It’s impossible to talk about the legacy of Mark Lanegan without talking about his band Screaming Trees. The Seattle group predated the city’s early-’90s grunge explosion by a good half-decade but were still in a good position to benefit from it, however briefly, by landing a coveted spot on the era-defining Singles soundtrack. For many of the million-plus people who bought that record in the months after its 1992 release, the Mark Lanegan story begins and ends with the Trees’ contribution, a roiling rocker called “Nearly Lost You.” But the amazing thing about Lanegan was how, with each passing year, the singer made that commercial milestone seem more and more like a footnote in a journey that saw him outlast grunge and outlive his more famous friends in the scene to become one of rock’s most venerable vagabonds.
Throughout his life, Lanegan had seen and experienced so much fucked-up shit, he needed two memoirs to cover everything. But for all the tales of substance abuse that permeate his backstory, Lanegan’s focus on music never wavered. He made a lot of it, with a lot of different people, and often in surprising contexts. While his guttural voice, menacing stage presence, and piercing death-stare earned him an unshakable reputation as a post-grunge grim reaper—kind of like Nick Cave with knuckle tats and a beaten-up ball cap—Lanegan’s sprawling discography presents an artist constantly striving for the beauty that life so often denied him. He was always seeking new ways to unlock the sanctity of a song—be it through folk, blues, metal, hardcore, funk, trip-hop, or electronic music. Trying to condense a career as vast and varied as Lanegan’s into a brief list may be a fool’s errand, but here are eight songs that served as crucial pit stops on his never-ending road to redemption.
When you revisit Screaming Trees today, it’s sometimes hard to square the band’s paisley-patterned sound with the intimidating image Lanegan cultivated later on. The group’s major label debut, Uncle Anesthesia, was released eight months before Nirvana’s Nevermind in 1991, just missing the grunge goldmine. Then again, its lead single, “Bed of Roses,” wasn’t really grungy at all, gesturing instead to the jangly sounds of R.E.M. While the long-haired, leather-clad Lanegan seen in the song’s video looks every bit the bar-brawling rocker, his voice—deep and sonorous, but not yet displaying the ravages of a hard-knock life—suggests that, if the cultural tides had turned a different way, Lanegan could’ve been the American Morrissey.