5 years…

…ago today we lost Mark. It’s hard to believe so much time has passed. It’s taken a long time to come to terms with his loss. Mark was many things. A very talented musician. A gifted composer both in terms of melody and lyrics. His ability to evoke deep emotions from his economical use of words was one of his extraordinary talents. And his skills crossed over into the technical aspect of music making. He was a skillful producer, engineer, and almost a magician at times, taking outdated recording technology, things he found in junkyards and fixing them and giving them new life as a way to help create his unique sounds. And by all accounts an extraordinarily kind, gentle and humble man.

But on the 5th year anniversary of Mark’s leaving us, we’d like to focus less on mourning his loss, and more on celebrating his life. To that end, we’ve compiled a tribute to Mark that we hope you’ll all enjoy. We scraped high and low for photos. One or more of yours may show up here. And if so we hope you’ll forgive our appropriating the various images we’ve found to help memorialize Mark today.

 

It’s A Wonderful Video…

We shared this extraordinary unofficial video for It’s A Wonderful Life on our Facebook page a few weeks ago but it was just too good not to share here as well!

We would love to know who made this…if anyone out there can help please get in touch…

Someday…

Tonight’s featured video is a great recent live performance of Someday I Will Treat You Good by Rob Williams and his band:

Rob used to front Richmond based Joe Buck Jr who covered the song back in 1996 on their debut album Used To Be Somebody…

“The cover was added at the last minute as Mark Linkous fell ill while on tour in Europe. The plan was for local bands to record versions of his songs to send to him in the hospital to let him know we were thinking of him. I don’t know if the tape was ever made for Mark, but we added our cover to the CD.”

In fact this would be the very first time an artist would release a Sparklehorse cover!

(I’m not counting Cracker’s Sick Of Goodbyes or Susanna Hoff’s Happy Place as both predate Mark’s own versions…)

Of course countless more covers have followed over the years…we have attempted to document all those to receive an official release in our Covers section…

Rob Williams’ latest solo album A Place In The Sun was released earlier in the year. Engineered and produced by John Morand at Sound Of Music; the record also features contributions from two more Sparklehorse alumni: Alan Weatherhead and Miguel Rodriguez-Urbiztondo…

Rob Williams