The gruff and gravelly voiced grunge singer Mark Lanegan was a solo artist, frontman for the Screaming Trees and participant in other bands like Mad Season and Queens of the Stone Age. Also a celebrated author, Lanegan sadly passed away in 2022 due to complications from COVID-19.
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If you ever spoke to Lanegan, you knew his wisdom and his folk mysticism. At times surly, at other times prolific, the Ellensburg, Washington-born creative spirit shone brightly with him.
[RELATED: 4 Songs You Didn’t Know Mark Lanegan Wrote for Other Artists]
So, with so much success and history, one might wonder just what Lanegan was like. What did he say outside of his songs about life and love, his craft and the world at large? Well, that is the subject of today’s inquiry. Here below are the 20 best Mark Lanegan quotes.
1. “I can’t say what people use the experience of listening to songs for, but I would never tell somebody what it is supposed to mean. That defeats the purpose of making it. Hopefully, whoever connects with it connects with it in their own way, and it can mean whatever it is supposed to mean to them.”
2. “Doing something that’s physical but not necessarily mentally taxing—for me, it frees me up creatively.”
3. “No one would hang out with me if I didn’t have music to make.”
4. “I had a lot of jobs when I was younger. Where I grew up, there was a lot of agricultural jobs, so I worked on a lot of farms. I worked in the pea fields, harvesting peas.”
5. “Me and Kurt Cobain were both listening to a bunch of Lead Belly and diggin’ it. We thought, ‘Let’s do an EP of all Lead Belly songs.’ We did a couple, and both of us were like, ‘Nah, this is a bad concept.’ We set it aside.”
6. “All the guys I know that play guitar are also secretly drummers and vice versa.”
7. “When I think of a hit, I think of Madonna.”
8. “It’s satisfying and gratifying to make your own music, but I personally don’t get the same enjoyment out of the music that I make as I do from somebody else’s music that I like.”
9. “I don’t think I’ve ever gotten to the point where I sent out Christmas cards! But if I did, they would have to feature my pets, that’s for sure.”
10. “The Trees was four complete nuts. We didn’t have a damn thing in common except insanity. So we fought a lot. And we had two brothers—who fought like brothers.”
11. “Nobody likes to believe that they need anybody’s help in anything, and the smarter you are—and I’m not smart—or the tougher you are—and at times I thought I was pretty tough—the more trouble you have.”
12. “I grew up in a small, rural community, where my extended family were mountain-folk type people, and some were very religious.”
13. “I was listening to punk rock in the ’70s as a young kid, but all by myself; I never met anyone that listened to that kind of music. Just by chance, I was in detention, and one of the guys in the class was [future Screaming Trees bassist] Van Conner. … I started talking to him and found out that we listened to some of the same music.”
14. “I don’t really take time off between records; it’s a compulsion for me.”
15. “When I was a kid, I got caught shoplifting by a store security guard in Ellensburg. The next time I saw that store guard was when I got thrown in jail again—this time for not paying court fees. The guy happened to be in jail, too, right next to me. That’s what Eastern Washington is like—you never get too far away from anybody.”
16. “As far as I remember, I don’t have any warrants out for my arrest anymore. I can travel without fear.”
17. “I’m about creating a body of work and moving on to the next thing.”
18. “I worked as a breakfast cook in a lot of different restaurants.”
19. “I’d wear nice clothes and brush my teeth more often if I cared about what people thought.”
20. “I think when people hear your music, sometimes they get deeply attached to it and think they know something about you, that you’re kindred spirits or something.”
Photo by Jordi Vidal/WireImage
