Last month ANTI- Records and the Sparklehorse estate announced Bird Machine, which is a posthumous album by Mark Linkous that will be released on September 8. Music had always been a shared language between Sparklehorse’s Linkous and his younger brother Matt.

Linkous began work on what he planned to be the fifth Sparklehorse album in 2009, where the Linkous brothers would talk through the plans for the record. It was those conversations that Matt and Melissa returned to years later as they began to going through boxes of tapes to catalogue and preserve Linkous’s unreleased recordings. Matt’s and Melissa’s goal is to bring the posthumous album titled Bird Machine back to life.

Today Matt and Melissa have shared the song “The Scull of Lucia,”which is a quiet and intimate track where you can hear every change of inflection of Linkous’s  voice. Jason Lytle of Granddaddy also contributed harmonies to the song.

The lyrics brim with a sadness familiar to Sparklehorse fans. Fragility and darkness were often seen as synonymous with the band and somewhat to Linkous’s frustration.

The song is a story of how Linkous’s heart had briefly stopped after an accidental overdose while on tour in 1996 became part of his abyss-gazing mystique. But the lyrics are combined with a sense of wonder and deeply felt appreciation of the world.

“There’s the pain in his music but also hope and beauty.” says Melissa. “Mark took what he had as experience and put it into song and poetry: trying to find peace, working to stay, the struggles of being human.”