Remembering Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous

Mark Linkous lost his life once -- for about two minutes after an accidental drug-mixing episode -- and last weekend, with his own gun, he gave it up for good.

The 47-year-old songwriter and producer's March 6 suicide in Knoxville is a tragedy, but not exactly a surprise. Working as Sparklehorse, Linkous produced a body of challenging, distressed, rural-minded alt-rock -- vital music that at times sought heights of spacey pop and fueled tears of furious grunge. But whether shimmering or screaming, Linkous' songs left little doubt that their creator struggled inside with the basic questions of living.

His public persona wasn't any more reassuring: In an interview last year about a forthcoming project with Danger Mouse and David Lynch called "A Dark Night of the Soul," SPIN asked Linkous whether he'd experienced such an evening himself. "If I had some funny answer, I'd give it to you," he replied. "But the stuff in my head is just too disturbing to talk about."

Linkous had already sought rock stardom in New York and Los Angeles when he retreated to a farm in Virginia to begin writing and recording as Sparklehorse in 1995. His Capitol records debut, Vivadixesubmarinetransmissionplot, is a lo-fi, roots-rock gem, full of the dreaminess and obscure yearnings that would become signature elements of Linkous' music. The record earned him a chance to open for Radiohead on tour -- a pretty strong vote of confidence even in 1995. But it was while on that tour in London that Linkous mixed Valium with antidepressants, rendering the singer unconscious for 14 hours with his legs pinned under him. His heart stopped for about two minutes when he was finally lifted off that hotel room floor, forcing him to be revived by electroshock.

Linkous spent months in a London hospital recovering, was confined to a wheelchair for six more, and never walked without pain again.

Much as been written about how that near-death experience inspired the music on Sparklehorse's second album, Good Morning Spider, which was partly written during Linkous' recovery. Its 17 songs veer from morphine-addled dreaminess to pain-ridden rage, shifting from one feeling to the next with no sense of short-term memory. Though noise seeped into his previous work, on Spider, Linkous used static as a musical color, cloaking his songs in haze and making them feel like some ancient AM radio broadcast from hell. Much of the album's lyrics, from "Painbirds" to "St. Mary," somewhat literally explore Linkous' near-death experience and recuperation. But while the quieter songs ooze a deeply-settled gloom, the louder ones explode with vital strength. After a long, hazy introduction, "Chaos of the Galaxy/Happy Man" struggles into focus and sprints to a fiery conclusion, with Linkous shouting, "All I want is to be a happy man" over a howling, triumphant guitar line. You can't help but wonder if it's the sound of Linkous crawling back to life.