Mark Lanegan, Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age singer, dies at 57

Mark Lanegan, a singer for Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age and an integral part of the 1980s and 1990s grunge scene in the Pacific Northwest, died Tuesday at his home in Killarney, Ireland. He was 57.

SKH Music, a management company, confirmed his death in a statement but did not specify a cause.

In the statement, SKH Music called Lanegan “a beloved singer, songwriter, author and musician.”

Although his stints in Screaming Trees, Queens of the Stone Age and the Gutter Twins never brought him the kind of fame achieved by Nirvana and Soundgarden, other Seattle grunge bands, he was known for his deep, world-weary voice that could take a song to soaring heights and melancholy lows.

He met the founding members of Screaming Trees in high school, and the band released its first album in 1986, with an aesthetic that married flannel shirts and long hair with angsty songs and rasping guitars.

The band pioneered a sound fusing heavy metal and punk rock — a genre later known as grunge — and helped bring it to the mainstream, releasing hits like “Nearly Lost You” in 1992 and “All I Know” in 1996. The Seattle grunge scene found critical success in the 1990s, by which time the Screaming Trees were a key player but not a marquee act.

In 1996, after the band released its seventh album in 10 years, it took a hiatus while Lanegan worked on his third solo album, according to a biography of the band on allmusic.com. Screaming Trees never quite picked up its momentum again and disbanded in 2000.

He later joined the ever-changing lineup of Queens of the Stone Age, earning two Grammy Award nominations with the band in 2002 and 2003.

In an interview with the YouTube channel FaceCulture in 2012, Lanegan talked about how he liked to preserve the mystery behind the meanings of his songs.

“I would never impose my interpretation of a song on anybody else,” he said, “because for me, the music that I’ve always loved the most is music that nobody told me what it meant.”

Lanegan’s vocals and songwriting skills were respected by critics and other musicians, many of whom he collaborated with. He befriended and worked with singers Isobel Campbell, Greg Dulli, Kurt Cobain and Chris Cornell.

Mark William Lanegan was born Nov. 25, 1964, in Ellensburg, Washington, a small farming city, according to his IMDb page. His parents, Dale and Floy, were teachers, according to his well-received 2020 memoir, “Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir.”

One of his first memories of music, he said in the interview with FaceCulture, was when he was at a fishing pond with his father and heard a song and thought, ‘Oh man, that’s sad-sounding.’ He later discovered that the song was the 1974 track “Love Hurts” by Scottish rock band Nazareth.

Offstage, Lanegan was candid about his drug use and a self-destructive lifestyle. In his memoir, he chronicled his journey from a “self-loathing redneck” to a rock star to a homeless heroin addict. He wrote about how his monthslong battle with COVID-19 confined him to a hospital in “Devil in a Coma,” a memoir he released in December.

He is survived by his wife, Shelley, SKH Music said. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

In July 2019, Lanegan appeared on the podcast “Come to Where I’m From,” where he talked about how humbling it was when fans shared how his music changed their lives.

“It’s kind of hard,” he said, “to think that your music is something that affects other people the way that the music you loved affected you.”

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