Mark Linkous, Sparklehorse
Like many a student facing Finals, I grew a little unhinged over my last few months at university. I don’t know when it started, or what was the trigger, but there were nights I’d lie awake, not really stressing about exams, but obsessively turning over two things in my mind, finding extraordinary comfort in two very simple things. One was – don’t laugh, I was at the end of my tether – “Why did the chicken cross the road?” (Is there any more perfect a description of human endeavour than this joke and its punchline? “Why are you cramming to read three nineteenth-century novels a day, seven days a week?” “To get to the other side.”)
The other was Mark Linkous. Under the name Sparklehorse, Linkous, a singer and multi-instrumentalist, released four full-length records between 1995 and 2006. The first two, largely solo efforts are lo-fi, sketchy, and often sound as though the songs have been recorded off long-wave radio in a vehicle moving at speed (destination: Nowhere Good). His third album, released in 2001, features more elaborate production, and contributions from other musicians, notably PJ Harvey and Tom Waits, and for me, this record, It’s a Wonderful Life, is Linkous’s masterwork. It almost perfectly balances the lugubrious and the sweet, rendering the title at once deeply ironic and entirely sincere. The album’s cover painting shows a headless suitor proffering a bouquet of glowing, disintegrating flowers; the first noise you hear is a hesitant chord seemingly played off a long-dormant wax cylinder recording, putting the listener at once into a charged, unreal space. Then Linkous’s voice: sweet and soft, with a Neil Young-ish, corncrake edge to it, it breaks when he reaches for the high notes. His lyrics feature a clutch of reoccurring images and terms – teeth, ponies, mountains, babies – that he invokes time and again on these records, each successive recurrence adding further, weirder associations.
Mark Linkous died twice. He overdosed on drugs in 1996, and was revivified only after his heart had stopped beating for several minutes; the records he made over the next decade are the work of a dead man
The standout song here, the one that makes me recall that strange end-of-student-days time, is “Sea of Teeth”, a gorgeous, endlessly sad lullaby whose nightmarish lyric is undercut by Linkous’s sedate, soothing delivery. We hear of “ghosts who shed their creaking hosts” and “summer’s bleeding fangs”, but the words are murmurous, his voice the warm croon one might employ to sing a baby to sleep. The whole thing is in hush: drums tiptoe; piano gracenotes are strung like candlelights the length of the song. Then there’s the refrain: “Seas forever boil, and trees will turn to soil.” And, my god, how I obsessed, in my pre-exam jitters, over those words, the simple, plangent statement of truth. On nights when the chicken wasn’t crossing and recrossing the road, I thought instead of felled trees turning to fossil fuel beneath the surface of the earth, the new saplings springing from mulch, the magic of photosynthesis, the perpetual cycle that began long before human life on earth and will roll on long after we’re gone, through all those sunsets and all those summers. Against this macrocosmic view, a bunch of exams on Derrida and DeLillo hardly seems the stuff to worry about – compared to the vast, wonderful, unheeding mechanism of the planet, very little is worth worrying about, even mortality.
Mark Linkous died twice. He overdosed on drugs in 1996, and was revivified only after his heart had stopped beating for several minutes; the records he made over the next decade are the work of a dead man. They are knotty, raw, confessional; it’s clear he was never the happy man he’d once sung about wishing to become, and when I heard he’d committed suicide in 2010, it seemed almost inevitable: a cry of pain that had been stopped for a while but never silenced entirely.
For some time after the news of his death, I found it too painful to listen to his songs. Even now it’s not really possible to actively choose to listen to Sparklehorse. But when “Sea of Teeth” – or the whole of It’s a Wonderful Life – comes on the iPod randomly, it feels okay to listen to again. What’s sad is that Linkous didn’t know, could never have known, nor will he ever, what these songs and these words meant to me and to his listeners – the chills they brought, and the comforts. Sadder yet: the feeling that this knowledge wouldn’t have made any difference to him. As he sang on one of his final songs: “You can’t put your arms around a ghost.” C
“Can you feel the wind of Venus on your skin?
Can you taste the crush of a sunset’s dying blush?
Stars will always hang in summer’s bleeding fangs
Can you feel the rings of saturn on your finger?
Can you taste the ghosts who shed their creaking hosts?
But seas forever boil, trees will turn to soil
Stars will always hand in summer’s bleeding veils
But seas forever boil, trees will turn to soil.”
“Sea of Teeth”, Sparklehorse