Mark Linkous...rest in peace

[TravelbySea]

the drunkard posted a cover "return to me" brian and i did. not sure if you all have heard it.

http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/2010/03 ... el-by-sea/

[3legcat]

where did you go, up to the sun?
where are you now, part of the sea in every drop
or did you simply stop?

some sweet day you will be mine, you'll be mine
some sweet day you will be mine, you'll be mine

[Rockstar Aimz]

New York Times obit. Kind of a hard read for me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/arts/music/08linkous.html

[tennessee jed]

Damn, I had no idea that this happened here in my hometown, Knoxville...what a sad and beautiful world.

[Beldo]

Reactions from artists: http://pitchfork.com/news/38119-artists ... k-linkous/

[DADDY]

So sad to see this today. Mark was my age. He wrote a great many songs that I loved. Couldn't he see he was loved more than hundreds of sparrows?

[erschen]

put on my favorite Sparklehorse song this morning "Someday I Will Treat You Good". Next was a song by 90's band Sparkler, a song about suicide. Then up next was a song by a now defunct local band the Sparrows, which was the late Carter Albrecht's band. Odd how these things work out.....and all three tracks are excellent.

give them a listen here, if you like

http://ifihadacutlasstunes.blogspot.com/

[RavingLunatic]

the drunkard posted a cover "return to me" brian and i did. not sure if you all have heard it.

http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/2010/03 ... el-by-sea/

Yeah,that's an excellent piece of work. I've had it on my computer for a while and have listened to it many times. I've never heard a single Sparklehorse song before though. So I suppose I'll do the usual thing and ask which album is the best to start with.

[Beldo]

I'm not sure if you can really go wrong with any of them, but Good Morning Spider is probably his most essential, followed by It's a Wonderful Life.

[George Murray]

Good Morning Spider, is a great album. That's the one I would get first.
This is on the album...check it out;

[Tuxedo T-shirt]

I love Sparklehorse but I'd say look at some of the top 10 lists and just download a few songs off iTunes or whatever, at least at first. His albums tend to have some weirdo interlude bullshit - I kind of enjoy them, but no sense in paying for an album of a bunch of weird shit if you don't even like the 'real' songs.

[Sandusky]

I remember hearing "Hammering The Cramps" on an Uncut cd comp back in 96 or 97. Then bought Viva... and fell in love with the band. Mark Linkous had a short book club on his old website that turned me onto writers like D'J Pancake. Saw Sparklehorse play the Nick with Varnaline in the late 90s after Mark's accident and he was in a wheelchair doing shots of Jagur cowboy hat and goggle sunglasses played a KILLER show (Varnaline were amazing too). Playing "Sunshine" and "Weird Sisters" this morning and so goddamn sad about this guy's death. Nice to see the love going round. I know guys here were about the only place I could get Sparklehorse talk. The Brits for sure got the band, pretty sure they more well known in England than the States. Mojo and Uncut gave them tons of press in the 90s. SParklehorse has always been one of my favorite band names too. RIP Mark Linkous.

[melt]

Weird...I actually like Good Morning Spider the least out of the four albums. I think it's probably their least accessible.

I'd probably rank them this way:
1. Vivadixie
2. Dreamt for Light Years
3. It's a Wonderful Life (2 & 3 are about equal)
4. Good Morning Spider

His death is hitting me hard. Like Elliott before he died, Linkous seemed (on the surface at least) to have exercised a lot of the demons that haunted him so much in the 90s. He finally released a new Sparklehorse album a few years ago, had teamed up with Dangermouse and seemed invigorated musically. I know at one point a few years ago he didn't have much drive to play live shows. I saw Sparklehorse twice during the 'Dreamt for Light Years' tour and he seemed in good spirits and they were great both times. I knew he wasn't the type of guy we'd get a new album from every two years, but it was always worth the wait. We lost one of the great ones.

[Tabbedout]

First Vic Chesnutt and now Mark. Vic said that he was glad to be alive just a few weeks before he killed himself. I heard him talk about the song, "Flirted with you all my life", and saying that it was a "break up song" written to death. Then he just went off and killed himself...

Sparklehorse really made me look at music differently, hearing "Viva dixie submarine" for the first time in 1999 had a huge impact on me, at times it's so sparse and simple and sometimes it's really dense and layerd with different sounds.

[Lord Summerisle]

Yeah this one is hitting me hard too. Sparklehorse are an incredibly important band to me, my favourite Sparklehorse songs are not just that they are some of my favourite songs full stop. Listening to them in the mid 90s was a key factor in pushing me towards the folkier side of music. The sound Linkous created was just mesmerising to me and a huge influence on the music I make. It's not really a surprise that he killed himself given the intrinsic sadness of his music but that doesn't make it any easier to accept or any less tragic that we have lost such a great talent.