Devil in a Coma: a memoir

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One morning in the spring of 2020, as the pandemic swept the world, the American singer Mark Lanegan woke to find he’d lost his hearing. He got up and fell down the stairs at the house he and his wife Shelley were renting in rural Ireland. Lanegan refused to go to hospital but, eventually, Shelley overruled him and called an ambulance. Lanegan had a nasty case of coronavirus and was put into a medically-induced coma. My favorite part (if it’s appropriate to have a “favorite” part of such a brutal retelling of an illness) was the style of his writing- the combination of old memories combined with the re-telling of his hospitalization, and then poems that relate to the specific part of the story in between.

I’d rather you be laughing than crying,” he says. “As for being hard on myself, it doesn’t represent the entirety of how I see myself. I feel incredibly blessed. For a person like me to have been to the places I’ve been, and have the opportunity to bring something to other people’s lives, it’s an amazing gift.” What I’m reading now… No sooner had the accolades dried on that memoir than Lanegan, relocated to Ireland, land of his great-great-great-grandfather, to escape Covid, contracted Covid. In denial at first, he falls downstairs. Unable to breathe, deafened, with deep welts on his scalp and a useless leg, he is committed to hospital and put in an induced coma on kidney dialysis. His wife learns that Lanegan holds the hospital record for surviving longest in this parlous state. At one point, she refuses to allow the doctors to perform a tracheotomy that would have ended his singing career. Every day,” he says. While he was in the coma, doctors wanted to give Lanegan a tracheotomy, but there was a danger it would alter his voice permanently, so Shelley refused permission.

On whether he’s back creating new music

I loved it. A great band — still is. Josh [Homme] is one of my closest friends, and the other guys were totally cool. On his time with Screaming Trees Lanegan has been so staggeringly prolific in the years of the pandemic, before and after the experience recounted in Devil in a Coma. Before he moved to Ireland, he started publishing his poetry. “Poetry is something I’ve kind of secretly dreamed of doing since I was a kid, dreamed that I might be able to write. But every time I tried to do it, it just didn’t seem to work for me. But in 2020, Wes Eisold suggested we do a book of poetry together, and he encouraged me to start writing poetry.” That book is Plague Poems, a powerful assemblage that’s split between Lanegan’s words in the first half and Eisold’s in the second. Throughout the book, Lanegan’s poems are haunted—by loss, by anger, and by the strange and prescient spectres of judgment days to come. “My first go at it was kind of lyrics masquerading as poetry. But I think I’ve gotten a little better at it since then. It’s something I enjoy. It’s more akin to songwriting, there’s a freedom in it. When you’re writing an actual book, there’s no freedom,” he laughs. Following Plague Poems, Lanegan wrote Leaving California, a collection that reflects on living in liminality, in fragments. Second editions of both Plague Poems and Leaving California were published in October 2021 and are available through Eisold’s Heartworm Press. I ask Lanegan if he feels the seasons in his songs, and I tell him that so much of what he sings conjures autumn for me, darker days with warm and fading light. “I grew up in a place where we had really hot summers and really icy, snowy wintertimes. But the fall and the spring are my favourite seasons when you’re in a place that has four seasons, fall being the best. I find it an inspiring time, something about the crisp air, the smell of woodsmoke, the changing of the colours of the leaves.” There’s a little bit of autumn left before the solstice, and it feels like the perfect time to read Lanegan’s new memoir while listening to his records.

This is a journal not of the Pandemiad but of the plague raging through one man's body and his brutal struggle to survive. If you're a Lanegan fan it feels like a natural extension of SBAW and his recent albums. If you have no idea about Lanegan but want to read about what it was like to have a bad bout of covid this may also interest you.

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This slight but weighty volume only adds to the man's muscular and vivid - in every sense of the word - body of work It's an interesting read. Especially given some of Lanegan's previously released work that swings into the conspiracy view of ~covid~ which effectively kneecapped him regardless of his thoughts on the matter. And for all it's dark and twisty there's the signature Lanegan humour. I could just imagine the doctors and nurses clapping with glee at the chance to find a vein when he was hospitalised for a second time unconscious. The Devil was fairly profligate with the best songs, but rare was the singer blessed with His very own voice. Grunge pioneer Mark Lanegan – who died yesterday (February 22) aged 57 – sang like a southern swamp, a canyon catacomb, a gallows tree.