The last time Mark Linkous visited his younger brother, Matt, in Richmond, Va., he was excited about making albums again.
By that point, in late 2008, two years had passed since Linkous’s band, Sparklehorse, released its fourth and final album for Capitol Records. “Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain,” a set of uncannily warped pop gems and warbled solitary hymns, had performed much like its predecessors: critically praised, commercially stillborn.
Linkous, though, seemed at the edge of an independent resurrection. He had capped a batch of electronic abstractions with the Austrian experimentalist Christian Fennesz and was in the closing stages of a star-studded project alongside the producer Danger Mouse, where the likes of Iggy Pop and David Lynch would sing their songs. After an introduction from Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, he had signed a new deal with the musician-owned imprint Anti-. He had booked studio time with the no-nonsense recording engineer Steve Albini, long a hero.
As the brothers sat around Matt’s cozy bungalow dissecting records like “The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society” as they had done as teens, Linkous gushed ideas. “He wanted to get this big rhythm section and do these live recordings,” Matt, 56, said while sitting on his porch on a rainy weekday in late June, grinning even as his gray-blue eyes suddenly went glassy. “I was just cheering him on: ‘Man, do it.’”
Late in 2009, Linkous arrived at Albini’s Electrical Audio in Chicago and cut the core of at least a half-dozen songs, the long-suffering perfectionist delighted by how fast and free of fuss it went. He took the results home and kept working in his rural North Carolina studio, Static King, recording new tunes and adding diaphanous textures. In late February 2010, he made plans to head to New York the next month to finish the record with Joel Hamilton, the engineer who had finessed his 2001 breakthrough, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
But in early March, Linkous moved to Knoxville, Tenn., to live with his longtime bandmate Scott Minor. Linkous had struggled with addiction and depression for decades, exacerbated by a medication mishap in the ’90s that left him partially paralyzed. His marriage was splintering. Early on a Saturday afternoon, he walked into an alley and shot himself. He was 47.
After Linkous’s death, everyone, including Matt, assumed the album that had recently lifted his spirits was lost inside the enormous archive he had accreted since he bought his first four-track in the ’80s. A musician from those Chicago sessions had even passed Anti- an instrumental version of the work in progress, a what-might-have-been whiff that suggested Linkous had never recorded vocals.
He had. In fact, Linkous had completed much of the album, as Matt slowly discovered starting in 2017, near the end of a decade-long quest to retrieve and preserve his brother’s entire musical output. He’d named it, too, scrawling “Bird Machine” in a black notebook of lyrics and doodles that served as a skeleton key. “Here I was all these years later, finally hearing this stuff,” said Matt, a longtime musician himself. “It was just amazing — I can’t count how many times I said that.”
For two years, Matt and his bandmate and wife, Melissa Moore Linkous, led a small team of Linkous’s closest collaborators through an arduous process of analyses, edits and additions to those tapes. In 2003, when Melissa was pregnant with their son, Spencer, she and Matt had served as Sparklehorse’s backing band during an arena tour with R.E.M. Now they asked themselves an impossible question: How would one of this century’s most idiosyncratic pop auteurs have perfected these songs had he survived? On Sept. 8, Anti- will finally release “Bird Machine,” the Sparklehorse swan song few believed existed.
“What do you do with someone else’s art?” Matt said. “Music was so incredibly important to my brother. It saved him at times, and he meant every note. He did this stuff for people to hear. It needed to be out there.”
A DESCENDANT OF the bluegrass royalty of the Stanley Brothers, Linkous always invested his songs with folk intimacy, no matter how strange the textures around them became. He wrote fragile and insular tunes, tentative transmissions from a mind where upheaval and despair always lurked beneath wonder.
“Something Mark and I shared was that we needed to do this,” said Jason Lytle, the Grandaddy singer who was smitten by Sparklehorse in the late ’90s before befriending its leader. “I’m not the most expressive, going-to-therapy kind of guy, so I needed songs to get stuff out. Mark had a similar thing.”
Making art, then, was essential; the conventions of the music industry were not. At one point, a steadfast Sparklehorse fable goes, a Capitol executive told Linkous a new song sounded like the hit. He slathered it in static. Linkous regularly sang into a plastic Silvertone microphone he had found in a junkyard in the late ’90s, giving his voice its trademark grain.
“Our first conversation steered immediately toward the core of emotion behind the gesture in music,” Hamilton said. “It wasn’t an engineering conversation. When you drop all the pretense of a $10,000 microphone, there’s no pomp left. The point was what was being expressed, what was moving from him to you.”
Linkous had told Albini he wanted to take the material home and continue in his peculiar way. Years earlier, Linkous had invested in a Flickinger recording desk, a finicky beast from the ’60s that Albini called “the best-sounding recording consoles ever built.” After years of fixes, it at least worked enough to use. Back home, Linkous routed his cheap microphones and curious textures through the console, bearing down on songs that suggested a more urgent, open Sparklehorse.
“His method was charming,” Albini said via email. “While it borders on a psychological hurdle, when I’ve seen people realize ‘the sound,’ there’s nothing more gratifying.”
These unconventional methods, however, made the discovery of “Bird Machine,” let alone its release, seem like a miracle.
After Matt was named the estate’s administrator in 2012, he began gathering every scrap of Sparklehorse sound he could find, songs scattered across nearly 30 years of microcassettes, two-inch tape reels, bulky hard drives. Melissa cataloged every artifact, copying whatever notes she found on labels or scraps of paper floating among the flotsam. “As I was documenting all this stuff, I was just with it — the grief, the work, Mark,” Melissa said during a series of video calls after that day on the porch.
They passed each new batch to Bryan Hoffa, a family friend and Grammy-nominated archival audio engineer. He digitized everything, advancing through Linkous’s timeline. When Hoffa arrived at the Chicago sessions, it became clear how much work Linkous had done on his final songs. While trying to maximize storage on 24-track magnetic tape, he split songs into different chunks. They found the vocals in such recesses.
Matt called Alan Weatherhead, a friend for nearly 25 years who had clocked more studio hours with Linkous than anyone else. “I really didn’t know what to expect based on what had been written — that it was totally done except the vocals, that it was unsalvageable,” Weatherhead said. And then Matt played “Hello Lord,” a wistful love song undercut by a sense of anxious dread for the future. “Hello Lord, how’s your children tonight?” Linkous sang, his falsetto cracking over acoustic strums.
“It was so strange hearing music of Mark’s I hadn’t heard, so emotional hearing his voice again,” Weatherhead said. “I was in.”
Early in 2021, Matt took a month off from his job leading a historic-home restoration company. Clad in masks because of the pandemic, he and Weatherhead met daily at Montrose Recording, the Richmond studio that had bought Linkous’s ornery Flickinger and then meticulously rebuilt it. Working until dawn neared, they pored over the tracks, considering what layers Linkous might have warped, lost or added as he wrapped “Bird Machine.”
Weatherhead reinforced the crunchy guitars of the brief rock stomp “It Will Never Stop.” Melissa’s subtle violin traced the rests of “Evening Star Supercharger,” a fever dream about the inevitable sprawl of entropy and pain captured in classic pop. The notebook Melissa and Matt found served as an incomplete atlas, guiding their decisions as they finished. A page with Hamilton’s name, number and pay rates suggested Linkous wanted him to mix the album, which he did. The lyrics allowed them to sing along when they felt like Linkous would have wanted a harmony.
They shipped two songs to Lytle to add his own diminutive croon, which had always seemed a fitting counterpart to Linkous’s. Lytle asked himself the same questions Matt and Melissa had been pondering for months.
“I kept wondering what his head space was when he made these songs — ‘Did he like these songs? Is he into this? Would he even want me to sing on this?’” Lytle said, laughing. “How can you even attempt to assume the role of this super perfectionist, whose moods change like the weather?”
ONE NIGHT EARLY in the process, Matt and Melissa gathered in their home studio, where several of Linkous’s guitars and amps still line the walls. Hoffa, the archivist, had sent new excavations from the recordings, and among the disembodied vocals and out-of-tune pianos they spotted a familiar voice — their son, Spencer. “Wake up. I love you. It’s daytime,” he said in a voice mail message he left his uncle when he was 5. “Hi, Uncle Mark. What are you doing? I miss you. I love you. Bye-bye.”
The sound was shocking, as heartbreaking as it was heartwarming. Linkous had long sampled voice mail messages from loved ones, including the brothers’ mother, Gloria. Matt knew that Linkous had recorded Spencer, the godson he adoringly called “god boy.” But arriving at the end of “O Child,” a bittersweet and Beatles-quoting ballad about the way people can mistreat you, their kid’s voice was crushing.
“It was so hard, knowing that Spencer doesn’t have his uncle. They were so sweet together,” Melissa said, tears streaming down her face. “Mark used to worry about what it would be like for Spencer, with all the troubles of the world. He wanted Spencer to be healthy and happy.”
As the family worked to finish “Bird Machine,” Weatherhead suggested that Matt sing on a few songs, his voice slipping behind his brother’s because they sound so similar. After coming home from the studio late one night, Matt heard Spencer, now 19, singing and playing guitar. He had a better idea: His son should sing those parts. He sang on five of the album’s 14 tunes, sometimes joining his mother to support his lost uncle.
“There is something about a blood harmony, like the Stanleys, and the connection of Mark and Spencer. It was powerful to hear all this stuff,” Matt said, pausing for a long time. “We just wanted to keep it close. We did.”
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