“Nearly Lost You” by SCREAMING TREES

Mark Lanegan, singer for Screaming Trees, a dozen solo albums, and numerous collaborations, died on February 22nd. This is the song that brought him into people's living rooms.

There's a rider that's fallen and It's clear there's no time to return

Ellensburg, WA is a small city east of the Cascade Mountains, a windy spot known for its rodeo grounds. It’s the sort of place from which a disaffected, restless young man with a few punk records would seek escape — by drink, drugs, or touring in a band with people he actively disliked. Mark Lanegan pushed the limits of all three. 

Lanegan joined Screaming Trees after Van Connor, the younger of the band’s two hulking Connor brothers, totaled Lanegan’s motorcycle, on which he’d planned to leave Ellensburg for Las Vegas; the bike was on loan as Lanegan recovered from having his legs crushed by a tractor in a farming accident. "We didn't have a damn thing in common except insanity,” he said of the band. “So we fought a lot.” Van got into onstage fistfights with his older brother, Gary Lee, who was the band’s guitarist and songwriter. Lanegan hated both Lee’s lyrics, which he found insipid, and their writer’s “superiority complex.” He quit a few times. Still, if some frat guy in the crowd tried to bait his 300 lb. bandmates by yelling fat jokes, Lanegan was quick to jump off the stage and settle things. 

After one intra-band row, Lanegan dumped his worldly possessions in the storage unit he had one winter called home, hopped on the back of a friend’s motorcycle, and moved 100 miles west to Seattle. One by one, the rest of Screaming Trees followed, making them a Seattle band just in time for the great grunge gold rush of the early 1990s. The only real major label interest they received, however, came from Epic Records and another label that requested they “lose one of the big guys”; they signed with Epic. In the meantime, Lanegan released his first solo album, The Winding Sheet, for which he learned to play guitar and wrote his first songs. Its stripped-down sound allowed his voice to fall across the songs in an ominous shadow, revealing lyrics etched in pain and sadness — friends called him Dark Mark for a reason. 

“Nearly Lost You” comes from the band’s 1992 album Sweet Oblivion, their sixth, and the first Screaming Trees record on which Lanegan would sing his own lyrics. After a mutiny, and after Nirvana’s Nevermind had reshaped the music landscape, Lee agreed that they should write and record the album as a band. New drummer Barrett Martin, who was steeped in jazz but could pound like John Bonham, came aboard. Martin gave their collision of ‘60s psychedelic garage rock with ‘80s punk some swing. Lanegan, in turn, poured his soul into words he could feel; “Nearly Lost You” came from an acid trip, just not one of his own. 

Van gave Lanegan a tape of him fucking around on guitar while fried on LSD¹; most of it was garbage except for one catchy riff over which he repeated “nearly lost you” in a drug-addled voice. Lanegan replayed the snippet a couple dozen times, hearing a single in a melodic hook that was different from anything they’d done before. He called Van and told him, “You don’t know it, but you’ve written a hit.”

Did you hear the distant cry

Calling me back to my sin

Like the one you knew before

Calling me back once again

I nearly, I nearly lost you there

And it's taken us somewhere

I nearly lost you there

Let's try to sleep now

Martin’s driving shuffle beat gives that catchy guitar riff extra oomph; the piercing, psychedelic squeal of Lee’s guitar lead lends the song a discordant edge. What sets the hook is when it all drops out, just fading cymbal hiss and distortion pedal buzz, giving room for Lanegan to be vulnerable. The way he draws out the syllables in “I nearly…” is downright tender. His voice gets a soulful crack as it bends around “taken off somewhere” in the chorus. His baritone could be such a thundercloud scudding low across the sky — the darkness, the threat of sudden violence contained within — but Lanegan gives this and all his songs an irreducible humanity, our strengths and weaknesses laid bare. What intimacy is more universal than a voice drawn taut, trying to make everything alright with “let’s try to sleep now”?

A great if at times not easy read

“Nearly Lost You” was indeed a hit, but it wasn’t much of one for Sweet Oblivion. The song was a late addition to the soundtrack for Singles, a Cameron Crowe romantic comedy set in a backlot version of the Seattle music scene². The film score was by The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg, and the soundtrack included two of his songs, plus Seattle headliners Alice in Chains, Mudhoney, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, along with nods to the origins of the scene with tracks by Jimi Hendrix, Lovemongers (Anne and Nancy Wilson of Heart), and Mother Love Bone. The soundtrack was like the Pacific Northwest alternative rock prom, and Screaming Trees’ management waived the sync fee to be invited. The soundtrack album went double platinum, spurred on in part by heavy airplay of “Nearly Lost You” on radio and MTV. The momentum from the band’s only song to ever chart was spent, however, by the time Sweet Oblivion came out months later. The album did just okay, selling 300,000 copies, or about a third of what Nevermind sold in its first month. Their follow-up album didn’t come for four years. In the time between, Lanegan released another standout solo album, Whiskey for the Holy Ghost. 

Whatever grunge was, “Nearly Lost You” doesn’t share much with those bands other than a 206 area code. It’s a classic song from within an era rather than a product of one. (If anything, grunge as a genre was a lot of tertiary bands flying the flannel and chasing a sound.) One thing that the bands topping the grunge nostalgia best-of lists all had, however, was a great, distinctive singer. Dating back to Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone, who died shortly before that band’s debut was released, these bands all had singers who went for it, whatever it was for them — Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, and of course Kurt Cobain³, whose wounded soulfulness makes the tragedy in Nirvana’s songs impossible not to hear. 

Screaming Trees had a great singer. In Mark Lanegan, we all did.

31 Song Playlist

Mark Lanegan and Screaming Trees songs mixed in an order that’s me trying to make sense of things. Lanegan loved The Gun Club , as do I, and found a friend in Jeffrey Lee Pierce, so his cover of “Carry Home” carries particular weight here. The Moby song is worth a listen to hear Lanegan with Kris Kristofferson. There’s a lot here. It’s all a lot.

Sing Backwards and Weep

Lanegan’s memoir, pictured above, comes highly recommended. He wanted the book to be more like literature than a tell-all autobiography, and it shows. It’s a dark journey, but even when he’s a dope-seeking monster, you pull for him. I’ve drawn on details from the book for this, but there is a lot more. It’s worth it for the Liam Gallagher chapter alone. You can order a copy here.

There is a Podcast

Rare Personal Note

Mark Lanegan’s solo albums mean a great lot to me, sometimes too much. His partner in the Gutter Twins, Greg Dulli said “I don’t know if Mark is the nicest mean Guy I’ve ever known or the meanest nice Guy.” I didn’t think it was my place to find out which. I kept my distance, not due to any perceived darkness in him, but my own insecurity: I thought he’d see right through me. It’s a regret I’ll carry.

My friend Jeff Klein was Lanegan’s touring roommate for a few years, and says for all the talk of Dark Mark, what he’ll remember is how much they laughed together. I’ll probably still remember him by the tears his music brings me, a gift just the same.

Jeff also said of Lanegan’s passing, “this is a rough one,” and I find myself agreeing.

Thanks

I don’t intend to make this newsletter an obituary feature. I can’t. I couldn’t bare it. This one was something I couldn’t not do. Thanks for being here for it.

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1. “I don’t condone the use of [LSD], but that might have been the case… It was a long time ago!” — Van Connor, UNCUT May 2019

2. Matt Dillon plays a guy in a band, wearing a ridiculous wig and Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament’s wardrobe. At a party for the film, Lanegan slipped a lit cigarette into the pocket of Dillon’s suit jacket as he walked away, setting the jacket on fire. [This is in Lanegan’s damn book. Read it!]

3. Writing out this list and realizing only one of them is still alive was its own gut punch.