Cold Cave's Wesley Eisold teams with Mark Lanegan for Plague Poems

Wesley and Mark spent the past two months composing verse for their new book, Plague Poems, which follows the release of Mark's new album and memoir.  

Here's the scoop from Wesley...
"Thrilled to announce our new book, Plague Poems – a set of poems written by the great Mark Lanegan and myself. Plague Poems is a collection of 23 poems written by each, for love - lost, losing, and even sometimes found. Written in February and March of 2020, the sub-conscious presents a narrative of love in the end of days. This is Mark’s first collection of poetry and on my end, these are the poems I’ve always wanted to write but couldn't until now. Undoubtedly you will understand why once it's read." 丰

You can pre-order a perfect-bound copy of Plague Poems signed by the authors directly from Heartworm Press right here.

There's more on the way from Mark Lanegan

Mark Lanegan has also finished his memoir, Sing Backwards And Weep which is due from Da Capo Press on April 28th followed by a new album, Straight Songs Of Sorrow out May 8th on Heavenly Recordings. Evidently, Lanegan's new recording was inspired by the process of self-examination which came with telling his life story.

The book is a brutal, nerve-shredding read, thanks to Lanegan’s unsparing candor in recounting a journey from troubled youth in eastern Washington, through his drug-stained existence amid the ’90s Seattle rock scene, to an unlikely salvation at the dawn of the 21st century. There’s death and tragedy, yet also humor and hope, thanks to the tenacity which impels its host, even at his lowest moments.

Today, Lanegan is a renowned songwriter and a much-coveted collaborator, as adept at electronica as with rock, constantly honing his indomitable voice: an asphalt-laced linctus for the soul. While the memoir documents a struggle to find peace with himself, his new album emphasises the extent to which he came to realize that music is his life.

“Writing the book, I didn’t get catharsis,” he chuckles. “All I got was a Pandora’s box full of pain and misery. I went way in, and remembered shit I’d put away 20 years ago. But I started writing these songs the minute I was done, and I realised there was a depth of emotion because they were all linked to memories from this book. It was a relief to suddenly go back to music. Then I realized that was the gift of the book: these songs. I’m really proud of this record.”

Straight Songs Of Sorrow combines musical trace elements from early Mark Lanegan albums with the synthesized constructs of later work. The meditative acoustic guitar fingerpicking – provided by Lamb Of God’s Mark Morton – on "Apples From A Tree" and "Hanging On (For DRC)" echo 1994’s "Whiskey For The Holy Ghost". Yet one of that record’s touchstones was Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, echoed in the new album’s opener "I Wouldn’t Want To Say", where Lanegan extemporizes à la Ballerina over musique concrète wave patterns generated by his latest favorite compositional tool, a miniature computer-synth called the Organelle. The lyric clings onto the music, emulating his book’s queasy momentum: “Swinging from death… to revival.”

“That song is the explanation, the beginning and middle and end of that entire period of time,” Mark says. “The encapsulation of the entire experience, book and record. So I started with that.”

Lanegan affirms that every song references a specific episode or person in the book, albeit some more explicitly than others. "Hanging On (For DRC)" is a loving ode to his friend Dylan Carlson, genius progenitor of drone metal and a fellow unlikely survivor of Seattle’s narcotic dramas. “I was always unhappy, and he was the guy who was always smiling, even through my crazy schemes that eventually got both of us into a lot of trouble.”

"At Zero Below" features two of the album’s many stellar guests. Singing admonitory harmonies with himself is Greg Dulli, another ’90s alt-rock veteran, Lanegan’s erstwhile partner in mischief and fellow Gutter Twin. The song’s incantatory fiddle is played by The Bad Seeds’ Warren Ellis. No lesser figure than Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones provides Mellotron on the serpentine "Ballad Of A Dying Rover". Aside from mandolin, all "Daylight In The Nocturnal House’s" cobwebbed atmospherics are by Portishead’s Adrian Utley. Ed Harcourt is Lanegan’s pick for album MVP (“He’s all over it – everything that he plays, piano or Wurlitzer, becomes magical”), with special mention to bassist Jack Bates, son of Peter Hook; that duo make especially distinctive contributions to Churchbells, Ghosts a bleakly humorous lament to the drudgery of life on the road.

The material on the last two Mark Lanegan Band albums had Lanegan’s words set to music by various other sources. But aside from the Mark Morton collaborations, Straight Songs Of Sorrow was built from the ground up by Lanegan alone, aided by producer Alain Johannes, his longtime consigliere. Only two other songs have shared credits, and even these stay in-house: "Burying Ground" and "Eden Lost And Found" were co-written by Mark’s wife Shelley Brien, with whom he also duets on the Rita Coolidge/Kris Kristofferson-style ballad "This Game Of Love". “Let’s put it this way,” says Mark. “Every girlfriend I’ve ever had, for any amount of time, left me. All the good ones left me! Until my current wife. It was great to sing that with Shelley, it really shows she’s a great singer. And it has a depth of emotion that I’m not used to. This is a more honest record than I’ve probably ever made.”

And indeed, there is a happy ending to this story. Just as his book closes with the hero overcoming adversity and turning, battered but cleansed, towards a new day, so Straight Songs Of Sorrow closes with "Eden Lost And Found". “Sunrise coming up baby/To burn the dirt right off of me,” marvels Lanegan, with his words echoed by Simon Bonney of Crime & The City Solution, an all-time hero. “I wanted to make a positive song to end this record, because that’s the way the book ended,” Mark says. “And what’s more positive than to have your favorite singer sing with you?”

Listen to the lead track "Bleed All Over" and "Stockholm City Blues" below. Pre-order Straight Songs Of Sorrow right here.