Morphine Announce New Album Cocoon Featuring Recordings Mark Sandman Made Before His 1999 Death

As the years pass, it gets harder and harder to believe that Mark Sandman was a real guy — that he made the music that he did, that he looked like that, that he was actually named Mark Sandman, and that he died in the way that he did. He was like a character that Jim Jarmusch might dream up. Sandman sang in a deep and lascivious baritone and played two-string slide bass as the frontman of Morphine, a jazzy Boston rock band who basically sounded like nothing else, before or since. Morphine made four albums, including the solid-gold 1993 classic Cure For Pain, before Sandman died from an onstage heart attack while playing a 1999 show in Italy. A fifth Morphine album, The Night, came out in 2000, after Sandman's death. Now, more than a quarter century later, another posthumous Morphine album is about to see release. Just before the end of the year, Morphine will release Cocoon, a new album constructed from music that Mark Sandman left behind in the last years of his life. Before making The Night, Morphine started and then abandoned a series of recordings with Paul Q. Kolderie and Sean Slade, the Boston producers who worked on classics like Hole's Live Through This, Radiohead's Pablo H...