Frederick Mark Linkous was born into a family of coal miners in Virginia in 1962, and in the ’80s he moved to New York City and then to Los Angeles in search of success in the music industry. Linkous’s gift for riffs and hooks is readily apparent in the two albums he recorded as the frontman of the Dancing Hoods, but the band never stood out in a sea of other Replacements replacements on ’80s college radio.
Returning to Virginia in the early ’90s, Mark Linkous began making more quirky, homespun recordings heavily influenced by Tom Waits. But the commercial explosion of alternative rock, and the success of his friend David Lowery’s band Cracker, set the stage for Linkous to rise to greater fame with the raw, eccentric sound of his new band Sparklehorse’s debut album Vivadixiesubmarinetransmmissionplot.
For 15 years, Sparklehorse made some of the most uncompromisingly offbeat and lo-fi albums released by a major label in the alt-rock era, never selling in big numbers but garnering the respect of more popular contemporaries like Radiohead and the Flaming Lips. Linkous collaborated with many of his favorite artists and famous fans, including Tom Waits and PJ Harvey on 2001’s It’s a Wonderful Life, and Danger Mouse and David Lynch on 2010’s Dark Night of the Soul. Sadly, before the latter album’s release, Linkous took his own life in Knoxville, Tennessee, in March 2010. Posthumous Sparklehorse music has sporadically appeared over the last 15 years, including the acclaimed 2023 album Bird Machine.Vivadixiesubmarinetransmmissionplot was released August 29, 1995. For the album’s 30th anniversary, we’ve taken a look back at its place in Sparklehorse’s discography.
9. Distorted Ghost EP (2000)
The Good Morning Spider highlight “Chaos of the Galaxy/Happy Man” famously submerged the album’s catchiest chorus in a squall of radio static. Capitol Records attempted to salvage the song’s commercial prospects with a slightly more accessible version, “Happy Man (Memphis Version),” but the remix was neither a hit nor an improvement on the album track. The Distorted Ghost EP is a mixed bag, but “Waiting for Nothing” is an overlooked gem and “My Yoke is Heavy” is the best of the three Daniel Johnston covers that Linkous recorded over the course of Sparklehorse’s career.
8. Chords I’ve Known EP (1996)
Chords I’ve Known is another EP that packages a slightly more radio-friendly remix of an album track, in this case “Heart of Darkness (Wiggly Version),” with a few B-sides. “Dead Opera Star” is a strange and funny singalong, and “The Hatchet Song” is probably Linkous’s finest piano ballad, making Chords I’ve Known about as memorable and enjoyable as a 10-minute stopgap release can get.
7. Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain (2006)
In 2006, Linkous released the first Sparklehorse album in five years, but more than one-third of the music on Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain was recorded for It’s a Wonderful Life, and had been previously released on editions of that album or its singles. Linkous was frank about the situation in an interview with Pitchfork, saying, “I’d quit working for a while, and it started to get really difficult to live and pay the rent. So it was really getting down to the wire where I had to turn a record in.” There are flashes of brilliance on “Knives of Summertime” and “Don’t Take My Sunshine Away,” but Sparklehorse’s fourth album feels like an incomplete artistic statement, compromised by real-life necessities.
6. In the Fishtank 15 with Fennesz (2009)
From 1996 to 2009, the Dutch indie label and distributor Konkurrent curated the In the Fishtank series. Most of the EPs and albums in the series featured two or three artists (like Tortoise and the Ex, or Low and the Dirty Three) that were passing through the Netherlands on tour and given two days of studio time to spontaneously collaborate. Linkous worked with Austrian producer Christian Fennesz for the final In the Fishtank, an apt pairing of two artists who were both great at making music with guitars as well as glitchy electronics. Linkous sings softly on “Goodnight Sweetheart” and “If My Heart,” but In the Fishtank 15 consists largely of noisy, exploratory instrumentals like the 11-minute “NC Bongo Buddy.”
5. Dark Night of the Soul with Danger Mouse (2010)
Linkous fell in love with Danger Mouse’s 2004 Jay-Z/Beatles remix project The Grey Album, and soon learned that the Georgia hip-hop producer was a Sparklehorse fan. They collaborated on three songs on Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain before embarking on an ambitious and star-studded collaboration album, to be packaged with a book of photography by filmmaker David Lynch. Guests including Iggy Pop, Julian Casablancas, Black Francis, Suzanne Vega, and Lynch himself sang over Linkous and Danger Mouse’s otherworldly soundscapes. A legal dispute between Danger Mouse and EMI Records delayed Dark Night of the Soul’s official release for over a year, and in that time both Linkous and “Grim Augury” vocalist Vic Chesnutt committed suicide, making that song an even more chilling listen. “For a record that required so much effort, too much here feels incidental,” Jon Caramanica wrote in the New York Times review of Dark Night of the Soul.
4. Bird Machine (2023)
In the decade after Linkous’s death and Dark Night of the Soul’s release, fairly little posthumous music trickled out, just three songs he’d made with Azure Ray, Danger Mouse, and MF Doom. Documentary and tribute album projects stalled, apparently blocked by his estate. And then in 2023 there was a thrilling and unexpected announcement: 14 new songs Linkous wrote in the last two years of his life, most of them recorded with punk legend Steve Albini, would arrive on a final Sparklehorse album. His brother and sister-in-law, Matt and Melissa Linkous, who had both played in live Sparklehorse lineups, sorted through a treasure trove of unreleased recordings to complete an album in line with his original vision. While posthumously assembled albums often offer frustratingly incomplete sketches, Bird Machine feels fully realized, even eschewing the kinds of brief song fragments and instrumental experiments that Mark Linkous peppered albums with when he was live. It feels like a small miracle that we received a fresh crop of great Sparklehorse songs like “It Will Never Stop” and “Chaos of the Universe” so long after their author left this world.
3. It’s a Wonderful Life (2001)
Dave Fridmann produced some of the most acclaimed alternative rock albums of the Y2K era, including several by the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev, two bands that Sparklehorse toured with and was frequently compared to. So it felt like a perfect pairing for Fridmann to produce Sparklehorse’s third album, and his signature booming drum sound propels “Piano Fire” featuring PJ Harvey, by far Sparklehorse’s most popular track on streaming services today. “Musing, eerie and oddly lovely, It’s a Wonderful Life is almost minimalist – it captures fleeting moments in a few chords and peculiarly evocative phrases,” Arion Berger wrote in the Rolling Stone review of the album.
2. Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot (1995)
Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot featured one chugging, irresistible rocker, “Someday I Will Treat You Good,” that became Sparklehorse’s only charting single on American rock radio, and functioned as a welcoming gateway to the album’s surreal garden of cryptic lyrics and hissy home recordings. On “Hammering the Cramps,” Linkous drops a reference to Captain Howdy, one of the names that the demon Pazuzu is known by in the horror classic The Exorcist, and Captain Howdy continued to make cameos on future Sparklehorse albums. “Linkous broadcasts his perambulatory fugues and ‘Dear Prudence’ balladry from some right scary places: the George Romero farmhouse of ‘Weird Sisters,’ the desolation basement of ‘Spirit Ditch,’ the lo-fi parlor of ‘Most Beautiful Widow in Town,’” Jeffrey Rotter wrote in the SPIN review of Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot.
1. Good Morning Spider (1998)
Sparklehorse was riding high on the success of “Someday I Will Treat You Good” in 1996 and opening some of Radiohead’s U.K. dates in support of The Bends when Linkous narrowly survived a harrowing ordeal. Knocked out by a combination of antidepressants and insomnia medication, Linkous collapsed in a hotel room and injured his legs to the point that he required a wheelchair for several months. The album Linkous created after recuperating is his magnum opus, a sprawling 17-track album that includes a fragile ballad about his London hospital stay (“Saint Mary”), an anthem co-written with Lowery that previously appeared on a Cracker album (“Sick of Goodbyes”), a blistering punk rager (“Pig”), and lots of gorgeous orchestral pop and bleary, fuzzed out experiments with synths and drum machines.
