2023-09-22 22:28:33
Small miracles happen every day. Some appear in an instant, without warning. Others require time and effort. Sparklehorse’s posthumous album took years of searching, collaborative work and two words. Mark Linkous had scribbled them, shortly before he died, in a black notebook between song lyrics and drawings. “That which is not named does not exist,” said the philosopher George Steiner, and Bird Machine (Anti-, 2023) existed from the moment its creator gave it a title. The artistic testament of one of the greatest twilight singer-songwriters was published on September 8 thanks to the love and determination of his family. His brother Matt and his wife, Melissa, have assembled it with absolute respect and clairvoyance with the purpose of completing the legacy of a unique artist, who disappeared 13 years ago.
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Further
Mark Linkous He ended his life with a shot directly to the heart. It was a March morning in 2010 in a lonely alley in Knoxville, Tennessee. She was 47 years old. The day before, Jonathan Donahue (Mercury Rev) received a strange message that he let go, believing it was a mistake. “I’m going to miss you,” his friend Linkous wrote to him. The phrase made sense hours later to his dismay and that of everyone who knew and admired him.
It was not an inexplicable event. In tormented souls like his, there are usually plenty of reasons, but the singer-songwriter was always targeted for suicide. Vic Chesnutt as a catalyst for a complicated personal situation, with a divorce from his wife Theresa in the making and a long history of addictions and depression. Nor can we exclude from the equation an economy that he often did not have enough to repair his car or retire some worn-out boots. Critics always treated him well, but those laurels never translated into substantial income.
First resurrection: London
If Alice Cooper, Neil Young, Jimmy Page or Tom Waits were some of his musical references, Vic Chesnutt represented something more. “As long as he is capable, so am I,” he repeated like a mantra in reference to how he faced the eventualities of his battered physical condition. Fixed in a wheelchair since he was 18, Chesnutt helped him face his own limitations after a fateful accident that nearly cost him his life.
Linkous passed out in a London hotel room. He was on tour with Radiohead, who had invited him to be the opening act for their show. The Bends (nineteen ninety five). To cope with the stress of live performance – excessive for his natural introversion – he combined his antidepressant treatment with Valium. It wasn’t a suicide attempt. Collapsing on his legs, in a position that deprived them of blood circulation for 14 hours, his release by the emergency team caused him to suffer. shock which led to heart failure. He was dead for a few minutes. Fortunately, they managed to stabilize him. Terrible chronic pain and the forced use of orthoses on his lower limbs were the consequences that he had to deal with ever since, circumstances that battered his already unstable existence. It happened in the early years of his personal project, Sparklehorse.
The dream of music
Eager to avoid a destiny that he assumed was doomed to the coal mines of his native Richmond (Virginia), the young Mark Linkous dreamed of growing in music. Two moves: to New York and Los Angeles, and two groups: Dancing Hoods and Salt Chunk Mary, were his first ventures. No luck. “We were great for two minutes,” he said of the first one. Back in Virginia he connected with David Lowery (Cracker), who would lend him an eight-track recorder to shape his first album, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot (Capitol, 1995), a debut that underpinned his proposal among the exquisiteness of country-folk more intimate and the freshness of alternative pop. One could already glimpse, among his cuts, an experimental approach of sound mosaic, the love for lo-fi sound and what would be one of his hallmarks: the soft, delicate and slightly distorted voice, the product of capricious chance. Linkous feared waking his wife during those recording sessions that lasted until dawn, a contingency he resolved by moderating her voice and filtering it with some effect.
But it was his traumatic experience in London that ended up defining his sound. From her he extracted every possible beauty, somber, honest, ghostly, between the real and the dreamlike, and deposited it in her second album, Good Morning Spider (Parlophone, 1998). In it he documented his particular way of the cross of slow and exhausting rehabilitation, through timeless pop songs. Linkous then ventured into a cinematic abyss but without succumbing to complete hopelessness: he was still capable of glossing his fascination with the world.
After this, three collaborative projects. First the one made with producer Dave Fridmann, It’s a Wonderful Life (Capitol, 2001), considered the peak of his career and in which his admired Adrian Utley (Portishead), PJ Harvey and Tom Waits participated. Next, the undertaking with the musician Danger Mousewho he met through his The Grey Album ―a crazy work in which he combined The Beatles with Jay Z―, and that helped him form Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (Astralwerks, 2006) postponed due to one of his persistent depressions. The credits included Joan Wasser (Joan As Police Woman), Tom Waits and Steve Drozd (The Flaming Lips). And finally, Dark Night on the Soul (Capitol, 2010), a compendium of psychedelia, punk, folk and space rock co-authored with Danger Mouse and with appearances by Vic Chesnutt, Iggy Pop, Julian Casablancas (The Strokes), Jason Lytle (Grandaddy), Suzanne Vega and Black Francis (Pixies) among others. For the book that accompanied it, they had the photograph of one of his idols, David Lynch, who also debuted as a vocalist on two songs. Due to legal disputes, the album was published a year later than planned, with Linkous already deceased.
The last years
During those last years, Mark Linkous remained active. He accompanied Daniel Johnston on his 2008 tour, he released an ambient epé with experimental musician Christian Fennesz: In the Fishtank 15 (Konkurrent, 2009), composed an instrumental piece for a documentary by David Lynch and He started preparing his next album. He seemed immersed in a reinvention phase. From his studio Static King, a shed attached to his home in the mountains of North Carolina – where he moved in 2002 – Linkous was sketching songs at a good pace. Six of them were recorded in 2009 in the studio that the producer Steve Albini had in Chicago. He even scheduled a trip to New York in March of the following year to finish the album with sound engineer Joel Hamilton. But by then he was in Tennessee, living at his friend Scott Minor’s house and in the middle of an existential crisis that he would no longer overcome.
Second resurrection: the posthumous album
Matt was aware of his brother’s progress on what would be his fifth album. In one of his last meetings, at the end of 2008, Mark conveyed his enthusiasm for the trail of influences that permeated his new songs and how they were taking shape. He had been listening to The Kinks, MF Doom, Grandaddy and The Beatles with delight and wanted to make a genuine Buddy Holly pop album, as if in a burst of therapeutic nostalgia. That visit concluded with a long car ride while all those records played.
These conversations were frequently evoked by Matt and Melissa – also musicians – during the years in which they dedicated themselves to the recovery of Mark Linkous’s artistic legacy among boxes, tapes, notebooks, CDs and other files. What did not appear, endangering the viability of the project, were the vocal tracks. The miracle came almost a decade after the search began. It was sound engineer Bryan Hoffa, in charge of digitizing Linkous’s recordings, who found them while trying to maximize the storage of the 24-track magnetic tape corresponding to his sessions with Albini. He divided the songs into different parts and it was between those spaces where the voices appeared. The news was received with great joy: the album was now a reality.
Once the bulk of the material had been compiled – including the handwritten list in which Mark established the title and order of the songs – another difficulty was presented to them, one of an ethical nature: how to complete Bird Machine without the guidelines of its author. The reputation as a perfectionist of the soul of Sparklehorse fell on his shoulders like a heavy weight. Matt and Melissa wisely chose to surround themselves with a trusted team of their brother’s regular collaborators. Alan Weatherhead produced it, Joel Hamilton mixed it, and Greg Calbi remastered it. All of them, along with many others, collaborated to safeguard the last artistic memory of the creator of those “sad, funny, tender and wonderfully grumpy little country-pop songs.”
The result is a posthumous album that joins, in its own right, Sparklehorse’s renowned catalog to compete, in height, with some of their best works. Infectious pop melodies that shine in Evening Star Supercharger o It Will Never Stop, punctual deliveries of his ghostly imagination in the electronic lace of Kind Ghostspunk rage sustained by the distorted effect of his voice on I Fucked It Up or torn and painful folk intimacy in Hello Lord or in the textured Stay, with which he closes as a hopeful – and frustrating – plea. All of this linked like glue by that sadness of indelible beauty that is the trademark of the house. 13 years after the death of Mark Linkous we witness a miraculous resurrection supported by 14 songs that are instantly and unequivocally recognizable as his. A meticulous work to thank his caring family propelled in their efforts, down to the detail, by the purest and most generous love.
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