Mark Linkous’s final Sparklehorse album: words of love and beauty from beyond the grave
The last time Mark Linkous visited his brother Matt and sister-in-law Melissa’s homein Richmond, Virginia, was during the autumn of 2008. The American singer-songwriter, who recorded and performed as Sparklehorse, had begun working on songs for his fifth album and the three of them would drive around in Melissa’s car, blasting out the records that were inspiring his new music.
Fifteen years later, speaking from their home, Matt and Melissa still laugh as they remember cruising around town with the stereo up. Sparklehorse’s music and sometimes anguished backstory had given Linkous, who died in 2010, the reputation of a kind of troubled visionary. But Matt and Melissa’s memories from this and previous visits are full of the fond, funny stuff of ordinary family reminiscence.
“Mark and I would go for chocolate milkshakes – the more chocolatey the better,” says Melissa. “We liked to go shopping too. Most of Mark’s cool dress shirts were from me that I’d find and save for him. It was always fun when we’d see each other and I’d pull out the shirts I’d got for him, one by one.”
They also recall Linkous’s excitement at the way the songs for his fifth record were developing in his mind. Music had been part of his and Matt’s close brotherly bond since their teens, and when Matt met Melissa in the early 1990s and asked her to play violin in his band, the three formed a tight musical connection. Linkous, who was working on the earliest Sparklehorse songs at the time, would join the two of them on motorcycle rides through the Virginia countryside, come to their practices and gigs, and later was best man at their wedding. Both Matt and Melissa also played on Sparklehorse records, and Linkous would seek their opinion of early versions of his songs.
“We would sit here at the house, talk about what he was working on next and he would play tracks,” remembers Matt. “It was nice seeing him excited about his music and a song that he liked.” Melissa adds: “He would get a twinkle. He’d say softly: ‘Hey, you want to hear this new song?’ And then he’d play it, perfectly loud.”
New music from Linkous was always received by fans as a special kind of gift. The four albums and two collaborative projects he released as Sparklehorse, starting with his 1995 debut, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, and continuing through the late 90s and 00s, contain some of the most beautiful and unusual music of that period.
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Born and brought up in Virginia, Linkous formed Sparklehorse – essentially a solo project but with a changing cast of supporting musicians – in his early 30s, after spending much of his 20s in New York and LA seeking mainstream success with guitar pop quartet Dancing Hoods. When they split after two underperforming albums, he returned, disillusioned, to Virginia, and began slowly to develop Sparklehorse’s distinctive sound – a skewed combination of alt-rock, country and electronic pop, with melodies that emerge hauntingly from amid distortion and static, and lyrics that present the world in ways that feel revelatory and strange.
As Sparklehorse’s reputation grew, fellow musicians and artists were among the most devoted fans. He established an early musical kinship
As I was archiving his songs, I would step back and think: ‘My God, this is so beautiful’
with Radiohead, supporting the band as they toured OK Computer and recording a cover of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here with Thom Yorke. He later opened for the Flaming Lips and REM. And though he never had a big commercial breakthrough, not least because of a growing ambivalence about mainstream success, his Dark Night of the Soul album, recorded with producer Danger Mouse around the same time he was writing songs for his fifth album, shows how far his influence extended. Alongside vocals from musicians such as the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas, Black Francis of Pixies and Iggy Pop, it also includes vocals and photographic artwork from David Lynch, a fellow observer of the unsettling beauty beneath the surface of American life.
But ashe began to record the songs for his fifth Sparklehorse album in 2009, at his own Static King studio in North Carolina, where he had moved several years before, and in Chicago with producer Steve Albini, Linkous’s mental health declined. Depression had shadowed him for several decades, and although his lyrics often convey a deeply felt appreciation of life, he also had periods of great struggle.
While touring the UK in 1996, his heart stopped briefly after an accidental overdose in a hotel room, an episode that also led to him almost losing the use of his legs and having to perform from a wheelchair for several months. At the start of 2010, his depression took a strong hold and in March, at a moment of particular crisis, he killed himself at the age of 47.
In the days that followed, the news of his death prompted heartfelt tributes from musicians and fans. And when, in July of that year, Dark Night of the Soul was given a posthumous release (a record company dispute had delayed it), the album was received as a last, beautiful expression of Linkous’s creativity. But then several years later, when Matt and Melissa gathered his scattered, unreleased recordings together to preserve and archive them – a long process that Matt likens to “an archaeological dig” – they came upon the songs he had written for his fifth album. “They were so honest and pure,” says Matt. “As I was archiving this, I would step back and think: ‘My God, this is so beautiful.’”
What followed was, as Matt puts it, “a great pause”. Though the songs struck them with the force of an epiphany, they agonised over whether it was right for them to complete the record. “It’s the hardest decision I’ve ever made,” says Matt. “It’s difficult making a choice about someone else’s art… Even if they were your best friend and brother.”
But the more they discussed and turned the idea over, the more they felt they had what they needed to proceed. Along with the recordings themselves, they had notes that Linkous had written about the new album, giving it a title – Bird Machine – and a list of tracks and handwritten lyrics. They were able to assemble a close-knit team of musicians and producers who had collaborated many times with Linkous to work with them. And, crucially, the progress Linkous had made on the album was such that the songs already had a vivid life of their own.
“Some of it was done. Some of it was close,” says Matt. “And anything that we added was intended to enhance it, not to embellish it. We wanted to bring out what was there.”
Melissa adds: “It was as though the songs let you know.. Mark did this. Mark communicated these songs. We just did our best to transmit them.”
It’s testament to the care they took in completing the record that the end result is unmistakably a Sparklehorse album: a gorgeous collection of songs, etched with a familiar strangeness and beauty. It contains the contrasts and emotional depth that typified Linkous’s music: gentle and restrained in places, with blasts of exhilarating punkish energy elsewhere. And though subtly decorated with digital feints and touches – listen on headphones and you have the sense of lifting a rock in the woods to admire the teeming life beneath – the songs also carry a simplicity and directness that casts an immediate glow.
When Matt and Melissa listen to it now, it is full of intensely personal memories. A cover of the Robyn Hitchcock track Listening to the Higsons has its origins in Matt and Mark’s first encounter with the song when they were living together in New York, and for Matt, it still swells with the sense of adventure and adolescent discovery of that time. “We would crank that song so loud,” he remembers.
And for Melissa, many of the lyrics on Bird Machine powerfully evoke who Mark was, both as an artist and a human being. “There’s something in this record that feels almost as if I’m being told an ancient story,” she says. “The visuals of angels dead drunk in the snow and stars being born, and then there’s this honesty and poetry in the lines of trying to find peace, working to stay… And the sweetness that you hear in those notes and in his voice, the gentleness of his spirit – that’s all Mark.”
But they know, too, how much it means to others. The messages left beneath the handful of new songs that have been released online before the album reveal the deep and lasting connection between Linkous’s music and his fans. And for Matt and Melissa, 15 years after they first heard Mark talk about the songs, and after so much time spent agonising like adoptive parents over the best way to nurture them, this makes the whole process worthwhile.
“Music was everything to Mark… He wrote this for people to hear and so much thought went into it,” says Matt. “It was a heavy process but it was a beautiful process. It was all out of love.”
Bird Machineis released on 8 September on Anti-Records