Music
by Jewly Hight
Playing Friday, Sept. 8 at Mercy Lounge
A four-album span should be plenty of time to gain a glimpse into an artist’s world, but not so with Sparklehorse. Since debuting in 1995 with Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, Mark Linkous—the soft-spoken, Virginia-bred creative force behind the band—has often teetered on the tenuous footing of artistic brilliance.
One gets the sense that Linkous’ mind is virtually impenetrable, and that he doesn’t really care what anyone reads into his exquisitely meandering, lo-fi pop songs. “It’s usually just conscious abstract imagery, I guess, or just trying to be poetic so people can interpret stuff for themselves,” Linkous says. “I’m just not that good at writing literally.”
In the same brief conversation, he admits to bouts of severe depression and describes the unorthodox inspiration for the instrumental title track of his new album—the song was born out of his forgetfully leaving guitar amplifiers on overnight. But if Linkous’ music has elicited any laughably odd interpretations, he wouldn’t know. “I don’t read any kind of music magazines or anything, and I don’t listen to that much music, actually, that even has singing in it. I mostly just listen to electronic stuff.”
Speaking of which, he could easily blame the delayed completion of the latest album—Dream for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain—on the faulty vintage mixing console he purchased for his studio, Static King. “All the Ohio Players albums were done on it,” he says. “Apparently a whole mess of hit records was done on it. But I don’t know, because the guy who sold it to me totally lied and said it was in great shape, but it was completely unusable when I bought it. Then the guy died, so I had no recourse, but I felt better. It’s taken probably five years to get enough of it working to make a record on, but the parts that work sound great.”
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Gear repair is only half of the story behind the record. There’s also the matter of Linkous living in a secluded rural setting where solitude is all too plentiful. “It can be good and bad,” he says. “It’s bad, because you can isolate yourself and become a total recluse and go crazy, which is one of the reasons it took five years to do this album.”
The songs on Light Years evoke hazy dream sequences. Linkous’ voice is a frail and intimate instrument, sometimes garbled as a result of his altering the tape speed in order to nail high parts. Songs like “Don’t Take My Sunshine Away” (his revision of the standard “You Are My Sunshine”), “Some Sweet Day,” “Ghost In the Sky” and “It’s Not So Hard” are eerily cheerful, simultaneously earthy and phantasmagoric.
When it comes to recording, Linkous is a self-confessed loner. He invited producer-of-the-moment and Gnarls Barkley co-mastermind Dangermouse into the studio, but hardly let him get at the controls. “I’m still really—I don’t know—probably overly protective about stuff, and that’s one of the reasons we’re going to do like a proper collaboration thing,” he says. “We’re supposed to start in a couple months recording a Dangerhorse record or something.”
On occasion, Linkous has produced projects for other artists, including Nina Persson’s A Camp, Daniel Johnston’s Fear Yourself and the tribute album Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered. Johnston, also known for being convolutedly brilliant and beyond quirky, attracted Linkous as something of a kindred spirit.
“I had been living with his music for a long time, the cassettes mostly, that he did alone in the early ’80s, and I was always really scared to actually approach him to work with him,” Linkous recalls. “I asked my mother to call his house to see if it was the right number, I think, or if they still lived there, and she ended up talking to his mother Mabel. So like Mabel and my mother became pen pals for 10 years before Daniel and I ever spoke.”
Linkous certainly isn’t one to sugarcoat the stories that he tells. Only once does he pause to consider the potential impact of his answer, and even then he remains utterly frank. “Ah, well, um, I could either tell a lie or the truth.”