LAMB OF GOD Frontman RANDY BLYTHE's Second Book Gets Official Title, Release Date
Архив новостей | Русская версия
Hachette Books has set a February 18, 2025 release date for "Just Beyond The Light: Living With The War Inside My Head", the second book from LAMB OF GOD frontman D. Randall "Randy" Blythe. It will be the follow-up to his 2015 book "Dark Days: A Memoir", which focused on his ordeal in a Czech Republic prison and his subsequent acquittal.
"Just Beyond The Light: Living With The War Inside My Head" is described by the publisher as "a riveting and revelatory memoir about self-development and maintaining proper prospective through difficult times."
In "Dark Days", Blythe unflinchingly wrote about some of the most harrowing episodes of his past. Now, in his highly anticipated follow-up, Randy shares how he works daily to maintain positivity in a world that feels like it is spinning out of control. In his own words, "Just Beyond The Light" is a "tight, concise roadmap of how I have attempted to maintain what I believe to be a proper perspective in life, even during difficult times." Written with a scathing balance of hard-edged reality offset by a knowing humor and a razor-sharp wit, voiced in in his inimitable, conversational, everyman-philosopher style, Blythe clearly breaks down his approach to life, which is a personal and idiosyncratic mix of sobriety, art, and surfing. He writes movingly of his childhood in the South, of fallen friends, of what he's learned touring the world as the vocalist of a successful heavy metal band, and of the very real ways he is doing what he can to leave the world a better place. Above all, he offers readers hope that balance, real balance, is possible, even (or especially) when things seem hopeless.
Compelling, compassionate, and refreshingly honest, "Just Beyond The Light" ultimately reminds readers that "as long as we keep our feet (and minds) planted firmly on the ground that is reality, the sky isn't falling — it never has been, and it never will."
Blythe told RVA Magazine about "Just Beyond The Light": "It is about trying to maintain a balanced perspective in the world right now, and in order for me to do that, I have to look to other people I admire. One of those people I write about is my grandmother, who was 94. I was beside her when she died, and I was grateful for that because it was post-COVID. I interviewed her over the course of two days and learned about her life. I asked her what the biggest difference is between [her generation] the modern age we're in right now — she didn't say computers or globalism; she said people are not as close as they used to be."
Asked if he feels like we've lost that sense of interpersonal connection between people," Randy said: "In many ways, but I don't think it's totally gone. I think it's dormant. I think it's buried under the iCloud of bullshit, and it's going to come back and bite us on the ass. In one way or another, you're going to need help. People don't know their neighbors; there's not the sense of community there used to be. In this hyper-connected world, people are lonelier than ever — particularly young people. They're interfacing with the world through this digital medium, and it's providing an illusion of connection, but real connection requires friction. There has to be a push and pull when you're in person, and that is absent via digital communications when there is a wall of anonymity."
Earlier this month, Blythe was asked by Chuck Armstrong of Loudwire Nights if the upcoming book is "a memoir of sorts", similar to "Dark Days". Randy said: "I don't know if you'd call it a memoir. It's a collection of — not essays, I would guess, but individual chapters that are self-contained stories. It was a lot harder to write than my last book. 'Cause the last book, there's a narrative arc and I knew exactly what was gonna happen. I knew the story. I had already lived it. When I started writing this book, I had ideas about what I wanted to say, but I wasn't exactly sure what ground I was gonna cover. So, it was a lot harder. The last one, I had the roadmap in front of me. This one, it was a little bit more open-ended. And it's a shorter book — thank God."
"['Dark Days' is] around 500 pages," he continued. "My contract called for 80 to 100 thousand words. I turned in 257 thousand words, so he had to amputate a bunch of shit. I can get a little bit longwinded. My editor reined it in this time, which I was very happy about. I need someone to rein me in. It's like in a band when you need a producer."
Back in November 2022, Blythe told Metal Hammer magazine that he was working on two new books. The first was said to be "a long-term project" called "Frontman", which, as its title suggests, focuses on other people who share his profession. The second was a sort-of sequel to "Dark Days: A Memoir".
"The last book was about personal accountability," Randy explained at the time. "The vehicle to that was the story about me getting arrested and going to trial. This book is about perspective — the core theme is perspective and changing it to a healthy one. In recent years, I've been listening to other people's perspectives rather than just trying to figure out everything myself, because I'm not going to. The book is a collection of stories about different experiences I've had with people and what I've taken away from those experiences."
In 2012, Blythe was arrested in the Czech Republic and charged with manslaughter for allegedly pushing a 19-year-old fan offstage at a show two year prior and causing injuries that led to the fan's death. Blythe spent 37 days in a Prague prison before ultimately being found not guilty in 2013.
Blythe's prison experience inspired two songs on LAMB OF GOD's 2015 album "VII: Sturm Und Drang": "512", one of his three prison cell numbers, and "Still Echoes", written while he was in Pankrac Prison, a dilapidated facility built in the 1880s that had been used for executions by the Nazis during World War II. It also led him to write the aforementioned "Dark Days", in which he shared his whole side of the story publicly for the first time.
(Source: www.blabbermouth.net)
