The Essence of Sparklehorse: Mark Linkous once named the song that described him best
“I was lucky enough to have been told how much my music meant to people,” the late Mark Linkous once said. That was the currency that the man behind Sparklehorse lived by. He absconded the countryside, where he drove his motorcycle and looked to fish songs from the floating ether, warding off the chronic pain that stemmed from his health issues. Little else to do with the usual trappings of music mattered to him.
“I don’t consider myself unusually talented,“ the ever-humble and considered musician once cited. “Making music is a talent in that I’m just sort of a conduit, and it goes from the air through me and on to recording tape. But I’ve been working at it a long time so it’s been refined.“
He finds himself in good company with this viewpoint. David Bowie similarly dismissed that his music was tied to intelligence, and claimed you just have to be “a social animal“ to be a good writer.
Linkous was a different type of “social animal“; in fact, those who knew him felt he often floated off to a private societal plain altogether. He drifted like a sponge in the ocean, passively soaking up the world and gently wringing it out in his music—music which he saw as his fitting craft more so than his ‘calling’. “I think many people have the opportunity to turn what is in the air into art,“ he continued. “Unfortunately, there are great painters and songwriters who work in the power plant that we’ll never see or hear.”
However, of the songwriters we did get to hear, he closely identified with one of them: Neil Young. When he was asked by NME which song he thought defined him best, he opted for the Canadian’s loose ballad, ‘F*!#in’ Up’. First released in 1990, the slacker rock-adjacent effort that Young cut with Crazy Horses asks a simple question with a drunken air that perhaps provides the explanation, “Why do I keep fucking up?“
Even the opening lyric seems to darkly illuminate how Linkous saw himself: “Mindless drifter on the road, Carry such an easy load“. In the countryside of Virginia, Linkous was never unaware of that trying to tread a lighter path in life comes with its own heavy burdens. But like the song itself, Linkous found solace in his music, and thats ours to share for a legion of continually growing fans, even years after his death.
So it brings but comfort and tragedy to reconcile that his three simple wishes in life were thus: “To have a baby, to be able to make records that are appreciated, and to have one of the new Moto Guzzi V11 Sports.”
