NEARLY LOST YOU
Mark Lanegan has made it into his mid-50s while mostly avoiding his past. Indeed, the last decade has been the most prolific of his long career, having released six albums and a dizzying stack of collaborations, with QOTSA, Neko Case, Duke Garwood, Earth, The Twilight Singers and many more. This year, however, he’s finally decided to confront a few ghosts.
He has simultaneously released the intensely autobiographical Straight Songs Of Sorrow, his twelfth solo album, and published his remarkably candid memoir Sing Backwards And Weep. “I didn’t really expect to find what was back there in my memory, because it was a time and place that I’d gone out of my way to forget,” he tells Classic Rock, sitting in his home in California. “It was an extremely dark and unhappy period to revisit.”
The book traces Lanegan’s story from juvenile delinquency in rural Washington state through to his time as lead singer in Seattle grunge-rockers Screaming Trees, a cantankerous bunch who became known for in-fighting, drugs and drunkenness as much as for their music. It’s all related in debauched, eye-popping detail. Lanegan writes of being addicted to heroin, booze and petty theft as a teenage redneck, spared from prison only by the good grace of the local judge. He’s so self-destructive that he expects to die at any given moment. His time in the Trees isn’t any happier.
Ultimately though, is about salvation. And comradeship. Lanegan is still here to tell his tale, unlike some of the close friends who, a standout from : ‘’
