MARK LANEGAN
Field Songs
(Sub Pop)
****

The emotional centerpiece of Mark Lanegan's Field Songs is "Low," a folk song played on acoustic guitar, overlaid with bluesy interludes and a sad Hammond organ. "Blood is all there is," Lanegan sings, his voice whiskeyed, pained, and almost preternaturally masculine. "Lord, you know where I've been." For all its lyricism, the song is uncannily deadpan: "Tell her I wanted to say good-bye before the light was dead and gone. Tell her I didn't want to lie."

None of the easy humor that graces much of the record is present here; "Low" seems in part to be a song for the walking dead and the memory of those who have passed on, penned by a man who has himself experienced a sort of resurrection. Lanegan is more sober and introspective on Field Songs than in his prior work as a solo artist and with his former band, Screaming Trees. The song closes with the lyric, "If you have ever been skeleton low/If you have ever heard somebody say/Baby, baby don't you know about love...." This is the voice of a grown man looking back on his own life and seeing himself as a different person, previously addled with and surrounded by the rampant drug abuse that saturated Seattle's ruinous grunge years.

Surviving the mean, heroin-scarred times that saw him produce more than 10 records with the Screaming Trees and solo, Lanegan has managed to become a quintessential American songwriter. Like Tom Waits, Lanegan's voice is finely characterized by the willful treatment of smoke and booze during years of hard living--ravaged and rich with character, the voice in which he actually speaks. Lanegan, in fact, has two singing voices. The second is more feminine, and less interesting to listen to (as on the song "Pill Hill Serenade")--effective in punctuating a chorus, like the one in "Low," but otherwise lacking the charm of the man's experience.

This is an intimate record, full of death ("When all is done and turned to dust/And insects nest inside my bones/I see..." from "No Easy Action"), and loneliness on top of death ("As another summer dies/And not a thing in this world to do/Except be alone in it" from "She Done Too Much"). The low, coarse rumble in Lanegan's delivery simultaneously envelops and underscores such themes, conveying a depth of understanding and an acceptance of hard truth.

The voice also allows for a subtlety in Lanegan's more playful moments. On "One Way Street," the album's opener, Lanegan sings, "When I'm dressed in white/ Send roses to me/I drink so much sour whiskey/I can't hardly see," over the lull of piano, guitar, and a gentle drum pattern. When he goes on to sing, "You can't get it down without crying," he is more invested, his voice raised in frustration and apparent helplessness, but the mood of the song itself seems unchanged. Moments such as these--quiet transitions in mood and manner that go virtually unnoticed--have distanced Lanegan from his grunge origins as his solo work has progressed, revealing a masterful ability (both in songwriting and production) to make recorded songs wherein the voice and the instrumentation seem intrinsically blended and complementary. Field Songs is seamless as a result. Nothing feels abrupt or out of place and the album flows as a body of work, as opposed to a collection of songs.

In a phone conversation from somewhere in Los Angeles, where he has been living for the past four years, Lanegan seems both pleased and surprised that anyone has observed anything about his songs at all. He is happy that his sense of humor shows through on Field Songs, especially when made aware of the fact that reviews of the record are calling it sad and depressive: "I'm glad you recognize the humor," he says. "There is a lot of it. How could a record make anyone sad?" But it does. Much of it is sad. Like the song "Fix"--not because the lyrics are so melancholy, but because of the imagery the title evokes and the obvious references to Seattle and to heroin: "Your word in my head/Gonna watch from the balcony/Sing backwards and we fix/It's true/Keeps on raining baby."

Though he says Seattle's long winters inspired his move south, one imagines that Lanegan had more than just rain as a motivation for relocating to a sunnier city--a desire for a place less haunted, perhaps. On "She Done Too Much," Lanegan is somber: "Got so sad the day she done too much/And though I had the same/She done too much/ And it's a bad, bad feeling that you get/When you get so lonely...."

Over the phone, Lanegan is charming, cordial, and witty. He laughs upon being asked his age. "I'm 36," he says. "Though I look about 56 now." When asked why that is, he replies, "Clean living?"