Mark Lanegan, 1964-2022

I only heard about the death of Mark Lanegan this morning. I suppose we all need to be grateful that he lived as long as he did, considering how cursed he once was with alcohol and drug addiction. I tend to listen to his albums when called into the early hours of the morning, his whiskey-soaked, bluesy growl being a voice best suited to the dark of the night I've been meaning to read his recent memoir, Sing Backwards and Weep, for a while and in looking for that I've discovered that he's just written another, last year, Devil in a Coma, about his near-death experience with Covid. He's been through the mill.

True story. Yesterday morning, in search of a CD to put on, I browsed my collection (which runs to over a thousand discs) and pulled out at random Ballad of the Broken Seas, his collaboration with Isobel Campbell. As late night music, I would normally have put it back and tried for something else. But I didn't. I played it. That was the morning he died. 

Prompted by that connection, and in tribute, I played every album of his in my possession today and then gathered the cases together for a photo. They're all great albums.