srakauno.blogg.se

Since I usually have more than one thing I’m working on at a time, I have to sort of focus on whatever’s right in front of me and work on it.” I’m not somebody who just sits down for the fun of it and writes, although I do enjoy it. “I don’t really do something unless there’s a project I’m working at … I don’t really write songs unless it’s for a reason. “If I’m writing a book, I’ll sit down specifically to write for it,” and emphasises that he always writes with an aim toward finishing a book or an album. I write on my phone or an iPad.” Writing poetry, prose, and songs are different processes, he explains.

“You have to have a thought before you can put it down on something. Thinking about how so many of the poems in Leaving California illumine experiences of wandering in a pandemic, I ask Lanegan if he starts writing in his mind before he puts anything to print. Second editions of both Plague Poems and Leaving California were published in October 2021 and are available through Eisold’s Heartworm Press. Following Plague Poems, Lanegan wrote Leaving California, a collection that reflects on living in liminality, in fragments. When you’re writing an actual book, there’s no freedom,” he laughs. It’s more akin to songwriting, there’s a freedom in it. But I think I’ve gotten a little better at it since then. “My first go at it was kind of lyrics masquerading as poetry. Throughout the book, Lanegan’s poems are haunted-by loss, by anger, and by the strange and prescient spectres of judgment days to come. But in 2020, Wes Eisold suggested we do a book of poetry together, and he encouraged me to start writing poetry.” That book is Plague Poems, a powerful assemblage that’s split between Lanegan’s words in the first half and Eisold’s in the second. But every time I tried to do it, it just didn’t seem to work for me. “Poetry is something I’ve kind of secretly dreamed of doing since I was a kid, dreamed that I might be able to write. Before he moved to Ireland, he started publishing his poetry. Lanegan has been so staggeringly prolific in the years of the pandemic, before and after the experience recounted in Devil in a Coma. But I didn’t start drawing until about a year ago. “A couple of records ago, I started designing my own record covers for better or worse. “I took one day of art class in high school and my art teacher told me I had no imagination and to get out of the room,” Lanegan says and laughs. I asked him if he’s been painting and drawing for a while now, or if it’s something new. There’s a 500-copy limited edition of Devil in a Coma that’s accompanied by a 12-inch print of one of the singer’s artworks. So when I started writing this, and it was shaping up to possibly be a book, I told him about it.” “Lee is always encouraging me to write,” Lanegan tells me, “no matter what it is. “So I started writing it while I was still in the process of getting better.” After all the accolades for Sing Backwards and Weep, it seems only natural that Devil in a Coma, too, would be published by White Rabbit. Was it cathartic to write another memoir, to revisit that horrifying personal experience of the pandemic? “I actually started writing it while I was still going through it because I had months of hospitalisation and … a bit of time on my hands,” Lanegan laughs. His new memoir Devil in a Coma recounts through vignettes his terrifying experience with Covid-19, nearly dying in a hospital in Kerry. Recently, Lanegan has begun publishing prose and poetry – a sonic and textual virtuoso.

There have been so many dazzling collaborations in the last twenty years, too, with Queens of the Stone Age, Isobel Campbell, Duke Garwood, and more. You might have listened intently to albums like Bubblegum or Blues Funeral, enamoured with those post-Screaming Trees sounds, or Straight Songs of Sorrow, the at once fierce and melancholy musical companion to Sing Backwards and Weep. In that time and since, he has recorded more than a dozen solo records.

Lanegan co-founded the band with Gary Lee Conner, Van Conner, and Mark Pickerel in Ellensberg, Washington in 1985 and was the frontman until 2000, when Screaming Trees officially broke up. My introduction to Mark Lanegan came through Screaming Trees in the ‘90s, probably like a lot of fans of my generation. Is this still a good time? “Yeah,” he says, in his gravelly, quiet voice. A few seconds later his number appeared as an incoming call. I nervously typed the digits of Mark Lanegan’s Ireland number into my phone and pressed the green call button. I spoke with the great singer about his prose and poetry, musical collaborations, the writing process, and the changing of the seasons. The book arrives just a little over a year after the release of Sing Backwards and Weep, Rough Trade’s 2020 Book of the Year. This December, White Rabbit will publish Devil in a Coma, a new memoir by Mark Lanegan.