Mark Lanegan: “If any album truly saved me, it was this”
In January 2022, the music world mourned the passing of grunge progenitor Mark Lanegan. He first raised eyebrows in the mid-1980s as the frontman of The Screaming Trees, an early Sub Pop grunge outfit based in Washington State. While the band maintained a small cult following through the remainder of the decade, their seminal work is now seen as having paved the way for the likes of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, who took grunge to the global arena in the 1990s.
Throughout his life, Lanegan struggled with heroin addiction and mental illness associated with substance dependence and fame. For Lanegan and his similarly troubled friend and collaborator Kurt Cobain, music offered solace from such afflictions, whether through personal creativity or their respective record collections.
Speaking to Music Radar in 2019, Lanegan explained that he’s “influenced by everything I’m into. I don’t usually like to talk about what a song means to me; I prefer that the people who connect with a song do so with their own interpretation.”
The singer continued: “It never crossed my mind what Neil Young meant by After The Gold Rush, only the personal movie it created in my head. My entire life, all the music that I’ve connected to has drawn me in like that. Joy Division, Nick Drake, Son House, The 13th Floor Elevators, The Gun Club – all the music that meant the most to me, the music that saved my life, was the music that told my own story back to me.”
During the 2019 feature, the musician discussed some of his favourite albums as having saved his life; the genres varied pleasingly, but a theme of desolation and introspective melancholy prevailed.
Joy Division’s second and final studio album, 1980’s Closer, held a particularly profound position in Lanegan’s heart. “In the particularly brutal eastern Washington winter of 1980-81, I was in a serious state of what I know now as clinical depression,” Lanegan explained while picking out the album. “I was working at a job cutting the exposed roots off trees in an apple orchard, work that required a 50-mile drive both ways to be alone all day on my hands and knees in the snow using a tool much like bolt cutters to dig under the snow, toil to cut through the thick, heavy roots, move on to the next tree and repeat.”
Continuing, Lanegan explained the source of his mental instability. “I had recently quit drinking and drugging, been left by my girlfriend for her boss at a pizza place and spent a large portion of my day driving to and from work, chain-smoking and brooding the entire way,” he revealed. “At some point, I came across a cassette of Closer, put it in my car’s cassette player, and it immediately got stuck there.”
Lanegan revealed that he was unable to eject the cassette and “spent the entire winter listening to nothing else. Its icy tones and poetically personal lyrics of pain and alienation seemed to mirror my own story. I suddenly felt like there was someone out there who felt like me – and Ian Curtis’s voice, Peter Hook’s bass lines and Bernard Sumner’s guitar became the soundtrack to my life.”
“If any record ever truly saved me, it was this one,” Lanegan praised. “Still today one of the greatest records ever made and still my companion on a regular basis.”
Following his rise to fame, Lanegan befriended Joy Division bassist Peter Hook. In an interview with Far Out in February 2022 following Lanegan’s death, Hook also revealed the American musician’s love for the Unknown Pleasures track ‘Insight’.
Asked to name his favourite of his own basslines, Hook replied: “I was thinking about this earlier because Mark Lanegan always said to me that he loved ‘Insight’, and the baseline for ‘Insight’ is one of my favourites. So today, thinking about him, it’s ‘Insight’ by Joy Division.”
Listen to ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ from Closer below.
