Sing Backwards and Weep: A Memoir

by Mark Lanegan

If there’s nothing else handy, money is always a sufficient lubricant.

Women who were smart, dirty, and open to any sort of nonmainstream but legal and consensual action in the bedroom were who I sought.

I was, at the end of the day, a slow learner, an extremely slow learner afflicted with the lack of self-awareness to even realize it. I always thought I knew it all, but I was only ever motivated into action by one of two things: pleasure or pain.

I was, in reality, driven by what I’d heard referred to in rehab all those years ago as “a thousand forms of fear.” Sadly, somewhere deep in my soul, I knew that was probably me.

The word depression had never crossed my mind, never in relation to what I’d been going through, and, in fact, never at all in my entire life. It was not something in my limited categories of feelings, nor was it a characterization I’d have ascribed to myself. “I’m only depressed because no one can tell me what’s wrong with me.”

heroin erased the myriad collection of endless worries that had kept me awake all night most of my life. It had freed me from feeling anything: loss, heartbreak, regret, grief, resentment, as well as the burning hatred and disgust I felt not only for myself but also for other people I thought had wronged me, real or imagined. When dope enveloped me in its golden glow, all that melted away like springtime snow. The world became black and white, boiled down to just getting enough drugs each day to keep the dogs of withdrawals off my heels. I felt as though heroin had saved me from a life of misery, and I was prepared to go to any lengths to make sure I would always have it. Heroin was my number one, and anything else—everything else—was such a far-distant second place as to be virtually unseen on the radar screen of my life’s importance.

My jealousy and bitter resentment over the painful, self-inflicted loss of my former love brought out a negative, sometimes violent reaction. My loss of Anna was still very much a raw, open wound.

The lyrical narrative of the individual songs was rooted in my day-to-day experience: pain, loss, the inner world and trials of someone strung out and struggling. Without comfort or love, searching for what, who knew? But it was something if ever found, might be located on a spiritual plane, not in the physical world.

My main issue had been leaving my comfort zone for an unknown place where I’d be forced to find a source of heroin when I could just stay home and be fine. I turned down many opportunities in those days for the same reason.

I was compelled to ask a stranger to keep my secrets, but most addicts were keeping secrets from someone themselves.