Here come the painbirds

On Mark Linkous and Sparklehorse

With rocks in my dress
And smoke in my hair
I walked into a lake
To get some sleep down there

I always loved Sparklehorse because their music seemed to conjure a world. It wasn’t just mastermind Mark Linkous’ lyrics—often surreal and strange, but also plainspoken and direct as a knife thrust—but also the sonics of the thing: the floaty dreamscape that seemed to lay a bed for any odd and beautiful idea that drifted his way. That isn’t to say the music all sounds the same. Linkous’s world made space for ethereal synthesizers, serrated guitars, blown-out vocals, drum machines, even the vocals of P.J. Harvey and Tom Waits, and made it all seem natural, of a piece. A single vision.

Linkous was born in Virginia, which slots him right alongside all my favorite Southern weirdos, from Carson McCullers and Barry Hannah and Flannery O’Connor and Frank Stanford to Howard Finster to Margaret and H.D. Dennis. With all of their work, the world is given, but at a slant. Strangeness rules, and it’s through the strangeness that all the deep heart can come pouring out.

There’s been a lot of ink deployed in describing Linkous’s addictions and its aftermath, the nerve damage that kept him often wheelchair bound, his difficulties with fame, all the problems that ultimately led to his death. I don’t really want to add to that. I’d like to stick to the music, to his art, for as long as possible.

I first came across Sparklehorse from the album It’s a Wonderful Life, which I heard at my first and best ever job, at Musiquarium in Jackson, Mississippi. It was a combination CD store (remember those?) and beer bar, specializing in jazz, and the absolute best possible place for sixteen-year-old me to work. My bosses would send me home with stacks of music I’d never heard before, because they knew I wanted to learn. They treated working with music like a vocation, something that must be worked at and earned, in order to pass all that beauty down to the people that came to browse. Let them buy what they came for, sure, but make certain they leave with Grant Green, Sonny Rollins, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone. It wasn’t just upselling for profit, it was the sincere belief that this music was good, that passing it on mattered. It was a beautiful thing for someone’s life, anyone’s life, and you were doing a service turning them onto it.

I took to the job like an evangelist. And I was damn good at it.

But other, slightly more mainstream offerings would float through the store from time to time, and It’s a Wonderful Life was one of them. I remember popping the CD in, hearing the crackling warmth of the opening title track, Mark Linkous’s voice whisper-soft over this lackadaisical drum shuffle, the synths and strings and guitar a whole meadow for the song to loaf in. When Linkous sang, it was like he was already in the room with you, like he’d been sitting there quietly, waiting on you to notice him:

I am the only one
Can ride that horse th’yonder

What the hell is this? I thought. And then came the next line, which won me over forever:

I’m full of bees who died at sea

Listen, I didn’t know what that meant. I still don’t, not in a literal sense. But at sixteen, a world was beginning to open up to me, a surreality that communicated the unspeakable, that spoke straight to the dreaming part of your brain. Linkous was a genius at this, and his music felt perfectly in tune with the lyrics.

Here are a few of my favorites.

From “Apple Bed”:

I wish I had
A horse’s head
A tiger’s heart
An apple bed

From “Little Fat Baby”:

He got dragged by a donkey
Through the switches and the myrtle
But he was once a little fat baby

From “Shade and Honey”:

Stars are dying in my chest
Until I see you again

From “Knives of Summertime”:

A flock of knives cut the sky

It wasn’t all just one-off lines and digressions. When he wanted to be, Linkous was also a wonderful storyteller, even if he never quite connected the dots for you. He sang his mysteries, drawing from his own weird regional storytelling, the muddy childhood landscape of his dreams, fragments of film and poetry, and swirling them all into something all his own. Take this bit from “More Yellow Birds”:

Will my pony recognize my voice in hell?

Great line, right? Could be something tossed off, abandoned, and in the hands of a lesser songwriter, it would be. But Linkous keeps it going, until we have a character, then three characters (speaker, listener, and horse!), a desire, a setting, and maybe a quest:

Will he still be blind or do they go by smell?
Will you promise me not to rest me out at sea?
But on a fiery river boat that's rickety

The song continues the thread, but the quest is over before it starts. Something has to take the journey’s place, a desire for peace:

I'll never find my pony along the rolling swells
A muddy river or a lake would do me well
With hints of amber sundowns and muted thunderstorms
A sunken barge's horns with the cold rusty bells

Doomed, but also (somehow?) comforting. Or at least desiring comfort. The warmth never leaves his voice. Not ever, even to the end.

And this brings us, I guess inevitably, to the pain Linkous sang so often about.

I only saw Sparklehorse live twice. The first was at a small club in Nashville, maybe 2005. The show was okay, beset by sound issues despite a sizable and eager crowd. Linkous’s famous radio-static microphone kept feeding back viciously. After one piercing shriek of feedback from the monitor, Linkous turned his face from the crowd, wincing painfully (“will my bleeding ears be rung with joy?”). The show went on, but he seemed in agony. A few years later I saw him in Chicago at Lollapalooza, the one and only time my old band was invited to play. Sparklehorse were never a particularly loud band, and the bleed from a metal show at a neighboring stage kept overpowering Linkous, dashing the fragile world he was building up there to pieces. Again, he looked toward the other stage and winced. There was no winning out here, not for music like his, not in a world like this.

She was my black earth
And the fire in my spine

But the pain does something wonderful in the music. Even if you weren’t aware of Linkous’s troubles, you can plainly hear them. Not overtly, though he often sang clearly if strangely about them (like “here come the painbirds,” which is about the best evocation of nerve damage I’ve ever heard), but in the contours of the music itself. That’s why a song like “Gold Day”—my absolute all-time favorite Sparklehorse song—works. (Nina Persson from The Cardigans sings backup, which is also cool.)

On their own, the lyrics could almost seem too childlike, too twee:

Keep all your crows away
Hold skinny wolves at bay
In silver piles of smiles
May all your days be gold, my child

It’s a song about hope, though a futile one. Nobody’s days are gold, not for very long. Or else, maybe in the Great Hereafter even our agonies seem golden. But not in this world, not now. Still, there’s something in the back of the child-world woodland imagery—the crows, the wolves—that speaks to the heart of all fairytales: the world is a dangerous place, and its rules are never fixed. Tread with caution. But also, and this is crucial, walk with hope.

Or the closest thing to hope you can get.

This has already gone too long, but let’s be real, I could talk about Sparklehorse for hours. The discography isn’t massive, but it’s all worth your time, including the ambient collaboration with Fennesz and the uneven but sometimes wonderful celebrity-stuffed compilation Dark Night of the Soul. For the newcomer, It’s a Wonderful Life, Good Morning Spider, and Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain are all essential. As a farewell, I’ll leave you with the full lyrics to the song I quoted at the beginning of this newsletter, “Comfort Me,” about as sad and strange and beautiful as anything Linkous ever wrote:

With rocks in my dress
And smoke in my hair
I walked into a lake
To get some sleep down in there

Won't you come to comfort me?
Won't you come to comfort me?

With minnows in my belly
And ink in my veins
The breath-robbin' lightning
Was making diamonds of rain

Won't you come to comfort me?
Won't you come to comfort me?

Dreamed I was born on a mountain on the moon
Where nothing grows or ever rots
I dreamed that I had me a daughter
Who was magnificent as a horse

Won’t you come to comfort me?