![mark lanegan dark mark vs skeleton joe mark lanegan dark mark vs skeleton joe](https://i0.wp.com/rockandrollfables.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/786883.jpg)
Spiritually and emotionally, it’s been very good for me.Ī great discovery we both made during the pandemic was ordering from the incredible punk/giallo catalog of Atom Age Industries and getting fun T-shirt packages in the mail. I dunno if I’ll stay here forever, but it suits me for now. But the weather does change very quickly over here - I can wake up and it would be sunny as fuck, and five minutes later it’s just pouring rain. So that’s what’s kept me sane, basically. But you can still walk all day and never see anybody because it’s that big. And I got a bicycle, and I walk every day, and this park is just an amazing, giant expanse, and it’s filled with bike paths and foot trails, and people are out there every day. We had foxes and weasels and deer, literally coming up to our door every day. And it was just a trip after 23 years in Los Angeles. And when I told him what I was planning, he said, “You should just take my house and chill there!” And when I got there, I saw all the physical beauty of this place, with this amazing national park and three huge lakes and all the mountains and the trees. But I have a good pal, Donal Logue, who had a house in County Kerry that was just sitting empty. And my plan was to quarantine for a couple of weeks in a Dublin hotel and then move on to Portugal. But since Ireland was the only place taking us, I bought a ticket to Dublin. And I’d sold my house, I’d put all my shit in storage, and I was really on my way to Portugal. Ireland was the only place in Europe that was accepting United States citizens in August of last year. But also with the pandemic, the Trump administration, and all that shit, it just became this huge fucking whirlwind of shit. I was involved in some shit that I shouldn’t have been involved in, but that’s the story of my life. I was sleeping in the big chair with three handguns in my lap and a shotgun leaning against my leg. I was sleeping in the studio every day because there were only two entrances there that I needed to cover, as opposed to the nine inside the house. Well, there was about a month when I was getting really out there on the edge. I have to leave!” And I really didn’t care where I went.ĭo you remember exactly how and when you made that decision? But this is why I finally said, “Fuck it. And if we’re lucky, we’ll both croak before the big end. I think this is all just the big wind-down. And now climate change is set to kill us all. But it seems like in America, we’ve learned nothing. SPIN: You’d think we’d have learned a lot from the pandemic, maybe acquired some grace or dignity. He might have looked like he was walking on air, but in reality, he was screaming from the sky in a jumble of molten wax and feathers as if California itself - which he now equates with Margaret Atwood’s dystopian Republic of Gilead - was out to do him in. Currently, he’s in the process of demoing his next solo foray. He published his gritty Sing Backwards and Weep autobiography, issued a stunning companion-volume album, Straight Songs of Sorrow, that essentially provided its soundtrack, put out a poetry book, and, as Black Phoebe, even cut an EP with his vocalist wife Shelley Brien.
![mark lanegan dark mark vs skeleton joe mark lanegan dark mark vs skeleton joe](https://i0.wp.com/stitchedsound.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/untitled-264.jpg)
Creatively, 2020 turned out to be a banner year for Lanegan. The Icarus reference isn’t entirely inapt.
![mark lanegan dark mark vs skeleton joe mark lanegan dark mark vs skeleton joe](https://www.godisinthetvzine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/unnamed-167.jpg)
![mark lanegan dark mark vs skeleton joe mark lanegan dark mark vs skeleton joe](https://balkanrock.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/12.jpg)
Because we did the bulk of it right in the midst of the pandemic, when things were getting crazy in Los Angeles and I was getting, uh, too close to the sun.” “More than any other record I’ve ever made, it totally has the feel of a time and a place for me. “But when I heard it played back, fully sequenced and mixed the other day, it just put me right back in L.A., and I was like, ‘Whoa!’” he says. The album, released on October 15, is exactly the way his fans have wanted to hear him for years, and he’s found the perfect spooky foil in Cardamone. A couple of months ago he put the finishing touches on the decidedly Gothic disc, letting his deep, sepulchral croon darken the Sisters of Mercy shadings of “No Justice,” “Living Dead,” “Sanctified,” and “Turning In Reverse.” When he ominously murmurs lines like “I woke to find a spider bite/ So infected I was paralyzed,” joining forces with Skeleton Joe makes good Halloween sense. “The ‘Skeleton Joe’ record was almost finished when I left Los Angeles, and I just had four more songs to sing,” Lanegan sighs, phoning from his pastoral new home in County Kerry, Ireland, where he moved in August 2020. Trouble is, that isn’t necessarily a good thing. He doesn’t want to sound Aleister Crowley-mystical, but ex-Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan truly believes that there’s a certain magical energy coursing through the sinister grooves of Dark Mark vs Skeleton Joe, his new full-length collaboration with former Icarus Line anchor Joe Cardamone, using the longtime aliases they’ve adopted for various projects and performances.