Publishers Weekly
01/27/2020
This overwrought debut memoir from the frontman of the proto-grunge band Screaming Trees is packed with rage, guilt, and the seamy details of a life nearly flushed down the drain. Hating his dead-end upbringing in a Washington logging town, Lanegan became a high school alcoholic with a rock-star attitude who cared only about baseball, “punk rock and getting loaded and laid.” His band Screaming Trees gained some success in the Pacific Northwest scene of the late 1980s, garnering accolades from Lanegan’s friends (Kurt Cobain among them), and scoring success with singles including “Nearly Lost You” as the grunge scene exploded. Nevertheless, Lanegan hated being in the band—calling the group “sick, violent, depressing, destructive, and dangerous.” After a few years clean he fell into a spiral of drinking, drug use, and violence. Even while Lanegan’s raspy, soulful, Tom Waits–like solo output, as in Whiskey for the Holy Ghost, racked up acclaim, he was too busy shooting up, he writes, to enjoy it, and by the mid-1990s, he was dealing heroin and crack to support his growing habits. This dark and engaging epic of destruction is at times undone by Lanegan’s obnoxious cockiness, yet it does serve as a raw look at the grunge music scene. Lanegan’s fans will wince and delight in this gritty narrative. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
"The artist's journey to find one's true voice can travel some very dark roads; addiction, violence, poverty, and soul-crushing alienation have taken the last breath of many I have called friend. Mark Lanegan dragged his scuffed boots down all of those bleak byways for years, managed to survive, and in the process created an astonishing body of work. Sing Backwards and Weep exquisitely details that harrowing trip into the heart of his particular darkness. Brutally honest, yet written without a molecule of self-pity, Lanegan paints an introspective picture of genius birthing itself on the razor's edge between beauty and annihilation. Like a Monet stabbed with a rusty switchblade, Sing Backwards and Weep is breathtaking to behold but hurts to see. I could not put this book down."—D. Randall Blythe, author of Dark Days and lead vocalist of Lambof God
"If you ever wondered how Mark Lanegan's music came to blossom, here's a taste of the dark dirt that fertilized it. But saying that, or something like it, feels irresponsible, almost like saying 'If you want to make great, soul-shattering art, traumatize yourself to the limit and beyond' ... Sing Backwards and Weep is gnarly, naked, and true."—Michael C. Hall of Dexter and Six Feet Under
"Harrowing, edgy, tense, and hypnotic. A very truthful, sobering account of what it's like in the throes of addiction, with shades of Bukowski, Burroughs, and Hunter S. Thompson."—Gerard Johnson, director and writer of Tony, Hyena, and Muscle
"Some books amuse you, some intrigue you, and some-they don't come along often-like Mark Lanegan's Sing Backwards and Weep, squeeze you by the throat and drag you down the back stairs of the author's soul and blast you till you see what he's seen and feel what he's felt. Mark Lanegan spares no detail of the toxic and maniacal things he's done and had done to him, nor of the glorious, weird beauty he walked out with on the other side. You can't look and you can't look away. This is my kind of book. Fucked-up, full of heart, and hard-core as a shot of battery acid in the eye."—Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight, I, Fatty,and Happy Mutant Baby Pills
"A no holds barred memoir of uncompromising honesty. All of the usual suspects are here-sex, drugs, rock and roll-and if that were all, it would be compelling enough on the strength of Lanegan's writing and the setting of 80's and 90's Seattle, a near mythical time and place in music history. But what elevates Sing Backwards and Weep above the pack is the window into Lanegan's development as an artist, from his first musical influences to the singular singer and songwriter we see today. He seamlessly weaves that storyline into the more conventional rock memoir fabric and the results are outstanding."—Tom Hansen, author of AmericanJunkie and This Is What We Do
"Sing Backwards and Weep is powerfully written and brutally, frighteningly honest. First thought that came to my mind was, 'Mark Lanegan gives the term bad boy a whole new meaning.' These are gritty, wild tales of hardcore drugs, sex, and grunge. But this is also the story of a soulful artist who refused the darkness when it tried to swallow him whole. And who found redemption through grace and the power of his unique and brilliant music. Finally, the song becomes truth. And the truth becomes song."—Lucinda Williams
"A stunning tally of the sacrifices that sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll demand of its mortal instruments."—Kirkus Reviews
"It's a hell of a read. All-consuming, even. Be warned."—Louder Than War
"In a gritty new memoir, Sing Backwards and Weep, Lanegan offers an unflinching look at his shadowy past, stretching from childhood up until the death of his friend Staley in 2002. The book reads like a debauched Bukowski novel, as Lanegan drifts from sin to sin, cursing those who held him back from music, drugs, and hookups, and recounting grisly tales about his famous friends."—Rolling Stone
"A dark, gripping and compelling piece of work."—Guerrilla Candy
"Rather astonishing... [it] reads kind of like the grunge-scene Andy Warhol Diaries: check the index, and there's probably a great story about your favorite artist."—Minnesota Public Radio, "The Current"
"MARK LANEGAN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY IS THE MOST RAW AND BRUTAL ROCK MEMOIR EVER WRITTEN... [This book is] one of the most unflinching memoirs in the history of music writing."—Kerrang!
"[Sing Backwards and Weep] unflinchingly tells the musician's hardscrabble story."—SPIN
"[A]n extraordinary snapshot of the reality lower down the totem pole.... one of the most compelling accounts of squalor and misery ever committed to paper. In comparison, Bukowski at his most fevered reads like Somerset Maugham."—New Statesman
"[A] fearsome and brutal new autobiography."—Washington Post
Library Journal
03/01/2020
The most shocking aspect of Lanegan's memoir is that he has lived to tell it at all. In the early 1990s, as the lead singer of Seattle grunge band Screaming Trees, with his own promising solo career on the side, Lanegan, like many of his Seattle friends, was poised to enjoy the rock-and-roll limelight. But music took a backseat to his addiction to alcohol, heroin, and crack cocaine and his attempts to fuel his drug habit through illicit means. Lanegan's desperation is palpable; lucid anecdotes take readers from the stages of huge rock festivals to inside decrepit crack houses. Just when he seemed to reach rock bottom, he fell further still, finally getting sober with the encouragement of one of his former drug buddies, Hole lead singer Courtney Love. VERDICT Told in a distinctively heavy voice, this warts-and-all account of addiction's effect on one's body and self-worth comes with heft and hits like a ton of bricks.—Amanda Westfall, Emmet O'Neal P.L., Mountain Brook, AL
Kirkus Reviews
2020-01-21
The frontman of the Screaming Trees gives a bloody, brawling, dope-fueled tour of his personal battlefields.
By any reckoning, Lanegan should be long dead alongside beloved friends like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Kristen Pfaff of Hole, and Layne Stanley of Alice in Chains. By either miracle or stamina, the author is still alive to offer a blisteringly raw self-portrait of life not just as an excessively self-indulgent rock star, but also a victim of his own hubris. It’s hard to remember in this age of social media, semiclean living, and legalized marijuana, but Seattle circa 1990 was practically a combat zone, thrust into the zeitgeist by the success of grunge rock, especially Nirvana, Soundgarden, and other bands on the Sub Pop label. Lanegan recounts the formation of the Screaming Trees with drummer Mark Pickerel and brothers Gary Lee and Van Conner in the late 1980s, and while their stardom was sudden, the author clearly hasn’t forgotten long, brutal tours in a fetid van, featuring stories that recall Henry Rollins’ Black Flag diary, Get in the Van (1994). There’s plenty of friction behind the music, but the narrative’s primal thread is addiction, from Lanegan’s early alcoholism to a heroin and crack addiction that would later find him dealing to junkies from his Seattle crash pad. His temper would also find him contemplating murdering Courtney Love and beating Liam Gallagher to death backstage. Elsewhere, the missed opportunities are tragic—blowing a gig on the Tonight Show, turning down an invitation to play Nirvana’s fabled MTV Unplugged episode, and ignoring a chance to score a movie. This isn’t just a warts-and-all admission; it’s a blackout- and overdose-rich confessional marked by guilt and shame. It’s also not a redemption song, but like any other train wreck, it’s impossible to look away.
A stunning tally of the sacrifices that sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll demand of its mortal instruments.
