Mark Lanegan’s Sing Backwards and Weep: Addiction, Art, and Redemption

Pedro Góis Nogueira
5 min readJan 15, 2025

Mark Lanegan’s Sing Backwards and Weep transcends the musician’s memoir to become a literary triumph.

“Sing Backwards and Weep” was not born out of ambition but rather from unexpected encouragement. While revisiting his lyrics for I Am the Wolf: Lyrics and Writings, Lanegan delved into fragments of his life with a raw perspective and a touch of finesse. It was through this process that the first personal reflections emerged, serving as the foundation for what would become his autobiography.

The problem was that Lanegan had already spent years free from addiction and drugs, distancing himself from his ghosts as much as possible — a healing distance, a deliberate step away to avoid falling back into the same abyss. But there was another path: to face the ghosts and slay the dragon. At that moment, neither the ghosts were the most lethal, nor the monsters the most central. Deep down, the dragon awaited. We can count on that — I, at least, imagine it.

Still, Lanegan hesitated. He didn’t want to be just another musician publishing an autobiography, which, as he himself admitted, often depressed him with their lack of originality. If he were to write, it had to add something to the world, something beyond what had already been written. Anthony Bourdain, a fan of Lanegan and a mutual friend of close confidants like Josh Homme, saw the potential in these early writings. After receiving a chapter via email, Bourdain responded clearly: “You’ve already started writing this book.”

A ghostwriter would have been the easier route. The voice might still have felt authentic, as Keith Richards’ autobiography demonstrates so well. Yet, Lanegan chose otherwise — perhaps because that voice of his was not just auditory. Writing about those songs became part of his creative corpus (or creator’s voice, if you prefer). It was ultimately a signal of judgment and discernment — a voice of reason and spirit. The truth is that through a genuine miracle, he had escaped the hell that had been poised to annihilate him once and for all. The epiphany is well described in Sing Backwards and Weep. It was natural, even healthy, for him to want nothing more to do with it. But the dragon had to be defeated.

Sing Backwards and Weep goes far beyond a mere autobiography; it’s closer to a memoir or even an autobiographical novel, dissecting the other side — a modern version of Crime and Punishment, if crime is paired with ecstasy and addiction. It’s a memoir-novel, a brutal dissection of life as a battlefield. Lanegan writes with dry, brutal, almost fantastical realism, as someone who has survived a massacre. Readers will feel utterly drained, yet firmly and illusorily convinced. With dry, brutal, and fantastic realism, these pages achieve a rare rawness, proving that there’s no need for exaggeration or sensationalism to convey the substance of pain directly through words.

In 1998, the album Scraps at Midnight already hinted at raw hells, material still incandescent, too close, lacking the perspective that time and distance provide to solidify and reveal its contours. A recent purge, with three great songs — among his best — while the rest was bruised and uneven, nothing special. Now, reading this memoir, it is clear this was shortly after Lanegan had finally managed to raise his head above water.

What followed was a disappearance of sorts. Lanegan left music, stepped away from the spotlight, only to return with friends. If there’s one aspect of life where fate seemed to favor Lanegan, it was in friendship. Friends always saved him, even as he failed to save others — friends who were brilliant, for better or worse. Courtney Love, often maligned, literally saved his life by paying off his debts and getting him off the streets. Duff McKagan gave him a roof after rehab. Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri brought him back with Queens of the Stone Age. Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs became a brother-in-arms, forming The Gutter Twins with him and fueling even more inspiration.

Then came collaborations with the Soulsavers and duets with Isobel Campbell — delicate but falling short of Lanegan’s depth. These albums became his calling card in Europe, especially for those who only knew him through these duets — a fact that’s disconcerting, irritating, and, in a way, depressing. So many people only know Mark Lanegan for his duets… or for Queens of the Stone Age… or for one of Anthony Bourdain’s final shows, another pivotal friend, and the first mentioned here.

As if the immense Lanegan were only that, or as if (merely) that were the true Mark Lanegan, when the grand and genuine Mark Lanegan can only and should only be found in his solo work. Just like Nick Cave, Neil Young, or Van Morrison — or would I be speaking of The Birthday Party, Buffalo Springfield, or Them, despite my love for those bands?

In the end, it hardly matters. Things take their own forms. Lanegan, who worked in a circus as a teenager, always carried that experimental side — force and vulnerability in an unstable balance, a circus of sorts. A man’s man and a woman’s man, with an intensity that avoided harming others but had no issue harming himself.

It’s curious that Lanegan was a furious enemy of those he felt owed him something — a man who never let a grudge go unaddressed. Ask the Conner brothers of his band, Screaming Trees. Or Liam Gallagher, Al Jourgensen… But above all — painful as it is — his own mother. This is methodically and nauseatingly explained in Sing Backwards and Weep.

“If it’s not going to be literature, I won’t do it,” he is said to have remarked. Sing Backwards and Weep is not only the best musician’s autobiography I’ve ever read — it surpasses even Bob Dylan’s Chronicles. It is merciless literature, like Cormac McCarthy, clinical like William Burroughs, dizzying like Hunter S. Thompson, and bitterly comic like Charles Bukowski.

Yes, Bukowski is invoked here too, with his implicit idea that you must die many times to truly live. What matters is what pierces through — songs of desperate beauty, a voice flooded with pain and soul. No instruments. No vocals. Just the essence of human struggle.

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Pedro Góis Nogueira
Pedro Góis Nogueira

Written by Pedro Góis Nogueira

Poems, short stories, essays and aphorisms | Poemas, contos, ensaios e aforismos.

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