Lamb Of God frontman Randy Blythe has completed the first draft of his new memoir “Dark Days“. While Blythe initially approached the writing process with confidence, the process slowly broke him down, as he details in a lengthy new entry over at his blog. An excerpt from that can be read below:
“As I sat down each day to work on Dark Days, I very swiftly realized that there was no way in hell I was going to be able to do much of anything at all except write my book while I was writing my book. Writing a book is not easy. Not at all. And despite the fact that I am, indeed, intimately familiar with one variety of the creative process after making several records with my band, the process of writing a book is vastly different from getting together with four other dudes to write and record an album. In my experience, writing a book makes writing a record look like a joke in comparison.
And if you do it like I did it, with no cowriter or ghostwriter or underwriter or whatever they are called these days, then you do it 100% alone. That means when something sucks, it’s 100% your fault. There’s no chance of pawning off even one shitty sentence in your book on someone else. Unlike an album, where listeners sometimes exercise a great amount of leniency and tolerance for aspects of the music they don’t care for because of the things they do enjoy about the band (ie., “I don’t really care for the singer, but the drummer/guitarist/accordionist/kazooist/whateverist is amazing”), an author has nothing to offer to the audience but his own contribution to the book.
A reader isn’t going to recommend your book to anyone else just because it has a few good paragraphs in the first chapter, or they really liked the epilogue. And unlike the collaborative effort that occurs in a band, you as the author can’t blame that particularly sucky self-indulgent part of your book on anyone but yourself. In a band, if a song just sucks (even if it’s your fault), you can always pass the buck and blame someone else: “This would have worked if it wasn’t for that stupid wanking guitar solo at the end,” or “If the drummer would have just played a straight beat like we wanted him to, the middle of this tune wouldn’t sound like he had epileptic fit in the studio,” or “This thing was a ripping jam until that douchebag singer came in and ruined it with his pretentious lyrics and awful screeching.”
Then, when the album drops and people hate it, you can just sit back and take a long relaxing soak in a glorious hot tub of self-righteousness: “I tried to tell them, but those boneheads wouldn’t listen. Now look at ‘em.””
At present Amazon lists the book for a February 03rd release date.
