Mark Lanegan, gruff-voiced frontman of grunge’s 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 ’90s 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. Yet by that point Lanegan had already been playing with Screaming Trees for nearly a decade; “Uncle Anesthesia,” the band’s first album for a major label after four earlier LPs on indies including SST, came out months before “Nevermind” was released in September 1991. Like other grunge acts, Screaming Trees — which Lanegan formed in the mid-’80s in small-town Washington state with brothers Gary Lee Conner on guitar and Van Conner on bass and drummer Mark Pickerel — found a middle ground between lumbering classic rock and scrappy punk. He wrote and recorded frequently with Queens of the Stone Age, whose frontman Joshua Homme had toured as a guitarist with Screaming Trees, including on 2000’s “Rated R” and 2002’s “Songs for the Deaf.” In 2006, he released the first of three LPs with Campbell; each drew comparisons to Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood’s duo records from the late ’60s and early ’70s.