Mark Lanegan, the former Screaming Trees singer and an ex-member of Queens of the Stone Age, reveals his experience contracting COVID-19 in an upcoming memoir.
Last year, the rocker was hospitalized after getting the contagious disease behind the worldwide pandemic. He slipped in and out of a coma and was given “little hope of survival,” according to a synopsis for the book, Devil in a Coma, which arrives next month.
Down toward the bottom of this post, read the synopsis and see the book cover artwork.
Lanegan also went “completely deaf” over the course of his illness, per Consequence. A spokesman for the Screaming Trees alum said the musician has “gotten his hearing back now, but his health is up and down.”
Other rock stars who’ve battled COVID include Bruce Dickinson (Iron Maiden), Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley (KISS), Jonathan Davis, Munky and Ray Luzier (Korn), Chad Gray (Mudvayne), Sean Killian (Vio-Lence) and Sebastian Bach (ex-Skid Row). Heavy metal singer Eric Wagner died in August after being hospitalized with COVID pneumonia.
Vaccination and booster efforts continue across the globe as 57 percent total of U.S. citizens are now fully inoculated. Over 700,000 Americans have died of COVID, according to a New York Times database. Since bands began touring again after a largely concert-less 2020, many have canceled or postponed shows because of the situation.
An earlier memoir from Lanegan, Sing Backwards and Weep, came out in 2020. It followed his 2017 lyrics book, I Am the Wolf. Lanegan’s latest solo album, Straight Songs of Sorrow, emerged last year.
Devil in a Coma is out on Dec. 14 in the U.K. — pre-order it here.
One morning in March 2021, with the second wave of infections ripping through Ireland where he was [a new] resident, Mark Lanegan woke up breathless, fatigued beyond belief, his body burdened with a gigantic dose of COVID-19. Admitted to Kerry Hospital and initially given little hope of survival, Lanegan’s illness has him slipping in and out of a coma, unable to walk or function for several months and fearing for his life.
As his situation becomes more intolerable over the course of that bleakest of springs, he is assaulted by nightmares, visions and regrets about a life lived on the edge of chaos and disorder. He is prompted to consider his predicament and how, in his sixth decade, his lifelong battle with mortality has led to this final banal encounter with a disease that has undone millions, when he has apparently been cheating death for his whole existence.
Written in vignettes of prose and poetry, ‘Devil in a Coma’ is a terrifying account of illness and the remorse that comes with it by an artist and writer with singular vision.
Mark Lanegan, Devil in a Coma Book Art
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