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
