Randy Blythe’s second book should be published at the beginning of 2025

Randy Blythe, frontman of Lamb of God, is a talented individual when he is not bouncing around on stage and shredding the mic. He’s an excellent photographer, a committed wildlife conservationist, and occasionally writes insightful essays. During a recent conversation, we heard that his latest literary venture is nearing completion. While speaking with Loudwire Nights’ Chuck Armstrong, Blythe said that he was nearing the end of his second book, which was “in the process of final edits.”

It took me 10 fucking years. So, it will be coming out next year, supposedly in February. So it’s done. I’m editing. And then I’m gonna start on another book and not take 10 years in between them.

Blythe’s first excursion into literature was his 2015 book “Dark Days: A Memoir”, in which he described his arrest and eventual acquittal in the Czech Republic following a deadly accident at a Lamb of God gig. Speaking of his latest book, he stated that he is taking a less regimented approach this time.

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. 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 long-winded. 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.

Blythe has stated that this will not be his last novel. In fact, he believes writing will be his post-Lamb of God venture.

Long after Lamb Of God is done, I will still be writing books. So when I wrote [Dark Days], I wanted to write it, and I know some people were upset there’s not more stuff about Lamb Of God and heavy metal and all that other bullshit — I wanted the book to be able to be read by a much wider audience than just metalheads, and I wanted it to stand the test of time, be a sort of universal human story that people could read and think about. If I sit there and talk about nothing but touring with this band and getting drunk here and all that, it’s gonna be, like, ‘Ah, great, whatever. It’s another fucking music story.’ But one of the most gratifying things about that book to me was that a lot of the reviews said you don’t have to be a metal fan to read this, to enjoy this, you don’t have to know who the band is to read this, enjoy it. ‘Cause I write records for the metal fans; I already do that. I wanna write books, although they [metal fans] are a sizable contingent of the people who bought the book — I wanna write books for everyone.