Mark Linkous, the artist behind the inventive band Sparklehorse, killed himself on Saturday in Knoxville, Tenn.

There are plenty of obits out there that lay out the facts of Linkous' life and death, which was apparently a self-inflicted gunshot wound, so I'll not repeat them further. From a strictly artistic standpoint, he was one of my favorite musicians, a guy whose music effortlessly shifted from dreamy to twitchy, quiet to abrasive. It was at times very Southern, other times spacey. It was defiantly experimental at a time when "alternative" was commercial.

Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse.

The first time I saw Linkous play, I believe, was at New York's Irving Plaza, opening for either Son Volt or Wilco, a show that resulted in my immediate purchase of the first Sparklehorse record Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot. He nearly died after that album (also well documented -- "I got very weary talking about that. From now on, I tell people that it was an elaborate marketing scam," he told me), and as a result there's a ghostly specter to Good Morning Spider, his next recording.

My favorite was It's a Wonderful Life released in 2001, an album of haunting beauty and wide-eyed vision, quiet keyboards punctuated with lightning bolt guitar chords and Linkous' voice, a feathery warble that always seemed like it would be incapable of flight, though it creaked and flew anyway.

When we talked he was a very funny guy, telling stories about digging around garbage dumps for discarded electronics or buying a Harmony Rocket guitar from a guy in a parking lot of Fuddruckers or being locked in his North Carolina studio because a bear wouldn't remove itself from the path between the studio's door and Linkous' truck; turns out he shouldn't have left garbage in the bed of the truck. Still it was clear he struggled with something. I mentioned that I tracked down an album by the Dancing Hoods, his first band. "Please fucking destroy that," he said politely. He said he sat in his car thinking about walking into the ocean without any intention of stopping because his time in that band was so unfulfilling. I believe it was Gavin Bryars' Jesus Blood Never Failed Me, a moving composition that includes a Tom Waits vocal in its final movement, that made him reconsider.

Another funk followed Wonderful Life. "I got in a bad hole depression-wise, " he told me at the time, "I couldn't get out for three years. I lost interest in recording. I still liked writing my little songs, singing them alone. But that was the end of it. I lost interest in recording them. I thought people didn't care."

Working with producer Danger Mouse he completed Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain in 2006. I believe the last time he played Houston was at the Proletariat that year with Daniel Johnston, a hero of his, opening. Sparklehorse was always a fiercer entity live; he had Johnny Hott of House of Freaks and an old Virginia friend banging on the drums.

That was it. There's another project with Danger Mouse forthcoming. He was working on another Sparklehorse project, though there's no word yet about whether it was in a state that will make it viable for release.

Linkous in the studio.

Download: Spain Colored Orange's Gilbert Alfaro, a fan of Linkous, covered his song, It's a Wonderful Life, which you can download here.