“A few years ago, somebody started putting together a box set of my work,” says Lanegan, alluding to One Way Street: The Sub Pop Albums, which was finally released last year. “One of the discs was dedicated to previously unreleased stuff, so that took care of most of what I had in the archive. There’s probably plenty more in there, y’know, for all I know. I used to record a lot of songs, and of course not all of them were going to make it onto the record. That’s not really how I do things anymore – those extra songs usually end up as B-sides to a 7-inch, or maybe I’ll put them on an EP. Those older songs, though, they’re all still out there somewhere, I’m sure.”
The unearthing continued into Lanegan’s latest release, last August’s Houston (Publishing Demos 2002). As the title suggests, the album is a collection of songs recorded by Lanegan and some close friends back in 2002. Some 13 years later, fans were able to hear that session in its entirety thanks to the project’s producer, Alain Johannes.
“Alain has remained a good friend of mine throughout the years,” says Lanegan. “We’d talked about putting it out for a few years now, but every time he had brought it up in the past I already had a new project or a new record that I was looking to put out at the same time. Sometime at the start of last year, Alain sent the songs over again. To my surprise, everything sounded really great and the songs were fine. I had some time, so I just figured ‘Why not?’ It wasn’t all that mysterious, really.”
While he is best known for performing under his own name, Lanegan is also a noted musical collaborator. He was a key part of the first few lineups of Queens of the Stone Age, has recorded with The Gutter Twins (alongside Greg Dulli of The Afghan Whigs and The Twilight Singers), and released three albums with Isobel Campbell and another, Black Pudding, with multi-instrumentalist Duke Garwood. So, what draws Lanegan to working with another performer?
“First and foremost, it’s the music,” he says. “More specifically, it’s the music that they make without me – it’s something that I have to enjoy. The people themselves, too, are very important to the operation. Almost always, it’s someone that I’m well acquainted with. If that’s not the case initially, it certainly is by the time the work is done and the project is finished. It has to be something that I can see my part in. There are rare occasions where a collaboration hasn’t worked out for that very reason – I think I can handle something, and then we’ll get further into the piece and it will become clearer that it’s simply not the case.”
This July, the Mark Lanegan Band are headed to Australia to perform at Splendour In The Grass. It will be Lanegan’s third appearance at the festival, having previously visited in 2009 with The Gutter Twins and in 2013 alongside Isobel Campbell. It’s suggested that he may well be seen as the outlier of the Splendour lineup, an odd-one-out inclusion among more hip and trendy acts.
“Maybe I’m delusional, but I don’t think about it in those terms,” Lanegan laughs. “Naturally, I enjoy a more intimate setting, but I also get something out of the scale of festivals. I’m bringing my band, too, so it will be more fitting to the climate.”
BY DAVID JAMES YOUNG
