Articles: The Sad and Beautiful World of Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous

On the morning of March 6, 2010, Mark Linkous woke up late inside the yellow two-story house on Irwin Street. The 47-year-old songwriter was finishing up a move from rural North Carolina to a spare bedroom at his bandmate Scott Minor’s place in Knoxville, Tennessee. He brought the essentials first—a sunburst Gibson guitar, brown Yamaha keyboard, an assortment of amps, some clothes—and planned to make one last trip to collect the rest of his belongings later that day.

The Sparklehorse founder, a composer of pop songs that whispered and roared through a sea of static, was on the verge of a new chapter in a life pocked with addiction, chronic pain, and depression. Hope stood on the horizon in the form of a forthcoming album, a supportive new label, and acclaimed collaborators backing up his genius. But a nagging woe still lingered: His relocation from the Blue Ridge Mountains signaled that his marriage was disintegrating, leaving the songwriter in an uncertain place without his partner of more than two decades by his side.

With his move almost finished, the six-foot-one Virginian, dressed in black and wearing thick-rimmed glasses, received a string of texts that left him distraught. Before his friends realized, Linkous walked out of the house with an assault rifle in hand, headed back toward an alley, and took his own life.

In the wake of his death, Linkous left behind a poignant songbook as remarkable as the company he kept, which included world-renowned artists like PJ Harvey and David Lynch, as well as more esoteric musicians including Vic Chesnutt, Christian Fennesz, and Daniel Johnston. A self-taught perfectionist with a penchant for eccentricity, as heard through his unorthodox studio recordings and otherworldly lyrics, he found solace in life’s simple pleasures even as he struggled to fend off his inner demons. His distorted murmurs commanded listeners to heed the beauty of darkness.

“There was a fragility in Mark’s music, and his vocals were so small,” says Linkous admirer and collaborator Nina Persson of the Cardigans. “It sounded so brittle, like it could just fall over and break any second.”

Over the decades, Linkous learned to rely upon noise as a mirror for his own complexities. He was a wistful wordsmith with a silly sense of humor; a bibliophile with a love of junk food; a masterful songwriter with an informal musical pedigree. He felt at home roaring down backwoods Virginia roads with friends on vintage motorcycles like his cherished Moto Guzzi 1000S. They would ride past dilapidated historic buildings masked by overgrown weeds, getting lost in the forgotten remainders of a bygone era. As they went, hours passed without a spoken word.

Linkous was most comfortable in silence, though he would also break that calm to pursue his musical ambitions, overcoming shyness to approach artists he admired. By simply asking, he forged friendships with bandmates like Minor—the two began playing together after an impromptu conversation that started with motorcycles and ended with the Velvet Underground.

And upon hearing that Tom Waits liked Sparklehorse, Linkous worked up the courage to cold-call his hero, knocking back a few Wild Turkey shots to calm his nerves. His unsolicited outreach sparked a regular correspondence between the songwriters, leading to an exchange of four-track tapes through the mail and eventually a more traditional recording session. “We seem to share a love of pawnshop hi-fi,” Waits once said, going on to describe the murky allure of Linkous’ music: “It’s like opening your eyes underwater at the bottom of a stream. You go, ‘Jesus, look what's down here.’”

At an early age, Linkous began to follow his curiosities in a similar fashion, letting his guard down to a select few who became privy to his creative brilliance. Raised in Clintwood, a small city in bucolic southwest Virginia, he rode on his dirt bike through the area, exploring fire roads and abandoned strip mines with his younger brother, Matt. After his parents separated when Linkous was in his early teens, he started hanging out with a motorcycle gang called the Pagans.

“The Hells Angels guys wouldn’t fuck around with the Pagans,” he once recalled. “They were just ruthless. The guy that I hung out with the most, Chico, got thrown out of a car going 60 or 80 miles an hour for fucking up a meth deal.” Linkous’ mother eventually sent her delinquent teenager to Charlottesville to live with his grandfather, a retired coal miner, in an attempt to set him straight. 

Though Linkous was intelligent, he showed disinterest in his classes at Albemarle High School. “We were the misfits,” says high school friend Paul Lorenzton. “He wasn't a dropout, but he couldn't have cared less,” adds Cathryn Low, who grew up down the road from Linkous and remembers him as a class clown who intentionally ran into doors to make people think he had broken his nose. During that period, Linkous’ grandfather was strict but he also showed affection where needed, giving his grandson a leather jacket and a Gibson guitar.

As Linkous learned his way around the six-string in the ‘70s, he started to emulate his idols, playing Black Sabbath, Ramones, and Blondie covers. His musical obsessions further emerged as he grew his hair to mimic Alice Cooper, wore occult-inspired outfits tailored by his grandmother to imitate Jimmy Page, and crafted homemade flash pots to emulate KISS’ pyrotechnics.

After graduating high school in the early ‘80s, Linkous moved to New York and was enlisted as a guitarist for a power-pop group called the Dancing Hoods. He became entrenched in the city’s club circuit, where he befriended members of the Damned and Psychedelic Furs. Soon, heroin took hold of him. He was using the drug when the Dancing Hoods moved to L.A. in search of a record contract in 1986. They became a local fixture, opening gigs for touring bands like Camper Van Beethoven and performing on MTV’s “120 Minutes”.

“Mark had a great stage presence with the Dancing Hoods,” says one-time Sparklehorse drummer Johnny Hott. “He was not the frontman, so he could maintain an air of mystery with relative ease.”

But the Dancing Hoods’ contract never came; the band’s lead singer landed a job with a record label, the bassist wound up in prison, and the group dissolved shortly thereafter. Linkous, still addicted to heroin, started living in his van near the coast. "I was close to just giving up and walking into the ocean,” he later said in 2001. But before that happened, he heard a radio DJ play a breathtaking version of “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet”, English minimalist composer Gavin Bryars’ 19-minute loop of a homeless man warbling the six-word phrase over a string ensemble featuring vocal accompaniment from Tom Waits. The song convinced him to carry on.

Following that revelation, Linkous reached out to his parents, asked for help with his addiction, and returned home to Virginia. He checked into a hospital for a month followed by a rehab stint. Once released, he moved to Richmond with close friends Bryan Harvey and Hott of the duo House of Freaks. He drank coffee and smoked Camels at the Main Street Grill; picked up odd jobs painting homes and washing dishes; and created folk art from whirligigs that he blasted with shotgun shells. Every now and then, he played in a few local bands like an old-time Gaelic folk group called the Flaming Cicadas.

“I gave up on wanting to be a pop star and came back home to just make great music without caring about the rest,” Linkous said in 1999.

When Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery moved to Richmond, he reconnected with Linkous and the two grew close fast. While on tour as a roadie for Lowery’s band Cracker, Linkous occasionally joined the group during encores, where they sang Neil Young’s “Fuckin’ Up”. During one such performance at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, New Jersey, Linkous tossed a tub of ice into a crowd comprised of indifferent New Yorkers, damaging part of the sound system. 

“We were never allowed to play there again,” Lowery says. “It’s a legendary place but it’s also kind of a shit hole. It didn’t really break our heart.”

Lowery lent Linkous his Tascam 688, a basic eight-track with only seven working channels, and the songwriter started recording new songs at his rural home outside Richmond. Dave Ayers, Sparklehorse’s first manager, says Linkous would send him cassette tapes of his tracks—some made at home and others recorded at a professional studio with Lowery—and they would discuss what did and didn’t work over the phone. "Whenever he would make something pretty, his first instinct would be to run over it with a truck,” Ayers says. As part of that effort, Linkous muddied his songs with distortion to mask the sound of his voice—sometimes even using a dirty microphone he salvaged from a landfill.

After countless conversations with Lowery and Ayers, Linkous’ recordings evolved into his full-length debut, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, a title that came from a dream involving Confederate General Robert E. Lee, old-time musicians performing inside a submarine, and swimming. After Capitol Records President Gary Gersh—the executive responsible for signing Nirvana—offered Linkous a six-figure contract, the label released the album in August 1995. Sparklehorse’s debut spanned from lonesome acoustic melodies to raucous rock anthems like the single “Someday I’ll Treat You Good”, as Linkous drew from a wide range of cultural inspirations and sources, including William Shakespeare, cult filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, and his own voicemails (one message from his mother appeared as an interlude).

The debut garnered modest sales at best. But it landed the band, which included Hott and Minor, opening gigs for respected, rootsy acts Chesnutt and Son Volt. More importantly, Sparklehorse caught the ear of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, who heard his music half a world away during a Middle East tour following the release of The Bends.

In the fall of 1995, Radiohead invited Sparklehorse to open a weeklong UK tour, thrusting Linkous onto stages in front of thousands of fans—a daunting task for a group with about a dozen shows under its belt. “They're a huge majestic rock band,” Linkous once said, talking about the Radiohead tour. “And we would just get up and sort of be squeaky and pathetic and on the edge.” Hott, who played keyboards on the tour, says Linkous seemed uncomfortable throughout those opening gigs, though the frontman was also unwilling to pass up such an opportunity early in his career.

“[Sparklehorse] sound like Radiohead in their more low-key moments, only marooned in the middle of a Nevada desert,” Raw critic Robin Morley wrote in a review of a Leeds gig. “Mildly grungy when they can muster up energy (not often). Polite. Unassumingly punctual.”

Between tour legs, Linkous’ psychiatrist switched his medication in an attempt to get his troubles with depression, which the singer had dealt with for years, under control—but Linkous didn’t let anyone else know about the change. Sparklehorse returned to the UK for a second string of Radiohead dates in January 1996, and after playing a warm-up gig in London, Linkous passed out in his hotel bathroom as the result of an adverse interaction between his antidepressants and the Rohypnol—aka Mexican Valium—he took to help with his insomnia. The following morning, a hotel maid found him in a position where the circulation to his legs had been cut off overnight.

When paramedics untangled his limbs, built-up potassium shot from his lower body upward, triggering a harmful chain reaction that caused a heart attack and kidney failure. Linkous flatlined for several minutes. Paul Monahan, his tour manager, rode with the songwriter in the ambulance, uncertain of whether he would survive the trip to the hospital.

“They put me in the grieving room, set aside for people who were told that someone had passed,” Monahan says.

When Linkous regained consciousness weeks later, he saw tubes coming out of his body as he lay inside London’s St. Mary’s Hospital. His wife Teresa, who he first met in L.A. in the ‘80s, stayed at his bedside, occasionally renting Mr. Bean videos that made him laugh until it hurt. Lowery snuck him small sips of Coca-Cola despite nurses’ orders. Over a three-month stay, Linkous underwent more than seven surgeries, endured continual rounds of kidney dialysis, and received treatment for infections. Doctors initially feared amputation, but he was discharged in a wheelchair and leg braces, which he wore for the rest of his life. Linkous blamed himself for an accident that was out of his control.

“The pain was so bad and it was constant,” Linkous said in a 1998 Dutch television documentary. “A person who has their arm amputated can have what they call phantom pain. That was what was happening—my nerves, freaking out.”

Back home in Virginia, doctors prescribed him morphine to quell the chronic pain, a necessary evil that exposed him once again to an addictive drug. “That was really cruel, and ultimately fatal, irony,” Ayers says. “There was just no escaping that. For him to regain the use of his legs, and survive the accident at all, opiate addiction was a necessary step to recovery.” Linkous miraculously returned to music in just three months, touring in a wheelchair as Sparklehorse opened for Cracker. He grew close with Chesnutt, an Athens, Georgia-based, wheelchair-bound folk songwriter, who became a confidant at a time when Linkous was struggling with his partial paralysis.

“He walked with a cane sometimes,” says former Ween bassist Dave Dreiwitz, who backed Linkous onstage in 1999. “Physically, [touring] was just tough for him given the condition he was in.”

Around that time, Linkous released the second Sparklehorse LP, Good Morning Spider, which was shaped by his long hospital stay. The album, a further foray into experimental pop, captured moments of anger and loneliness, along with songs of compassion and love. During that album cycle, the press paid attention to Linkous’ survivor songs with morbid fascination, which unnerved the songwriter and made him feel self-conscious in his fragile state: “For a long time I felt the only reason journalists wanted to talk to me was because I was the guy who nearly died,” Linkous said in 2001.

Resisting pressure from his label to cut straightforward radio edits of potential singles, Linkous didn’t sell many Sparklehorse records, particularly by ’90s major-label standards. For example, Good Morning Spider contains the song “Chaos of the Galaxy/Happy Man”—a four-and-a-half minute sonic journey that starts as an eerie instrumental medley before unexpectedly shifting at the staticy sound of a turning radio dial and finally blowing out into a grunge anthem ripe for rock airplay. Do away with the somber intro and the obfuscating noise, it seems, and the song could be a legitimate hit. But Linkous initially bristled at the thought of re-recording for commercial purposes, attempting to sabotage the commodification of his work.

“He told the label the masters had gotten burnt in a bonfire, which was complete bullshit,” former tour manager Matt Johnson says. “He still had to get paid to eat, but at the end of the day, whatever his music was, that was what was going to be out.”

The money made was enough for Linkous and Teresa to live modestly in a rented Virginia farmhouse that was 90 minutes outside Richmond, but felt even further away from society. Linkous engrossed himself in his natural surroundings—water running down a stream, dogs racing around his farm, bears roaming in the wild—and removed the clocks from his house. He set up a practice space dubbed Static King, which was home to a 16-track recording console, an arsenal of synths, and an assortment of other instruments including a German violin he claimed to have purchased from a crack dealer for $20 during a blizzard. Static King became his refuge between tours and it was there that he first found inspiration for his most ambitious record.

To record his third album, It's a Wonderful Life, Linkous decided to leave behind the comforts of home, venturing to several cities and scheduling sessions with a host of different collaborators. He traveled to Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann’s Tarbox Road Studios in upstate New York to lay down “Gold Day” with the Cardigans’ Persson; traded those tapes with Waits, who growled and played “metal things” on the swampy “Dog Door”; and went to Barcelona to record “Piano Fire” with PJ Harvey, producer John Parish, and Portishead’s Adrian Utley.

“He was happy to try anything that you would throw at him in the studio,” says Parish, who produced the Spanish session, recording some vocals through a $25 box called a Whisper 2000—a spy device typically used for listening in on quiet conversations—to once again distort the singer’s vocals.

“Every track was under a microscope,” Linkous said of the album in 2008. “There was never really intentionally supposed to be famous people on it, but there just was. But I did really have specific ideas for how it should sound or how it should be mixed and the vibe that the whole record should have.”

Joel Hamilton, a recording engineer at Mission Sound in Brooklyn, watched Linkous’ penchant for experimentation unfold up close. He remembers how the songwriter used archaic instruments like the Optigan—a 1970s Mattel toy organ that plays sounds from 12” plastic film discs, including a jovial pre-recorded sample called “Guitar in 3/4 Time” that is heard in It’s a Wonderful Life’s opening bars. Elsewhere, Linkous’ insistence on the obsolete led to irreplicable moments on “Morning Hollow”; while recording the track, he replaced a harmonium’s foot pump with a vacuum motor to keep the sound’s ebb and flow going.

“If you sit down at a piano, there's a particular noise that it makes that anyone on Earth knows, but Mark would use it as some alien button box that had just arrived on the planet to make music,” says Hamilton. “It wasn't in the service of being weird or different. It served his vision.” 

Linkous devoted the sanguine collection to the family, friends, and fans that helped him survive in the aftermath of his near-death experience. "If the whole record is about anything, it's to remind yourself that it was a good day to be alive today—not getting eaten by a bear, or seeing a deer drink out of a creek," he said in 2001. As his personal storm passed, his gratitude for the world around him grew, something seen in the evocative everyday moments he chose to capture in his lyrics: dogs eating birthday cake, sun beams touching his skin, skinny wolves being held at bay.

“I was lucky enough to have been told how much my music meant to people,” Linkous said in 2001. “Maybe something about my music will inspire one person to tell another person how much they mean to them today before it's [too] late.”

When the planes destroyed the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers one month after the release of It’s a Wonderful Life, the optimism that Linkous had worked so hard to gain vanished. “I really thought it was the end of the world—Revelation—and no one else knew it but me,” Linkous said in 2006. Personal tragedies and tribulations followed: Loved ones died, his depression worsened, a relapse occurred.

To help free Linkous from heroin’s grip, his friend Paul Lorenzton let him crash at his isolated cabin in the tiny town of Hayesville, North Carolina. “Heroin's one of the easiest drugs to get and it's cheap,” Lorenzton says. “He had to get the heck out of that.” In 2002, Linkous moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains, more than 400 miles away from his home in Virginia, where he grappled with debilitating migraines and malaise. Even sleep felt like a luxury.

“[I just looked] forward to being unconscious again and sleeping, with the possibility of having happy dreams,” Linkous later said, describing that period of his life. “You can stay in bed all day, until you can’t pay your rent and don’t even eat food: You eat crackers, just enough to subsist on.”

At Teresa’s behest, Linkous traveled to Florida during the early part of 2003 to receive treatment for his depression. Later that year, Sparklehorse was back on the road with the Flaming Lips, followed by an arena tour supporting R.E.M.—another uncomfortable experience for the reserved frontman.

“I remember talking to one of the guys in R.E.M., and they were like, ‘One day you’ll have this,’” Linkous said. “I don’t want that at all.” When he returned to North Carolina, he set up a recording space in a nearby warehouse that became home to his rare 1969 Flickinger recording console, a temperamental board that became a source of great joy—and frustration. 

“They're really enigmatic and interesting pieces of equipment,” says Steve Albini, the Chicago-based recording engineer who has worked with everyone from Joanna Newsom to Nirvana. Linkous had called Albini for advice about the console, which was rumored to have recorded parts of the Ohio Players’ catalog along with an one-off T. Rex rehearsal. “It was a bit much for a person to try to build a home studio around one,” Albini adds.

During that time, Linkous also struggled to create music due to writer’s block. His fourth record, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, became a laborious process because he was attempting to write songs in a sober state of mind. His frustrations poured over at Tarbox, where, after working a 12-hour shift with Fridmann and Flaming Lips drummer Steven Drozd, he dismissed their collaborative work, going so far as to try and erase an entire session, much to the ire of his label, which had originally signed him for an alt-rock sound that had long fallen out of fashion.

In the midst of his creative rut, Linkous stumbled upon Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, a full-length mashup of the Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album that helped the Athens, Georgia, producer born Brian Burton find a wider audience. “I had no idea at all about the story behind it or anything, and I just loved it,” Linkous said. In 2005, the two musicians eventually got in touch, which led to Burton flying out to North Carolina. For Burton, the collaboration became not only about making music, but also getting Linkous out of bed each morning, in hopes of helping the songwriter break through his artistic roadblocks.

“There were days we worked and others we didn’t,” Burton says. “He just didn’t think anybody cared if he put out another record.”

Burton convinced Linkous to work on several creative efforts—tracking a bass part for a collaborative track with rapper MF DOOM; shaping new Sparklehorse songs; and devising a project that would feature their instrumentals but would not require Linkous to sing (much to his relief). The latter proved most fruitful, prompting Linkous and Burton to work through another half-dozen sessions in North Carolina and California to further shape the music that became part of a project called Dark Night of the Soul. As they finished recording, they each reached out to their friends—Burton with Iggy Pop, Julian Casablancas, and Frank Black; Linkous with Wayne Coyne, Chesnutt, and Persson—requesting lyric and vocal contributions. 

Later on, Burton asked David Lynch to shoot cinematic stills to accompany the record, initially doing so without telling Linkous, who deeply admired the filmmaker. “David was into it,” Burton recalls. “[Mark] lost his shit. His outward happiness was minimal a lot of times, but that was probably the happiest I had ever heard him.” When they later staged the photo shoots, Lynch says, he drew inspiration from watching Linkous smoke unfiltered cigarettes until they were an eighth-inch long—the nicotine turning his fingers yellow-orange—and soaking in the Southern musician’s sounds, which the director describes as “Piney Woods grunge.”

“He was a real purist,” Lynch adds. “His tenderness separated him from others and it came through in his music.”

As a legal dispute between Burton and EMI delayed Dark Night of the Soul, Linkous returned his focus to Sparklehorse. On September 25, 2006, he released Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, a collection of pensive ballads and pop anthems stitched together from old outtakes and new recordings. Linkous devoted the release to his friend and old roommate Bryan Harvey, who was brutally killed along with his wife and two daughters inside their home on New Year’s Day in 2006, during a weeklong murder spree in Richmond. The tragedy sent the entire city into shock, including Linkous, prompting him to stock up on more guns for his own protection.

To promote the record, Linkous assembled a touring outfit that doubled as a safety net, including a grieving Hott, still reeling from Harvey’s death. “Mark and I let some tears fall, especially in the beginning of that tour,” says Hott. “We comforted each other with hugs and reminiscing about Bryan.” Before hitting the road, Linkous grabbed coffee with former Go-Go’s bassist Paula Jean Brown, a recovering addict, to gauge her interest in not just touring, but helping him stay sober during his first shows since 2003. His initial anxiety eased during a successful European tour that lasted for two months. But in February 2007, on the night of Sparklehorse’s show at the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles, Linkous’ longtime label informed him that they would no longer be doing business together. The news sucked the life out of the room backstage. On the heels of sold-out shows overseas, dismal sales from his American gigs placed the remainder of the tour in doubt.

“He had the feeling where your heart’s been broken, like you’re de-animated,” says songwriter Jesse Sykes, whose band the Sweet Hereafter had opened for Sparklehorse that tour. “I’m sure it felt like he had been kicked in the throat. From that night on, he would come out to play and then disappear onto the bus, and that was that. He was just gone.” 

Despite the circumstances, the tour went on, even though Linkous came down with flu-like symptoms. Around his bandmates, he maintained his sense of humor—equal parts dry and goofy—though it couldn’t fully mask the fact that he was struggling. After a Coachella performance gone awry, one of the final full-band Sparklehorse shows, Brown chatted with Linkous about whether life as a musician—lugging gear to gigs without a label’s support, battling the pain in his legs while performing in the sweltering sun, seeking to stay sober at festivals with free-flowing drugs—was worth it.

“You know, sometimes it’s all I can do not to just walk out of the house and into the woods and not come back—go follow the foxes and the critters out there and just curl up and die,” he told Brown after the show.

For the next two years, Linkous pursued different kinds of gigs—he played guitar on tour with Austin lo-fi legend Daniel Johnston; collaborated with electronic composer Christian Fennesz on the ambient record In the Fishtank 15; and scored an instrumental piece for a David Lynch documentary. Sparklehorse was set aside.  

Then, Anti- Records, home to acts like Waits, Kate Bush, and Daniel Lanois—artists whose mainstream popularity never matched their critical influence—gave Linkous a chance to release his music with a label invested in his art. In the fall of 2009, days after flying back from playing three shows in France and Belgium with Fennesz, Linkous and Minor drove to Chicago, where Sparklehorse’s management had booked studio time with Albini for two weeks at his Electrical Audio studio. Unlike past sessions—which had been recorded only to be deconstructed and meticulously rebuilt, almost to a fault—Linkous wanted to make an album filled with simpler pop songs that were “not unlike Buddy Holly songs.” He compared the new material to "suicide probes that send back as much information as they can before crashing into the sun." To break out of his comfort zone, Linkous put together a live band that included Minor; bassist Paul Dillon, Linkous’ longtime guitar tech; and Steve Nistor, a studio drummer who worked with Linkous during the Dark Night of the Soul sessions.

"I always thought that I was just a conduit, that something was coming through me and I was making music out of it," Linkous said in 2009. "It seems like that got harder and harder to do, so I'm trying to do that again by simplifying things. The songs are not quite as clever, and I'm not laboring forever over every lyric."

On most days during the session, Nistor recalls, Linkous got off to a late start in the afternoon, as the sun was already setting. “It was a darker, slower, whiskey-soaked kind of mood, for sure,” he says. “That was the first time I felt that he was struggling with some severe depression.” In between writing last-minute lyrics, Linkous captured his own sparse downtempo arrangements along with straightforward rockers like "Listening to the Higsons" by Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, whom he once opened for as a member of the Dancing Hoods.

“It was back to basics,” Minor says. “It was very electric, very all over the map, from jam-type of stuff to more barely-hanging-by-a-thread stuff.” 

More than half a dozen songs were tracked by the end of the session, including nearly all of the instrumental parts. But Linkous was unable to finish his vocals because of a scratchy throat. No one was worried about that, though, as the singer planned to return to Electrical Audio to complete the vocals and then mix down those tracks. 

“[Mark] was animated about wanting to finish the record,” Albini says. “I didn't get the impression that he was distracted.”

As both Dark Night of the Soul and his fifth Sparklehorse record neared release, Linkous began living in Knoxville. He had visited months earlier when he played at Big Ears Festival and returned after a short tour with Minor and Fennesz in Europe. He fell for the city and its residents, and it seemed like a place ripe for a fresh start, which was necessary as the possibility of a divorce with Teresa loomed. (Teresa, who declined to talk on the record for this story, later told Knoxville police no divorce paperwork was ever filed. But others close to Linkous, including his manager, have stated that the process had started.) Minor, who himself had already relocated to the east Tennessee city, let Linkous crash at his place as the songwriter figured out his next steps. 

“That was part of his survival plan,” North Carolina songwriter Angela Faye Martin, who enlisted Linkous to producer her 2009 album Pictures From Home, once said. “I think the hermitage part of his life was over and he was transitioning into learning how to be a part of a group.”

At first, Linkous reveled in his newfound independence, becoming surprisingly social with Knoxville locals, and even discussing plans of opening a studio in Tennessee. However, for the first time as an adult, he no longer had Teresa to lean on. She had not only been his partner but also his caretaker, watching over his health in times of need. 

“She kept Mark alive through many periods,” Minor says. “She'd always grab him in the knick of time and save him. I didn't realize how important it was for someone to be there in that role. No one picked it up.”

On Christmas Day 2009, Vic Chesnutt ended his own life, causing Linkous to fall further into a deep depression. He was grieving not only the loss of his friend, but a fellow tortured artist with a morbid streak rooted in disability and a bleak outlook on life. “He looked up to Vic so much,” early Sparklehorse manager Dave Ayers says. “From that moment forward, I was afraid.”

Though family and friends offered support—his brother, Matt, was hopeful that he’d make it through the rough patch—Linkous appeared to have lost his way when he lost Chesnutt. In an email exchange with Linkous, Hott offered words of encouragement to his friend, urging him to “hang in there and find his armor,” which the songwriter had donned during his past trials.

In response, Linkous told Hott he “didn’t know where it was anymore.”

At Chesnutt’s funeral, R.E.M.’s production manager DeWitt Burton offered to help Linkous make the permanent move from Hayesville to Knoxville. Months later, on the first Friday in March 2010, DeWitt and Linkous loaded up the songwriter’s belongings and made the 120-mile trip from the mountains to the city, where they joined Minor for a celebratory meal.

On his first morning in Knoxville as a permanent resident—an unseasonably warm winter day—Linkous, not a fan of the locally-sourced eggs or fresh arugula at the table, was treated to a decadent breakfast of bacon, dark chocolate, and espresso.

“A symphony of brown,” Minor says. “He clearly loved it.” 

That day, Linkous got an early start, drinking a fair share of a fifth of Kentucky bourbon. He then received several unnerving texts on his Blackberry and became upset. “It’s not good,” he told Minor and DeWitt without further explanation, according to a police report.

Not long after, he headed up to his room where, unbeknownst to his friends, he had stored a black ITM Arms assault rifle. When he came downstairs, he had on his black baseball cap, flannel shirt, and jacket—underneath was a Sparklehorse T-shirt—and went for a walk. Around 1:15 p.m., Linkous flicked his red lighter, puffed one more cigarette, and sat down on the ground in the winding alley behind Minor’s house. According to a neighbor, Linkous held up the assault rifle with both hands and pressed it against his heart. He clenched the trigger. A single shot rang through the quiet Knoxville neighborhood. He let go of the gun in silence.

“I ran out there and, sure enough, he's sitting on the ground, having shot himself,” Minor says. “It wasn't gruesome. It wasn't even that scary. I was like, ‘Hang in there buddy, you're going to be fine.’”

But the harsh reality of what happened sank in minutes later, when paramedics found Linkous slumped against the foot of a pink door with the gun atop his body and the bullet casing a few feet away. Over a half-dozen Knoxville Police Department officers roped off the alley with yellow caution tape, questioned his friends, and later notified Teresa. According to his toxicology report, Linkous’ blood alcohol content was recorded at 0.43, over five times Tennessee’s legal driving limit. Benzodiazepines and antidepressants were detected in his system. The final police report simply described his motive: “To satisfy personal need or desire.”

“May his journey be peaceful, happy, and free,” his family said in a statement after his death. “There's a heaven and there's a star for you."

Two weeks later, Linkous’ memorial drew people from around the world to the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond—the same building where Bryan Harvey’s life was honored—reconnecting his family, musicians, and friends from different parts of his life. In lieu of flowers, contributions made in the songwriter’s name were sent to the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, a nonprofit that offers assistance to musicians in need of medical care. Persson, attempting to hold back tears, performed one of Linkous’ most optimistic numbers, “It’s a Wonderful Life”. The ceremony was filled with people whose lives Linkous had touched—even if he couldn’t see it himself.

“That's the sad thing about Mark,” Persson says. “He apologized for his presence all the time, in every way. He doubted himself. Most people tried to help him get that he was fantastic, and that was something that was very clear in the funeral.” Stars of the Lid founder Adam Wiltzie—a one-time sound engineer for Sparklehorse who also backed Linkous onstage in 2007—flew from Belgium to attend the funeral. He remembers drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon with Minor in the parking lot and reflecting on the surreal moment he and his friends suspected could happen someday but never fully prepared for.

“I don’t remember any anger at all,” Wiltzie says. “Just sadness.”

That same month, EMI finally settled its Dark Night of the Soul legal dispute with Brian Burton, and the collaboration officially arrived in record stores to positive reviews in July 2010. Artists indebted to Linkous’ influence hosted tribute shows in his honor across the globe, from Asheville to Australia. Persson, backed by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, performed an elegant rendition of Linkous’ song “St. Mary” in front of thousands. Meanwhile, the Linkous family refused to authorize documentary films or tribute albums. Box of Stars, a nonprofit promoting awareness about mental health, was forced to cancel a crowd-funded Sparklehorse covers compilation set to feature the Flaming Lips and Dinosaur Jr. despite raising over $46,000 for the charitable cause.

Eventually, Albini handed over the final Sparklehorse session tapes to Linkous’ estate (through an attorney, members of the estate declined multiple requests for comment for this story). Because Linkous only recorded scratch vocals and didn’t finish his lyrics during the Albini session, the album may never be released. Hamilton wonders if those rough takes could be combined with the microcassettes on which Linkous frequently captured sonic snippets. Minor agrees such an effort isn’t out of the question, though, he adds, “It wouldn’t be a Sparklehorse record.”

In the years since his death, Linkous’ most cherished belongings have made their way into the hands of his closest friends. Lorenzton purchased the motorcycles, including Linkous’ beloved Moto Guzzi. Brian Burton’s studio is now home to three of Linkous’ old guitars, including a 1960s Gibson ES-330 that has made appearances on subsequent records including Broken Bells’ After the Disco. Two years ago, Teresa gave Linkous’ Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard to the Flaming Lips’ Steven Drozd. “I just started fucking crying,” says Drozd. “It’s my most cherished musical possession.” And the old Flickinger console, which Linkous had struggled to restore, is fully functioning at yet another old friend’s studio in Richmond, capturing the sounds of songs awaiting to be heard.