In another chapter, he describes how he would always have his morning fix while listening to the Way of Life album by Suicide, a band that was in heavy rotation in the kitchen of an off-campus house where I lived for a couple of years during college. Know who you are and fearlessly follow your heart,” is apparently one of his maxims, and you’d know it from the pages of this book. Sing Backwards and Weep’, though, is something else again; the full metal jacket assault on the genre. Little did he know that within less than a decade, he would rise to fame as the front man of the Screaming Trees, then fall from grace as a low-level crack dealer and a homeless heroin addict, all the while watching some of his closest friends rocket to the forefront of popular music. I was struck again by how visceral a reaction Lanegan was able to evoke—I really felt like I was experiencing his agony while he read.

Sing Backwards and Weep: Mayhem, music and drugs Sing Backwards and Weep: Mayhem, music and drugs

Kurt’s body had been found in the small room above his garage—the same room at which I had stood at the foot of earlier—the victim of an apparent suicide. Eventually, Lanegan puts out solo albums, the first of which featured the Lead Belly cover and other duets with Cobain.I knew he had been battling with covid last year and had released a book about the experience but thought he had turned the corner. If he’s trying to be sarcastic, it’s lost amid the seething ire that reverberates throughout the text. Guitarist Mike McCready told Total Guitar that he had waited sixteen years for Mark’s vocal and poetic contributions. He spews it all, sharing parts of his childhood upbringing, the rise to fame with Screaming Trees, and his descent into drugs and homelessness. But at least I can understand Mould’s bitterness, if not accept or agree with it, because it comes from a place of passion — a band that he and his former musical compadres wanted to be in, music they wanted to make, and then life and its complication sours the milk.

Remembering MARK LANEGAN: 15 Essential Facts From His First

Mark Lanegan was a talented musician who couldn’t fight his demons, his talent overshadowed by his addiction to heroin. On the night before the Letterman appearance in '92, for example, the Trees stayed in a hotel in "the dying tourist town of Asbury Park, NJ. From the back of the van to the front of the bar, from the hotel room to the emergency room, onstage, backstage, and everywhere in between, Sing Backwards and Weep reveals the abrasive underlining beneath one of the most romanticized decades in rock history-from a survivor who lived to tell the tale. For those people only familiar with his work with the consistently mediocre Screaming Trees I urge you to check out the great work he did on his own and in collaboration with other artists from PJ Harvey to Nick Cave to Johnny Cash. There is humour of the bleakest kind to be found in some of his escapades, and some of his feuds are thoroughly entertaining, one of which is between him and Liam Gallagher, whom he wants to introduce to a fistful of quarters.And the Screaming Trees do have a legacy; far from “terrible”, their earlier albums are treats of rough-hewn backwoods psych — even their debut Clairvoyance, which has that kind of we-made-a-record spirited naivety. Mark Lanegan – 'Straight Songs of Sorrow' review: grunge survivor shares music that salves the soul". often ending with him "beating the shit out of" whoever it is that looked at him funny, or he wants to fight them. The truth is the truth, but I can see some people mentioned in this book becoming irate with the all-out divulging of the past. Needless to say, libraries have always had a special place in Mark's heart due to his "nasty librarian" fetish.

Sing Backwards and Weep: The Sunday Times Bestseller

I was hoping Mark would expand on these relationships surrounding him, but what’s here is a huge helping of what seems like (has to be) the darkest times in Mark’s life. Like Stone Temple Pilots' late frontman Scott Weiland, with whom he recorded an unreleased song, Mark had been a quarterback. You can hear Kurt on guitar and backing vocals on Lead Belly’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” which appeared on Lanegan’s debut solo record, The Winding Sheet (1990).The abuse detailed in these passages is completely shocking, even more so because Lanegan detonates those bombs so late in the narrative of his 20s. Just when you think he's fallen as low as he can, you turn the page and realise there's another level.