Mark Lanegan, gruff-voiced frontman of grunge band Screaming Trees, dies at 57

Mark Lanegan, the gruff-voiced singer and songwriter who led Screaming Trees to fame during the Seattle grunge explosion of the early 1990s before going on to play as a member of Queens of the Stone Age and in duos with Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs and Belle & Sebastian’s Isobel Campbell, died Tuesday at his home in Killarney, Ireland. He was 57.

His death was announced by a spokesman, Keith Hagan, who didn’t specify a cause of death.

Caked in guitar distortion but graced with a yearning melody that Lanegan delivered in his parched croon, “Nearly Lost You” became a top-five alternative-rock radio hit for Screaming Trees in 1992. It benefited from both Nirvana’s success the year before with its blockbuster “Nevermind” and from the song’s placement in Cameron Crowe’s grunge-scene romantic comedy “Singles.”

The film’s soundtrack, which also featured music by Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden and Mudhoney, sold 2 million copies and helped drive grunge’s mainstream breakthrough.

Yet by that point Lanegan had already been playing with Screaming Trees for nearly a decade; the band released 1991’s “Uncle Anesthesia,” its first album for a major label, months before “Nevermind” came out in September 1991.

Lanegan began releasing solo records in 1990; his first, “The Winding Sheet,” featured appearances by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic. In 2000 he sang on “Rated R” by Queens of the Stone Age, whose Joshua Homme had toured as a guitarist with Screaming Trees.

Lanegan put out his latest solo album, “Straight Songs of Sorrow,” in 2020, the same year he published a memoir, “Sing Backwards and Weep.”