Out today is ‘Bird Machine’, the posthumous album by Sparklehorse aka Mark Linkous, that many believed would never see the light of day. Uncovered from tapes and recordings archived by his brother Matt and sister-in-law Melissa, the lyrics brim with a sadness familiar to fans of Mark’s records, but they are combined with a sense of wonder and deeply felt appreciation of the world. “There’s the pain in his music but also hope and beauty,” says Melissa. “Mark took what he had as experience and put it into song and poetry: trying to find peace, working to stay, the struggles of being human.”
Over the course of four beautiful and otherworldly Sparklehorse records and two Sparklehorse collaborative projects, Mark had built a reputation as one of alternative rock’s most distinctive and influential songwriters. But the intimacy and honesty that made his songs so special also laid bare the troubles that he carried. As he continued to work on the album that would become ‘Bird Machine’ in 2009 and early 2010, the depression which had shadowed him for many years began to deepen. On March 6th, he took his own life at the age of 47.
Listen to “Listening to the Higsons”
“Linkous always invested his songs with folk intimacy, no matter how strange the textures around them became. He wrote fragile and insular tunes, tentative transmissions from a mind where upheaval and despair always lurked beneath wonder,” said The New York Times, in an in-depth interview with Matt and Melissa that speaks to their experience finishing and releasing this music, having their son Spencer sing background vocals – “the godson [Mark] adoringly called ‘god boy’’ – and of working with co-producer Alan Weatherhead and mixer Joel Hamilton, who had both also worked with Mark on past Sparklehorse albums. Read it in full HERE.
During Mark’s last visit to see Matt and Melissa they drove around in Melissa’s car blasting out the albums that were providing Mark’s inspiration for the new record. Matt remembers Mark talking about his plans for the record, his excitement about the influences feeding into it, and the way the songs were starting to take shape. It was these experiences and conversations that Matt and Melissa – who had both worked with Sparklehorse – returned to years later as they began to sift through boxes of tapes and CDs to catalogue and preserve Mark’s unreleased recordings and eventually bring ‘Bird Machine’ to life.
From the time that Mark began working on these songs to the record’s imminent release, 14 years have passed, a long time for a collection of tracks that were already well advanced at the time of Mark’s death. But there’s something too in the album’s long and complex gestation – the chaos of old tapes, the love and care that Mark’s family and his close musician friends have shown to every detail – that makes this so distinctively a Sparklehorse record.
“It means so much to me, this last batch of beautiful stuff that my brother was putting together,” says Matt. “When I sit down and put on a pair of headphones, I’ll put on the first track and run it all the way through. Everything from “It Will Never Stop” to “I Fucked it Up” to “Stay,” that’s Mark just letting it out.”
Order ‘Bird Machine’
1. It Will Never Stop
2. Kind Ghosts
3. Evening Star Supercharger
4. O Child
5.Falling Down
6. I Fucked It Up
7. Hello Lord
8. Daddy’s Gone
9. Chaos of the Universe
10. Listening to the Higsons
11. Everybody’s Gone to Sleep
12. The Scull of Lucia
13. Blue
14. Stay
