Spin, February 1994 A Tree Grows In Seattle Mark Lanegan branches out on a solo venture. Mark Lanegan, singer for Seattle's Screaming Trees, has the kind of voice that makes any material sound good - he could sing the phone book and it would sound...well, really boring, but you know what I mean. On Whiskey for the Holy Ghost, his second solo album for Sub Pop, he gets far more compelling subject matter with which to deal, and pulls it off with typical aplomb. Similar in theme to Lanegan's acclaimed 1990 disc, The Winding Sheet, Whiskey is a melancholic tonic, filled with dark, boozy tales of loss and regret, accompanied mostly by spare acoustic arrangements (courtesy of Mike Johnson, currently serving as bass player for Dinosaur Jr.) that contrast pretty obviously with the Trees' usual modus operandi. "I got this hard rock band, so to speak, that I make these other kind of records - much louder - with, and I get sick of it," explains Lanegan quietly. "I'm fucking out there touring for a year this time, listening to the same songs every night and going deaf. So I guess it's a reaction against that as much as anything." Never one for the rock spotlight, Lanegan had to be cajoled into releasing The Winding Sheet, and despite having gotten over "the humiliation of releasing a solo record," which he regards as a "fairly pretentious" thing to do, took nearly three years to complete Whiskey. "The original concept was to record the album in one day, which we tried to do, but when I went in to sing, I couldn't even get started," he says. "Only four of the songs are from that original session." The rest were constructed in dribs and drabs, whenever Lanegan could fit a couple of days' recording into his busy Trees' schedule. "The record company definitely started questioning my sanity," he confesses with the hint of a gleam in his eye. "But I wanted to get it right." - by Jim Greer