“I didn’t want this to be a book about that, but I can’t tell my story without touching on that” – Mark Morton of Lamb Of God shares more about the loss of his daughter

The autobiography of Lamb Of God guitarist Mark Morton, titled “Desolation: A Heavy Metal Memoir”, was released by Hachette Books on June 25th. In addition, Morton acknowledges in an interview with co-author Ben Opipari that writing the chapter on the 2009 loss of his daughter, Madalyn Grace Morton, was the most difficult part of writing the memoir. An illness claimed Madalyn Grace’s life the day following her birth.

It’s not because I discovered anything new about that situation. I just think that I struggled to honour it and word it just right. And I remember telling you [Opipari], ‘I don’t want a lot of notes on this one.’ That was one of the things I was, like, If there’s grammatical stuff… I spent some time with that one. I was in a really bad mood those few days. So, in that sense, it just drummed up stuff. It’s not something I bury. It’s not something I forget. It’s not something I wanna commodify either. I didn’t want this to be a book about that, but I can’t tell my story without touching on that. So it was more about finding the balance of all those things and kind of making it feel like I honoured that, but didn’t exploit it and told my authentic version of that. And I think that’s what we did.

Morton also admits that writing his thoughts on Lamb Of God‘s early years—when the band was first known as Burn The Priest—was the most enjoyable aspect of writing Desolation.

I really, really enjoyed kind of going through all the memories of the Burn The Priest era of Lamb Of God and then the early Lamb Of God stuff and just really trying to characterise what an absolute just cyclone of chaos and idiocy we were back then. And that was fun to explore and to revisit. And even with the stuff before that, like my high school bands, I did a lot of checking in with folks and seeing if I was remembering this right.