Music Profile

Sparklehorse

Reclusive Southern Alt-Pop Singer-Songwriter By Eric Schneider

Mark Linkous crafted strangely beautiful songs that often sounded celebratory and mournful at the same time.

Gifted Virginia-born singer-songwriter Mark Linkous recorded under the name Sparklehorse, crafting strangely beautiful songs that often sounded celebratory and mournful at the same time. An adherent to the Tom Waits School of Eccentric Imagery and Instrumentation, Linkous layered many of his imaginative compositions with unusual percussion, keyboards, and strings, often throwing static and distortion into the mix. Although Linkous was a reclusive studio perfectionist, only issuing albums every three or four years, he also managed to keep a remarkable cadre of musicians in the orbit of his rural satellite, working with performers such as Vic Chesnutt, the Flaming Lips, Danger Mouse, PJ Harvey, and even Waits himself. A troubled artist who literally came back from the dead after a traumatic episode in the mid-1990s, Linkous was prone to extended periods of deep depression, and, tragically, took his life on March 6, 2010. Fittingly, one of the last projects he worked on was entitled Dark Night of the Soul (a multimedia project with Danger Mouse and David Lynch), and one of the final songs released while he was alive (recorded with Christian Fennesz) was called “Goodnight Sweetheart.”

TAGS: Alt-Country, Indie, Lo-Fi, Recluse, Singer-Songwriter, Southern Gothic,

FACTS: Born/Formed: September 09, 1962; Died/Disbanded: March 06, 2010; Location: Arlington, Virginia, United States;

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