That Mark Lanegan is alive is a surprise - to him as much as to anyone else. His self-destructive days are now behind him, but for years it looked like we would be robbed of one of the stand-out singing voices of his generation.

Words: Rob Hughes

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, Sing Backwards And Weep is about salvation. And comradeship. Lanegan is still here to tell his tale, unlike some of the close friends who shared his journey into the 90s: Kurt Cobain, Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Alice In Chains singer Layne Staley. Their memories are pressed deep into the folds of the new album too, alongside other episodes and characters from Lanegan’s turbulent former life. As he wonders aloud in his sonorous drawl on Skeleton Key, a standout from Straight Songs Of Sorrow: ‘I spent my life trying every way to die/Is it my fate to be the last one standing?’

TRAVIS KELLER/PRESS

The songs on the album were written immediately after completing Sing Backwards And Weep, drawing from the same troubled well of experience. “I’d spend fourteen-hour days and realise that I hadn’t moved from the chair,” Lanegan says of writing the book. “If I was a character actor I would’ve been DeNiro in Raging Bull. I did everything short of taking up a needle and a pipe. There were a lot of memories to choose from. It covers a ten-year span and, frankly, shit was happening every single day. The kind of things that most people only go through maybe once in their entire life.