R.I.P. Mark Lanegan

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/arts/music/mark-lanegan-dead.html

Mark was my favorite of the Grunge era vocalists.  His voice had remarkable depth and resonance.  He was also a great writer of both music and literature, which is not surprising as he grew up in Ellensburg with parents who taught English at Central Washington University.  Most folks know of his work in The Screaming Trees, who's oeuvre preceeded the Grunge scene, and was more aligned with the neo-Psych and neo-Garage Rock scenes of the mid 1980s.  The Screaming Trees were included on the great Sons Of Nuggets box set which anthologized those scenes magnificently.  Later, during the peak of Grunge, their tune "Nearly Lost You" gave them much wider exposure.  Mark went on to many more diverse and interesting projects once the Screaming Trees disbanded.  He was a featured vocalist in The Gutter Twins, Queens Of The Stone Age, the Kyuss side-project Desert Sessions albums, and made some wonderful albums collaborating with Isobel Campbell (formerly of Belle & Sebastian).  He also collaborated with Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell, and made a handful of outstanding solo albums in his own right.

I was fortunate to see him perform live here in Seattle a few times, and his voice just blew me away.  He was also the very first performer at the venue above my shop, The Neptune Theatre, when it converted from a movie house to a concert venue back in 2012, and returned at least three other times through the years.  

With Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell already gone, his passing leaves Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder and Mudhoney's Mark Arm as the last remaining of a very talented group of frontmen who graced the Seattle musical landscape in the early 90s.  

We lost a great one today.