#50: "Sea of Teeth" - Sparklehorse
50 down, about 200 more essays about film and music to go! This song, this album, this artist is one of the reasons I make music. Mark was taken from us too soon, but his legacy continues.
Linkous was so overburdened with talent he had to die twice before the game was really up. The first time was in 1996. He was on tour in the UK with Tindersticks when he collapsed in his hotel room, folding his legs under him as he fell, after an overdose of alcohol, antidepressants, heroin and valium. It's worth considering quite how much pain you must be in to ingest those four substances to a point where you black out. When was found 14 hours later, and his limbs were unfurled, he suffered a heart attack and was technically dead for a few minutes. There followed six months in a wheelchair, seven rounds of surgery and a full two years on morphine. His legs never regained their strength. Then, last week, in an alley outside a friend's flat in Knoxville, Tennessee, he shot himself in the heart - Rob Fitzpatrick
The reason I knew there would be a fast turnaround for my 50th entry in the 5 Year Project was because I had just rewatched and wrote about All the Real Girls. There’s a stunning moment of unabashed warmth and intimacy when our two main characters, make out in bed together. The song that plays in the background its entirety is the Sparklehorse song, “Sea of Teeth.” It’s definitely one of my top 20 all-time favorite pieces of music ever made.
I won’t reiterate the love I have for the film again here though I’ll provide a little context. Suffice to say, when that particular song played during that scene, I was taken aback when I first saw the film. Not necessarily because of the surprise factor, it was that specific song that I responded to the most out of all the songs by this band. Like a few other tracks on Sparklehorse’s record, It’s a Wonderful Life, for whatever reason, I instantly well up with tears.
In a film that uses music so beautifully throughout, everything from Will Oldham to Mogwai to The Promise Ring, I still think about the choice to use “Sea of Teeth” during a moment of stark vulnerability between lovers getting to know each other physically and attempting to get comfortable. As I said in my last entry, I never was that close to my object of affection in real life, so in essence, the movie feels like a fantasy, an alternate version of reality in which there was mutual love felt. But I can guarantee I would’ve struggled with intimacy the way the characters do in that scene and throughout the entire story.
In reality, I did leave gifts for the person I felt a desire to be close to. CDs, notes, candy, even rings (not of the diamond variety). It was easy to do since I could leave them on her dresser in the room after just getting done with band practice in my drummer’s basement. Perhaps if Sparklehorse came out around the time of Exile in Guyville or U2’s Zooropa, I would’ve given her a copy of this record too. Sparklehorse’s music spoke to me immediately. I am almost certain there will be more reflections on other songs of theirs to come.
It started with the record, Good Morning Spider and the song “Sick of Goodbyes,” one of their more successful radio friendly pop rock singles that even included backing vocals and collaboration with Cracker’s David Lowery. I bought the album at Big Time Records in Munster, Indiana probably in 1998. From that point forward, I was a fan of singer/songwriter Mark Linkous.
The hushed, radio static vocals accompanied by lo-fi production were something entirely new and intoxicating to me. I actually got into them thinking they were far more poppy based on the first song I heard. Little did I know that Sparklehorse would go on to be a huge influence on my own songwriting, in terms of a particular record I put out many years later called Projector. I used a lot of mellotron, weird spacey synths and focused on nature imagery rather than just writing about lost love and then found.
“I was on morphine for two years, just ‘cause of the nerve damage and pain,” Mark says. “Since I got off that I can think a little more clearly. For a while I was worried that my songwriting cells died when my heart stopped. I think they’re OK, though, or I grew new ones. Really poppy ones. The songs I’m writing now are really pop songs.”
“The fact that he got up and was able to do anything again, let alone get on stage and rock out, is amazing,” says Bob Bortnick, Linkous’ bandmate in the ‘80s group Dancing Hoods and now an artists and repertoire executive at Almo Sounds (where he signed Garbage).
“Musically, what he’s doing is real. This is the kind of stuff he was doing in the bedroom next to mine when we were in Dancing Hoods. I saw him in New York a few months ago and walked backstage and there were some Radiohead guys, and PJ Harvey and Michael Stipe. Mark was so nervous, but I was, ‘Wow! All these people are getting it.’ ”
Says Tom Waits, who is adding vocals to a track for the next Sparklehorse album, “I love his songs. . . . It’s like opening your eyes underwater at the bottom of a stream. You go, ‘Jesus, look what’s down here.’ I feel like I’m [hearing what is] between radio stations with him. And we seem to share a love of pawnshop hi-fi.” - Steve Hochman
I tend to use the word ‘vulnerable’ a lot when writing about favorite songs and musicians. But never is it more apt than describing Mark’s delivery. You feel as if he’s singing directly to you, often without any compressed effects. He’s right on top of that microphone, whispering sweet melancholic turns of phrase often about sparrows, trees, babies. But you also sense the fragility he brings to the worlds he creates, as if he could break and fall apart because he can’t handle both the beauty and the pain of being alive.
A lot of his songs sound as if they were recorded in a dusty pawn-shop basement, with found equipment that contain a multitude of imperfections. Wonderful Life stacks rudimentary drumbeats, fuzzy-buzzy guitars and basses, woozy southern gothic grandeur, mournful roots-based melodies and Linkous’ somber, sweet vocals into a poisoned little layer cake of despair. I often used to say about this record, “this is what sadness sounds like.” But there’s also longing, hope and grace to be found in the melancholy. Kurt Cobain once wrote the lyric, “I miss the comfort in being sad,” and Mark’s plea to someone at the end of Wonderful Life is, “won’t you come to comfort me?” It doesn’t mean he will no longer be sad, at least he won’t be alone.
There’s such an open sincerity to “Sea of Teeth.” No affection, no pretension. It contains random images strung together that make sense, complementing the landscape you can easily conjure up as being comforting, but isolating. Think of a nature trail you walked on once, by yourself. You too might “feel the wind of Venus on your skin.” Stick around long enough and you could also, “taste the crush of a sunset’s dying blush.” Life moves forward even in the face of decay. The cyclical inevitability of the sun setting along with imprinting stars continuing to stick as a source of reliable alleviation in the darkness.
Sparklehorse has been described as “defiantly surrealist… with all manner of references to smiling babies, organ music, birds, and celestial bodies.” To me, nearly every song he made contained some hidden, poetic truth even if it encased in raw dissonance. We can’t literally feel the “rings of Saturn on our finger,” but there’s something gorgeous about imagining a portion of the universe as being attainable, to where we can physically touch it. I’d like to think of Mark as being a part of the stars in the sky now, looking down on a haunted world, marching to an inevitable conclusion. Death is not the end. In fact, transcendent songs like “Sea of Teeth” have made him deathless. Mark definitely struggled a lot, physically and mentally. A song like “Sea of Teeth” and an album like It’s a Wonderful Life made that abundantly clear.
Linkous devoted the sanguine collection to the family, friends, and fans that helped him survive in the aftermath of his near-death experience. "If the whole record is about anything, it's to remind yourself that it was a good day to be alive today—not getting eaten by a bear, or seeing a deer drink out of a creek," he said in 2001. As his personal storm passed, his gratitude for the world around him grew, something seen in the evocative everyday moments he chose to capture in his lyrics: dogs eating birthday cake, sun beams touching his skin, skinny wolves being held at bay. “I was lucky enough to have been told how much my music meant to people,” Linkous said in 2001. “Maybe something about my music will inspire one person to tell another person how much they mean to them today before it's [too] late.” - Max Blau
Mark’s music inspired me to be grateful for the darkness inside. Suicidal ideation is always going to be a part of my troubled brain, but there’s still so much to adore and appreciate in the little time we have on this planet. Somehow songs like “Sea of Teeth” capture something ineffable and inevitable. We’re going to be crushed by the weight of an ending. It might be fast, it might be slow. There’s no way to know. So, we should appreciate the positive energy (and the incredible art) that sometimes alludes us. We’re often too drowned inside the work routine, the commute, the silencing of real emotion. Maybe that’s what this Substack is all about. Remembering that many works of art in my life have given me a sense of purpose and a reason to be grateful. Granted, there are lots of people who have done that too. But you can’t stream them online or listen to them on YouTube. With film and music, you can immediately seek them out. In fact, here’s the song to listen to now!
Sparklehorse manages to be sad and beautiful simultaneously in a way that is life-affirming for me. That plucked acoustic, the waltz-like slow motion tempo, the drop C# sound of “Sea of Teeth” is something that I’ve found impossible to cover and capture. The plucked twinkled piano, the streams of mellotron and the Whisper2000 vocals are present in nearly every song Mark made over the years. It’s more than a mood piece, it’s the sound of someone trying to hold on. I know what that’s like. I also have recorded a few Sparklehorse covers fairly recently thanks to the monthly PRF series.
Many songs over the years can capture the feeling of falling in and out of love all within a span of four minutes, but few manage to do it with the kind of soft-spoken elegance that Mark did time and time again, especially with a song like “Sea of Teeth,” one of my absolute favorite pieces of music ever recorded. The fact that it also happens to be in one of my favorite movies feels like the stars aligned perfectly, just for me and for that alone, moments like that captured through art, typify why I am happy to be here to not only experience them myself, but to share them with you. I only hope Mark is at peace now. His tree has turned to soil. He deserved to blush with the sunset for all that he’s given us. I wouldn’t be writing and loving music to the extent that I do if it weren’t for him and the record, It’s a Wonderful Life.
I recommend seeking out this documentary about Sparklehorse here as well.