Story by Andrew
Sparklehorse’s
Mark Linkous’ suicide was hardly a complete shock: the man had known serious
hardship, physical and mental illness and debilitating chemical dependencies to
a degree that few could be expected to handle for long. Even without knowing
his biography, the most affecting moments on Sparklehorse’s four albums all
seemed to be raging desperately to find some light in the gathering darkness.
And I contend that nothing captures the rage, sorrow, bloody-minded hope
and heightened physical stress of desperate depression and heartbreak like the
unhinged ‘Happy Man’, from Sparklehorse’s ‘Distorted Ghost’ EP in 2000.
From
the lo-fi sonics to the off-kilter drumming to the hazy stream-of-consciousness
lyric (“I woke up in a horses’ stomach one foggy morning” isn’t a line one
expects in popular music), this is a song that I adored then as much as I do
now. My ex-wife utterly hated it, though: in fact, it was one of the very
few songs that she would angrily switch off if I played it in our house. Maybe
she had an inkling that, when our marriage finally sputtered out, it would be
Linkous’ desperate insistence that all he wanted was to be a happy man that I
would take so much to heart as I entered my own long dark night of the soul.
It
gave me a lot of strength at the time, but the unfortunate coda – performed
with a self-inflicted rifle shot to the heart in an alleyway in Knoxville,
Tennessee in March 2010 – is a sobering reminder that a song, no matter how
powerful and important, is still only a song.
Artwork by Karin
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