mark-lanegan-Straight Songs Of Sorrow

Mark Lanegan preps guest-filled new album & memoir (listen to "Skeleton Key")

mark-lanegan

Mark Lanegan will release new album Straight Songs of Sorrow on May 8 via Heavenly. The record features appearances by Greg Dulli, Warren Ellis, John Paul Jones, Ed Harcourt and more, and the 15 songs on the album were all inspired by Mark’s upcoming gritty memoir, Sing Backwards and Weep, which will be published on April 28 through Da Capo. “Writing the book, I didn’t get catharsis,” Mark says. “All I got was a Pandora’s box full of pain and misery. I went way in, and remembered shit I’d put away 20 years ago. But I started writing these songs the minute I was done, and I realised there was a depth of emotion because they were all linked to memories from this book. It was a relief to suddenly go back to music. Then I realized that was the gift of the book: these songs. I’m really proud of this record.”

The first single is the dark, dramatic “Skeleton Key” where Mark ponders, “I spent my life trying every way to die / Is it my fate to be the last one standing?” Listen to that, and check out the album’s artwork and tracklist, below.

As for the memoir, here’s the synopsis:

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 dripping with drugs. He tracks the tumultuous rise and fall of the Screaming Trees, from a brawling, acid-rock bar band to world-famous festival favorites that scored a hit #5 single on Billboard’s Alternative charts and landed a notorious performance on David Letterman, where Lanegan appeared sporting a fresh black eye from a brawl the night before. This book also dives into Lanegan’s personal struggles with addiction, culminating in homelessness, petty crime, and the tragic deaths of his closest friends. 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 underlining beneath one of the most romanticized decades in rock history-from a survivor who lived to tell the tale.

mark-lanegan-Straight Songs Of Sorrow

Straight Songs Of Sorrow tracklist
1. I Wouldn’t Want To Say
2. Apples From A Tree
3. This Game Of Love
4. Ketamine
5. Bleed All Over
6. Churchbells, Ghosts
7. Internal Hourglass Discussion
8. Stockholm City Blues
9. Skeleton Key
10. Daylight In The Nocturnal House
11. Ballad of a Dying Rover
12. Hanging On (For DRC)
14. At Zero Below
15 . At Eden Lost and Found