Screaming Trees, including Lanegan, left, in London, 1989. Photograph: Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images High points for me were the stories about Mark’s friendships with Kurt, Layne, and others. There were even a few comical tidbits including one with Chris Cornell that made me smile. The book ends after Mark’s rehab, and then with Layne’s death in 2002. I sat speechless for some time after because this memoir left me with an empty feeling. It was such an unexpected ending even with already knowing Layne’s outcome, and there isn’t much included on Mark’s collaboration with Queens of the Stone Age. The short epilogue was much appreciated, but what about all the other years? What’s been happening since Layne’s death? How has Mark coped? All I can do now is hope that Mark will write and share another memoir, and if he does, I’ll be first in line to read it. Hoewel ik nu meer weet over Mark Lanegan, blijft hij tegelijkertijd een enigma. Het beeld dat hij hier van zichzelf schept (kort lontje), valt moeilijk te combineren met zijn onbeweeglijke presence op een podium (als hij kon, stond hij buiten de spotlights). Lanegan defines himself here – and I don’t know the alternative if there is one – as a hardcore junkie. He opens with a description of the day (or is it one of many?) when he got busted. He describes his descent into drugs, some music, occasional transactional sex, and more drugs.

Sing Backwards and Weep by Mark Lanegan | Waterstones Sing Backwards and Weep by Mark Lanegan | Waterstones

Prosvetljenje, skidanje s droge i pranje od prošlog života dolazi u jednom šturom poglavlju, ne njegovom željom i namerom već bežanjem od većih problema, u situaciji da se u potpunosti predaje dobroj volji poznanika koje jeste ili nije zajebao do koske ili stranaca koji ga poštuju kao umetnika. Lanegan je toga svestan i prihvata to ali na nihilističan način, kao lutriju sudbine, ni po čemu bolju ili lošiju od anonimne smrti u jarku. Ovog puta izgleda ima pameti da ne grize ruku koja ga hrani. Knjiga se završava pre vaskrsnuća karijere, a to je deo njegovog života koji me više zanima, tako da se nadam nastavku. I’ve seen Lanegan perform on stage six or seven times. He walks on, sings for an hour and a half, says “thank you”, and leaves. Outside of the lyrics, he’s been a man of exactly two words. The lyrics are great; the book’s title is a line from a Lanegan song. The variety and quantity of his work, and its excellence, suggest a hard-working, driven artist; the lyrics suggest hard-living, loneliness, constant flight – trains are a very regular feature – and a nightmare world within the everyday. The songs gave me what I wanted. Would the book illuminate or just get in the way? This book chronicles about a decade in Lanegan’s life in Seattle and abroad — from the mid-80s onward — in ultra-high definition, and if you’re looking for detailed retellings of sordid scenes with some of the key characters from that highly romanticised time in popular music, there are certainly plenty of those.Hij heeft zo mooie muziek gemaakt, zo goede nummers, het is vreemd dat we hem nooit meer zullen horen of zien. All of that’s compounded by amateurish writing. If I’d had the guy in a class, I’d push him on some of the sentence-crafting basics. He overuses adjectives, not just larding them on but allowing them to fill in for the substance of analysis. I honestly can’t tell one of the women he almost loves from another. They’re all ‘sensitive’ and ‘soul-tingling,’ but there’s little to distinguish them beyond the adjectives. Es un libro donde el cantante se desnuda sentimentalmente y vivimos de primera mano como es la vida de un yonki. Especialmente trágicos los capítulos donde vemos como otros cantantes y amigos famosos como Kurt Kobain o Layne Stanley van muriendo mientras Lanegan se queda solo dentro de la espiral de droga que lo empuja cada vez más hacia abajo. El final del libro con un Lanegan deambulando por Londres, enfermo y estafado por camellos de baja estofa o durmiendo con vagabundos es especialmente dramático. Menos mal que al final pudo escapar de todo eso y entregarnos unos discos fantásticos. Un superviviente que regresa del infierno.

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

Clayton-Lea, Tony (May 8, 2020). "Mark Lanegan: Straight Songs of Sorrow review – emotionally frayed, feral and beautiful". The Irish Times . Retrieved May 23, 2020. With great skill, he renders long-ago memories in vivid three-dimensional scenes that perfectly capture who he was then and why he acted how he did in the moment. Only occasionally does he allow a modicum of present-tense wisdom to enter into the narrative and, when deployed economically, it becomes brutally effective. La impresionante crónica de juventud de Mark Lanegan, un libro durísimo y crudo donde expone sin tapujos su viaje al infierno de la droga escapando de un pueblo rural y de una família disfuncional. Lanegan was born in Ellensburg, in Washington state, in 1964. His family was “from a long line of coal miners, loggers, bootleggers, South Dakotan dirt farmers, criminals, convicts, and hill-billies of the roughest, most ignorant sort”. Readers familiar with his music might already conclude: he was born to be Mark Lanegan.This book is only of interest to those of us with a morbid interest in the darker side of life; a tale of sunshine and redemption this is not. Don’t call Mark Lanegan a grunge pioneer! Mark referred to the term with which he had been “shitstained” as “moronic” and “media-generated.”

Sing Backwards and Weep by Mark Lanegan | Waterstones

Ik verdiep me zelden in het leven van muzikanten, ik beluister hun muziek en meer interesseert me niet. Uiteraard besef ik dat alcohol en drugs een grote rol spelen in het muzikale wereldje, maar dit boek was toch wel een eye opener. In his own words, he was born a 'garbage can of a drug fiend', a teenage thief and alcoholic, the town drunk even before he was of legal age to drink. I did get the feeling he was eager to move on from his early years, though he does return to discuss his parents at later stages. We do get to read about his musical influences and how they shaped him.A day or two later, Rosemary called me, her voice shaking with emotion, and delivered the news. 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. A medical examiner judged his death to have taken place the same day we were at the house looking for him. But it was the fear of showing my true heart, at times either so full it might burst or so empty I could cry, that hounded me most viciously. […] There had been a perpetual war between myself and the costume of persona I’d donned as a youngster and then worn my entire life. Petrified that someone might discover who I really was: merely a child inside the body of an adult. A boy playacting a man. My lifelong hard-ass exterior and, underneath that, ironclad interior were all an intricately constructed, carefully cultivated, and fiercely guarded sham. I was, in reality, driven by what I’d heard referred to in rehab all those years ago as “a thousand forms of fear”. Sadly, somewhere deep in my soul, I knew that was probably me." As his career progresses, the focus of this tome moves more from the music to our hero's relationship with drugs, particularly heroin. It's a shame the book didn't expand into his years of relevant recovery , which saw a rich series of solo albums, along with notable collaborations with Isobel Campbell and Greg Dulli. More than anything else, Lanegan portrays himself as an unreliable, criminal, hateful, rancorous, utterly useless, miserable piece of shit, a dope dealer semi-guilty of the deaths of several Seattle peers, a violent, lying sex and porn addict and complete failure.

Sing Backwards and Weep: The Sunday Times Bestseller

Very good memoir. It was often difficult to listen to. It also put me in a rather dark mood after hearing some of it. It was good to know what was going on behind the scenes during this tumultuous period. There was a lot I didn't know. With how dark the subject matter was, I am glad it turned out well in the end; and I am glad to have gotten through the memoir. I'm very sensitive to hearing about human suffering and I can only tolerate so much before it really starts to affect me. This memoir was starting to do that and I am relieved to be done with it. When I first learned what this story of Mark Lanegan’s early years in music would entail, I couldn’t help but think of Bob Mould’s own autobiography, See A Little Light, and all of its recriminations and petty swipes at his ex-bandmates in Hüsker Dü. 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.My entire childhood, my mother, who, unbelievably, worked as a college lecturer of early childhood education, had been a wholly detestable, damaged witch,” he writes. Great survivor: Lanegan on stage with the Screaming Trees in 1993. Photograph: Lindsay Brice/Getty Images The bottom dropped out of my heart. Tears were instantaneous, even as disbelief had me shaking my head, whispering, "No." I always thought I'd have a chance to see another show, to capture a "remember me?" moment, a laugh and a hug.