With his new album Straight Songs Of Sorrow due for release 8 May via Heavenly Recordings, and having last month shared the track ‘Skeleton Key’ from the LP, Mark Lanegan today shares ‘Bleed All Over’, one of the many standout tracks from this much-anticipated release.
Additionally, Mark Lanegan recently launched ‘The Vault’ an innovative web-based streaming platform powered by Spotify and Apple Music. By connecting to either platform, fans can explore Lanegan’s entire back-catalogue, from the genesis of his recording career in 1984 through to his latest album ‘Somebody’s Knocking.’ The Vault includes Lanegan’s solo material, his work with Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age, Isobel Campbell, and Soulsavers, as well as his many other collaborations and guest appearances. The platform lays out each key album with descriptions approved by Lanegan himself, giving fans an opportunity to engage further with this beloved artist’s wide-ranging body of work. The Vault also includes Mark Lanegan playlists created by fellow artists and kindred spirits. Click HERE to listen to the new one compiled by Peter Hook.
When considering any great work of art, be it a painting, a novel, or a piece of music, it’s natural to wonder what might have inspired it: ‘the story behind the song’. Mark Lanegan’s new album, ‘Straight Songs Of Sorrow’, flips that equation. Here are 15 songs inspired by a story: his life story, as documented by his own hand in his new memoir, “Sing Backwards and Weep”.
The book is a brutal, nerve-shredding read, thanks to Lanegan’s unsparing candour in recounting a journey from troubled youth in eastern Washington, through his drug-stained existence amid the ’90s Seattle rock scene, to an unlikely salvation at the dawn of the 21st century. There’s death and tragedy, yet also humour and hope, thanks to the tenacity which impels its host, even at his lowest moments.
Today, Lanegan is a renowned songwriter and a much-coveted collaborator, as adept at electronica as with rock, constantly honing his indomitable voice: an asphalt-laced linctus for the soul. While the memoir documents a struggle to find peace with himself, his new album emphasises the extent to which he came to realise that music is his life.
“Writing the book, I didn’t get catharsis,” he chuckles. “All I got was a Pandora’s box full of pain and misery. I went way in,and remembered shit I’d put away 20 years ago. But I started writing these songs the minute I was done, and I realised there was a depth of emotion because they were all linked to memories from this book. It was a relief to suddenly go back to music. Then I realised that was the gift of the book: these songs. I’m really proud of this record.”
