Sing Backwards and Weep

One of the rawest and most honest music autobiographies I've ever read

Stuart Braithwaite

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 . . . 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

Kirkus

Many rock memoirs come with a third act in which the artist achieves sobriety and disavows their former life. Not so Lanegan, who delivers grand guignol scenes of heroin-fuelled violence, degradation and self-abuse while recalling his Screaming Tree days, with little in the way of regrets. Rare in its rawness and bracing honesty.

The Guardian, 10 of the Best Music Biographies

The most brutally honest rock memoir imaginable

Daily Telegraph

Not for the faint-hearted

9/10, Classic Rock

An astonishingly frank, heartbreaking and tremendously brave book

Record Collector

Dark yet borderline-hilarious cavalcade of horror and mayhem

Big Issue

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

This is a frank, astonishing and often horrifying recollection from someone who has certainly lived a life, and who has now decided to share a part of it . . . far from your usual Rockstar Memoir

Echoes and Dust

One of the most unflinching memoirs in the history of music writing . . . it is a survivor's tale, and a brilliantly written one at that

Kerrang

[Sing Backwards and Weep] makes for a harrowing epic, a thriller if I ever read one . . . the lyricist's flair he applies to its best passages elevates the book from the level of hachneyed retreads . . . he's able to dial himself up in moments of rage, sink us chin-deep into his sorrow at the loss of good friends . . . and crank the tension into a tightly wound ball when the dope-sickness sets in and the chase for a fix is on

Bookanista

A harrowing but often hilarious chronicle of addiction and regret . . . packed full of surprises . . . [Lanegan's] eye-popping memoir explores hell's many sub-basements, and lived to produce good writing

Guardian

Rare in its rawness and candour, the book is a brutal chronicle of addiction

Guardian

[A] deeply sensitive book

Guardian

A brutally honest, harrowing yet utterly compulsive read

The Quietus

frank about his youthful search for "decadence, depravity, anything, everything" and refuses to flinch from the guilt he still carries around the death of his friend Kurt Cobain

NME

It's a depiction of addiction and self-loathing so bleak that your fingernails come away its pages caked in dirt. In it Lanegan lays his track-marked past bare, cycling endlessly between his roles as powerless victim, talented screw up and toxic enabler from page to stinking page

Clash

unflinchingly tells the musician's hardscrabble story from his early days in backwater Ellensburg, Washington as he drifts from a teen gambler and porn fiend to petty criminal

Spin

A chronicle of depravity and drugs, laced with dark humour and crackling with - well, not exactly joie de vivre, but certainly the will to live. The story of the rock star who descends into substance-abuse hell but survives to tell the tale has been told a thousand times, but Lanegan relates his experiences with irresistible swagger and honesty

Financial Times

A bejewelled document of excess and redemption

Mirror

The book is a triumph.

New Statesman

This is a narrative packed with surprises [...] but there is room in this heavy, heavy book for quite astonishing turns of kismet.

The Observer

A visceral, unforgettable memoir.

The New European

Sing Backwards and Weep is an unflinching trawl - or would be, were it not marginally leavened by straight-shooting yet eloquent language, gallows humour and his sweet, boyish excitement at the breifest of encounters with musical heroes such as Waylon Jennings and Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh

Scotland on Sunday

The usual offering is that dreaded soufflé of bullshit known as the rock memoir - the airy embellishment of glory days that inevitably collapses under the weight of its own conceit. But Lanegan's Sing Backwards and Weep is a rock memoir only insofar as its author happens to have sung rock n' roll in seminal bands while developing close friendships with some of the genre's most dearly departed

Vice

Rare in its rawness and candour, the book is a brutal chronicle of addiction [...] despite the tragedies, an arch humour characterises a lot of the writing

The Guardian

gripping memoir

Sunday Express

This is a narrative packed with surprises [...] but there is room in this heavy, heavy book for quite astonishing turns of kismet.

The Observer

A rock autobiography as raw as it gets. Come for the magnificent rant about Liam Gallagher, stay for the bleak and gripping account of addiction and loss

The i

Sing Backwards and Weep is a painstakingly unflinching account of a troubled life further troubled by the excesses of rock 'n' roll. It is among the very best memoirs I have read, by a musician or anyone else

The Australian

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.

Irish Independent

Sing Backwards and Weep - by turns mordant, entertaining and bleak - is both a portrait of a damaged man and a chronicle of a now legendary music scene

TLS

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.

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