The most honest and unsparing grunge memoir ever committed to the page by one of the greatest alternative rock stars of the past thirty years
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
"Mark Lanegan-primitive, brutal, and apocalyptic, What's not to love?" Nick Cave
"A stoned cold classic" Ian Rankin
"Powerfully written and brutally, frighteningly honest" Lucinda Williams
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 reality beneath one of the most romanticized decades in rock history-from a survivor who lived to tell the tale,
When Mark Lanegan first arrived in Seattle in the mid-1980s, he was just "an arrogant, self-loathing redneck waster seeking transformation through rock 'n' roll," 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 pinnacle of popular music,
In Sing Backwards and Weep, Lanegan takes readers back to the sinister, needle-ridden streets of Seattle, to an alternative music scene that was simultaneously bursting with creativity and saturated with drugs, He tracks the tumultuous rise and fall of the Screaming Trees, from a brawling, acid-rock bar band to world-famous festival favourites with an enduring legacy that still resonates, Lanegan's personal struggles with addiction, culminating in homelessness, petty crime, and the tragic deaths of his closest friends, is documented with a painful honesty and pathos,
Gritty, gripping, and unflinchingly raw, Sing Backwards and Weep is a book about more than just an extraordinary singer who watched his dreams catch fire and incinerate the ground beneath his feet, Instead, it's about a man who learned how to drag himself from the wreckage, dust off the ashes, and keep living and creating,
Sing Backwards and Weep is
the only rock autobiography you need investigate. Like
some nicotine-stained amalgam of Tom Waits and Kurt Cobain, Mark Lanegan gives another meaning to "warts and all" as he recounts his near obliteration during the Seattle grunge boom of the 1990s, of which he is one of the few survivors. A
brazen and bleakly comic saga about the needle and the damage done.
