I wrote a piece for Spin this week about Mark Linkous, who passed away on March 6th, 2010, ten years ago today. His music meant a lot to me so I really just wanted to write something, and was playing a bunch of my favorite songs while I was doing that and put this playlist together.

Sparklehorse deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Box Of Stars (Part One)
2. Comfort Me
3. Tears On Fresh Fruit
4. Painbirds
5. Shade And Honey
6. Dead Opera Star
7. Weird Sisters
8. Ghost Of His Smile
9. Dog Door
10. Grim Augury with Danger Mouse and Vic Chesnutt
11. Mountains
12. Hammering The Cramps
13. Junebug
14. More Yellow Birds
15. Waiting For Nothing
16. Sad And Beautiful World
17. King Of Nails
18. Daddy's Gone with Danger Mouse and Nina Persson
19. Hundreds Of Sparrows
20. It's Not So Hard
21. Cow
22. Little Bastard Choo Choo
23. Goodnight Sweetheart with Fennesz
24. Box Of Stars (Part Two)

Tracks 3, 7, 12, 16, 21 and 22 from Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot (1995)
Track 6 from the Chords I've Known EP (1996)
Tracks 1, 4, 13, 19 and 24 from Good Morning Spider (1998)
Track 15 from the Distorted Ghost EP (2000)
Tracks 2, 9, 14 and 17 from It's A Wonderful Life (2001)
Tracks 5, 11 and 20 from Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain (2006)
Track 23 from In The Fishtank 15 with Fennesz (2009)
Tracks 10 and 18 from Dark Night Of The Soul with Danger Mouse (2010)

I adored "Someday I Will Treat You Good" the few times I heard it on the radio or on 120 Minutes in 1996, but I didn't pick up the band's first album until 1999, when I checked out the follow-up and fell in love. I was on acid the first time I listened to Good Morning Spider and that was the beginning of a year of infatuation and listening to Sparklehorse as much as any other band when I was 17. And that record still just gets under my skin, I included all of the last 4 tracks on the album here because that's such a perfect run.

Since Sparklehorse only had 4 proper albums, it was fun to kind of pick through the other projects and find songs that fit well here. Linkous always had some good songs on EPs and singles, and listened to the session with Fennesz that I'd never really checked out before abd revisited Dark Night Of The Soul, which I think I like more now than when it came out. "Grim Augury" is just such a haunting song, knowing both Linkous and Vic Chesnutt committed suicide by the time the album was released, I should really check out more of Chesnutt's records.

"Shade And Honey" is notable for being featured in the 2002 movie Laurel Canyon, where some of the music performed by the fictional band in the film are Sparklehorse songs as sung by actor Alessandra Nivola (Linkous had a brief cameo in the movie, but he doesn't play a member of the band playing his songs, although Lou Barlow does). The Exorcist is one of my favorite movies of all time so I've always been fascinated by Linkous's recurring mentions of Captain Howdy on different records, wanted to put all those songs ("Hammering The Cramps," "Junebug," and "More Yellow Birds") together as a trilogy here. But man, "Hundreds Of Sparrows," "Comfort Me," "Cow," what a songwriter, what a creative guy. There aren't many musician deaths that have hit me harder.

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