Popular music is littered with the left-behind detritus of dead rock stars, but the first posthumous release from Sparklehorse is no thrown together, odds-and-sods collection. “Bird Machine,” set for release on Sept. 8 on Anti- Records, is what former Richmond resident Linkous intended to release as his gothic pop-rock band’s fifth album before he took his own life on March 6, 2010.
Beautiful, noisy, creepy, uplifting, downbeat, melodic as hell: It’s as fully realized as anything in Sparklehorse’s small but influential discography. The 14-song set just took a while to find its wings, says Mark’s brother.
“‘Bird Machine’ is an album consisting of tracks that he was planning on releasing,” says Matt Linkous, the executor (with his wife Melissa) of his brother’s estate. “Mark had written down the name of the album,” adds Melissa. “Along with track names, and handwritten lyrics, which were helpful as we worked to navigate how to move forward.”
Sparklehorse never had a hit record, but few acts were as celebrated by music critics and fellow musicians in the indie-rock universe as Mark Linkous. Spin magazine once wrote that Linkous was more respected by his peers, such as PJ Harvey, Nina Persson and Tom Waits, than recognized by the record-buying public – at least in the U.S. In the United Kingdom and parts of Europe, Sparklehorse was revered.
When he committed suicide, it came as a shock but wasn’t a surprise. Linkous had been battling demons for a long time. While touring Europe as the opening act for Radiohead in 1996, he consumed a combination of drugs and alcohol in a London hotel room and blacked out with his legs pinned beneath him for hours – the incident almost caused him to permanently lose the use of both limbs. “I’ve had depression for a long time, but it’s gotten really bad,” he said in a 2006 interview. “When you get that bad, I think you can’t do anything except sleep.”
In the years following Mark’s death, Matt and Melissa, who had performed at various times with Mark in Sparklehorse, tried to get a handle on the entirety of the work he left behind, including his final sessions. They contacted audio preservationist Bryan Hoffa, who had worked with the Sparklehorse leader when Hoffa was an engineer at Sound of Music studios. Hoffa began inventorying what was left behind.
“Mark recorded himself for years going back prior to the first Sparklehorse record,” Hoffa says. “No matter where he lived he had a studio that he called Static King.” Linkous wasn’t wedded to any one particular recording format, he adds. “He just used whatever worked. From the ‘90s, there was DAT, Tascam DA88, which uses Hi-8 video tapes, and microcassettes for capturing rough ideas … all kinds of formats. Starting with his second record (“Good Morning Spider”), he did a mixture of home recording on those formats but then also worked with other people and collaborated in professional studios…. Sound of Music was one of them.”
Focused and quiet
The first Sparklehorse album, “Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot,” was recorded in 1995 at Sound of Music and produced by Linkous’ pal David Lowery, who had opened the studio with John Morand and Miguel Urbiztondo the year before. Says Hoffa: “One of the first things I worked on as assistant engineer to John Morand was when Sparklehorse came in to do a song, a b-side. ‘Happy Man.’ But it was a different version than the one on ‘Good Morning Spider.’ It was banged out in a day. We tracked it, did a vocal on it and mixed it.”
Hoffa remembers Linkous being focused and quiet in the studio. “That was his personality. He had a wry sense of humor and was really focused on the music. His sensibilities really showed, no matter what he was working on, whether it was a Sparklehorse tune or producing a band like Denali. He’d always put his thing on it.”
Linkous met engineer Alan Weatherhead at Sound of Music when he wanted to record a last-minute song (“Too Many Birds”) for “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Sparklehorse’s third record. Weatherhead ended up performing in the Sparklehorse live band and assisting Mark on the Horse’s fourth disc, 2006’s “Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain.” They also worked together on various production projects for outside artists, including Daniel Johnston, Nina Persson’s A-Camp and Richmond’s Denali.
“Sometimes he would record ideas he had, not totally fleshed out, sometimes they would be completely done,” Weatherhead, who co-produced “Bird Machine” with Matt and Melissa, says of Linkous’ working method. “Or they would be done and just needed lyrics. It varied. The songs on ‘Bird Machine’ were pretty much done … we have the notebooks with the lyrics and those are the words that he sang.”
Linkous worked on the final record in the fall of early 2009 and in early 2010, recording at his home studio and with the legendary Steve Albini (Nirvana, Pixies) at Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.
“I thought he was a good dude and his art was genuine,” Albini said in a public statement after Linkous died. “I only worked with Mark for a couple of weeks, but he was as open, sincere and unaffected a person as I’ve ever encountered. He was completely unguarded and enthusiastic about the things he loved, and he gave the musicians he worked with freedom to be creative and excel.”
At Albini’s, Linkous was getting back to an earlier way of working. “Everybody is in the same room and that’s a different kind of recording than what he’d done on the previous record,” says Weatherhead, adding that the Static King material was completed but the sessions with Albini weren’t.
“You had what was recorded with everyone, live, with a couple of overdubs here and there. There were things that Mark had done to some of them at home, but for the most part those songs were just the basic tracks of everybody playing together.” That Chicago band included longtime Sparklehorse player Scott Minor on keyboards and mellotron, drummer Steve Nistor, bassist Paul Dillion and pianist Andrea Morici.
“The tracks were in various stages of completion,” Matt confirms. “Some farther along than others. Some were finished, some weren’t.” A decision was made – and Matt calls it the toughest of his life – to finish what Mark started and flesh out the tracks with overdubs. “We were very mindful when adding anything and did it only to enhance what was already there. This is Mark’s art, his creation. But it wasn’t quite finished. We just brought it to the finish line.”
“We tried to keep the parts to a small group of people who knew Mark pretty well,” says Weatherhead. “We’ve all played in Sparklehorse at one time or another so we approached it as, ‘what would Mark ask us to do on this song?’ We weren’t trying to outthink it and have somebody do what Mark himself would do.”
“The songs were already there, fully realized and powerful,” echoes Melissa Moore Linkous. “We just did our best to honor them.” The group added “little things here and there,” Weatherhead says. “Additional layers, guitars, keyboards, Melissa played some violin, and we had Stephen McCarthy come in and play some pedal steel and toy piano. We sent two songs to Jason Lytle from the band Granddaddy, Mark loved Granddaddy, and he added backing vocals to those.”
Sifting through dark times
“The Granddaddy connection was already in motion before Mark’s passing,” says Joel Hamilton, who mixed “Bird Machine” at his Studio G Brooklyn in New York. Hamilton worked as an engineer on Sparklehorse’s third and fourth albums, and Linkous intended to use him to finish “Bird Machine.”
“He wanted to get it live to tape and sort of get the feel of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ happening again. He’d gone away to the digital [style] and wanted to come back to people playing in a room together, so that the feel of the basic tracking was a band.”
Hamilton says that the plan was for Linkous to record his final touches and mix at Studio G Brooklyn. “And ultimately it didn’t happen. Then the family found some hard drives of Mark’s that had a bunch of more completed material than any of us had initially thought. And there was a notebook that had my name and number saying ‘go to mix with Joel’ on these dates. I mean, we were in the process of figuring it out when things were sadly cut short.”
“The changes they made are pretty subtle,” says Hoffa, who was not involved in the overdubs. “I think the album was mostly there. When I listened to the final, nothing hit me over the head like, ‘oh they added that.'”
In finishing the material, Hamilton says that the question was constantly, “is this a yes or no in Mark’s world?” “There is a recorded history of Mark’s output, so knowing that Mark would have doubled the acoustic guitar, that means Matt could play an acoustic guitar overdub and we know that’s in line with everything else done by Mark.” There were no ringers, he laughs. “We didn’t bring in session musicians like Steve Vai or anything. This is a cast of characters that have appeared before.”
Hamilton says that the most difficult part of the project was sifting through the final works of someone who was in a dark enough place to end his own life. “But the reason that this album is relevant isn’t because Mark’s gone, it’s relevant because he’s brilliant.”
Future albums coming
“Bird Machine” is filled with standout tracks: the poppy first single, “It Will Never Stop,” the self-depreciating rocker, “I Fucked It Up,” “The Soul of Lucia,” which Hamilton calls a return to the classic Sparklehorse sound, and a rousing cover of Robyn Hitchcock’s “Listening to the Higsons.”
“It’s totally live and unbridled,” says Matt, adding no overdubs were needed for that one. “It’s like a tiny band playing on your kitchen table and they blow out all the windows of your house … it’s Mark just letting loose.”
One special track is the heartfelt “Falling Down.” “I love it,” says Weatherhead. “He’s telling a big story, a personal story, and as a writer it’s a fine line to walk. He was really doing it on that one.” “I drive a motorcycle to the studio every day and I always sing it in my head,” adds Hamilton. “It’s the first one I think of.”
As for the rest of the archive, Hoffa, who has inventoried everything, says that a lot of the material is high quality and certainly releasable. “It’s not a massive archive. We’re talking about hundreds of items. It’s not like Prince’s, which is a huge vault of decades of material. There was a lot of home stuff that he did, and completely different versions of songs that were on the records. Plus a lot of live material.”
Matt Linkous confirms that future Sparklehorse albums are in the planning stages. “‘Bird Machine’ needed to happen first,” he says.
