet is one of the best albums of all time,” Grohl said. “It was a huge influence on our Unplugged thing.”
Screaming Trees: “Bed of Roses” (1991)
When you revisit Screaming Trees today, it’s sometimes hard to square the band’s paisley-patterned sound with the intimidating image Lanegan cultivated later on. The group’s major label debut, Uncle Anesthesia, was released eight months before Nirvana’s Nevermind in 1991, just missing the grunge goldmine. Then again, its lead single, “Bed of Roses,” wasn’t really grungy at all, gesturing instead to the jangly sounds of R.E.M. While the long-haired, leather-clad Lanegan seen in the song’s video looks every bit the bar-brawling rocker, his voice—deep and sonorous, but not yet displaying the ravages of a hard-knock life—suggests that, if the cultural tides had turned a different way, Lanegan could’ve been the American Morrissey.
Mark Lanegan: “Kimiko’s Dream House” (2001)
After the Trees’ 1996 album Dust failed to capitalize on their post-Singles bump, Lanegan’s solo career became his primary outlet. His records dug even deeper into country, blues, and soul, their quieter presentation drawing out the raspy resonance of his voice. On this understated beauty from 2001’s Field Songs, Lanegan pays ultimate tribute to the Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce, the hero-turned-friend who originally made the underground safe for blues-loving punks back in the early ’80s. “Kimiko’s Dream House” sees him complete the lyrics to an unfinished song Pierce had gifted him shortly before his 1996 death. And Lanegan sounds genuinely humbled by the opportunity, turning in one of the most gentle and graceful performances of his career.
Queens of the Stone Age: “Song for the Dead” (2002)
Lanegan could afford to chill out on his solo records because he had an open invitation to growl away to his heart’s content with America’s premier turn-of-the-century hard-rock band. Lanegan made his Queens of the Stone Age debut on 2000’s Rated R, singing lead on the grunge-soul groover “In the Fade.” But two years later, on “Song for the Dead,” Lanegan exploited the full demonic potential of his hell-bound howl; even Grohl’s rapid-fire drumming seems to cower in his presence, signaling the singer’s entrance by shifting from a full-throttle thrash to a seasick grind. Arguably, Lanegan’s stone-faced live performances of the song with Queens during this era did more to shape his doom-prophet image than anything else in his canon.
Mark Lanegan: “Methamphetamine Blues” (2004)
Just as his associations with Nirvana helped Screaming Trees get a leg up in the early ’90s, Lanegan’s Queens of the Stone Age tenure had a reinvigorating effect on his solo career both commercially and aesthetically. His first album to chart internationally, 2004’s Bubblegum, uprooted the earthy qualities of Lanegan’s previous solo releases in favor of busted drum-machine rhythms and atomic fuzz, as exemplified by the raucous industrial funk of “Methamphetamine Blues.” Borrowing a page from the Queens’ supergroup playbook, Lanegan corralled an all-star cast for the album that included PJ Harvey, Josh Homme, Greg Dulli, and Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan and Izzy Stradlin, paving the way for Lanegan’s next iteration as the most voracious collaborator in rock.
Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan: “Honey Child What Can I Do?” (2006)
Of all the artists Lanegan parterned with over the years, his most surprising remains Isobel Campbell, who was singing and playing cello for indie-pop aesthetes Belle and Sebastian back when Lanegan and the Trees were still lording over mosh pits at Lollapalooza. But rather than amplify the considerable contrast between Lanegan’s low croon and Campbell’s pristine pitch with typical he-said/she-said duets, their three albums together stake out common ground. Their vocals are layered into imperfect harmonies that can feel both charming and, at times, a little unsettling, with Campbell sounding less like Lanegan’s singing partner than a voice trapped inside his head. But this orchestral-soul delight from 2006’s Ballad of the Broken Seas emphasizes the pure joy and deep mutual respect in their odd-couple pairing, with the two making like Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood performing on some late-’60s variety TV special.
The Gutter Twins: “Idle Hands” (2008)
Where Lanegan’s solo records plumbed the darkest nights of his soul with an unflinching documentarian’s eye, Afghan Whigs/Twilight Singers auteur Greg Dulli did the same through a seedy cinematic lens. After they guested on each other’s records, a full-on union between these two dark princes of alt-rock was all but inevitable. Their one and only album together as the Gutter Twins, Saturnalia, feels like the musical version of the long-awaited Pacino/De Niro matchup in Heat—a tense cat-and-mouse game between two wily veterans cast against an extravagant rock-noir backdrop. Had it been released, say, a dozen years earlier, the punchy “Idle Hands” could very well have turned out to be a bigger hit than anything the Trees or Whigs released at the time.
Dark Mark vs. Skeleton Joe: “Turning in Reverse” (2021)
The final musical project Mark Lanegan released during his lifetime now feels like a symbolic passing of the torch between two generations of uncategorizable outsiders. Dark Mark vs. Skeleton Joe was the short-lived partnership featuring Lanegan and Joe Cardamone of the Icarus Line, another punk-reared artist who briefly flirted with major-label-backed notoriety before leaving the noise behind to pursue a quieter art-pop path. While Lanegan was no stranger to synths by this point, the duo’s self-titled debut from last year marked his first full-on foray into Moroder-ized electro-disco, and “Turning in Reverse” is the album’s dramatic, strobe-lit tour de force. It is at once the most atypical and perfectly emblematic Mark Lanegan song, one that packs a whole world of hurt into its four minutes yet embodies the restlessly creative spirit of an artist who never stopped searching.
