LAMB OF GOD's RANDY BLYTHE Says His Upcoming Book Tour 'Will Not Be Appropriate For Children': 'This Is Your Warning'

LAMB OF GOD frontman D. Randall "Randy" Blythe recently announced spoken-word and question-and-answer events to promote his upcoming book, "Just Beyond The Light: Making Peace With The Wars Inside Our Head".

Due on February 18, 2025 via Grand Central Publishing (GCP),"Just Beyond The Light" is described by the singer as 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."

The special "evening with" event includes a spoken-word performance, an audience question-and-answer session, a copy of "Just Beyond The Light" and an opportunity to have the book signed. Tickets for the dates are available via RandyBlythe.com.

Earlier today (Monday, January 6),Blythe took to his Instagram to share the following message: "Aloha and happy New Year to everyone! I am very busy grinding away at stories for my upcoming spoken word tour to support my new book, 'Just Beyond The Light'. I am quite excited for the tour, but I do feel the need to clarify something in advance about these shows.

"I just got an email from an acquaintance mentioning that they have already bought tickets to one of the shows, and that they will be bringing their son, a lovely young man I have met before. I had to reply and tell them that I am not so sure this is a good idea.

"As I have mentioned elsewhere, this is NOT a regular book tour, meaning an author sitting at a stool looking all scholarly and reading a few passages from their book, then sitting at a table and signing copies. I will be reading a tiny excerpt at one point from the book, but the rest of the time I'm onstage I will be attempting to illustrate the major themes of the book via stories from my life.

"Just in case any of y'all are completely unaware of my history as a human being, over the years, at times I have lived a very, ahem, 'full throttle life' — there is a VERY GOOD reason that I have been clean and sober for 14 years now. This means that some, not all, but SOME of the stories I will be telling will involve heavy, HEAVY alcohol and drug usage, as well as the batshit insane situations that occurred as a result of said substance intake. Some of this will be very funny (at least to me),and some of it will be sad/pathetic — regardless, I'm fairly certain it will NOT be appropriate for children. This is your warning, ok?

"I'm not going to be gratuitously foul-mouthed, but I'm not a choir boy, my life hasn't been a never-ending trip to Sunday school and we aren't going to be sitting around a campfire at summer camp- it's adult story telling time, y'all, so leave the kids at home. I don't want to traumatize your children, and trust me, you don't want to have to answer the questions your 8 year-old will have after hearing some of this stuff.

"Everyone else, I'll see ya there!"

"Just Beyond The Light: Making Peace With The Wars Inside Our Head" tour dates:

February 19 - Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts
February 21 - Harrisonburg, VA @ The Golden Pony
February 23 - Somerville, MA @ Arts at the Armory
February 25 - Montreal, QC @ Théâtre Fairmount
February 26 - Toronto, ON @ Red Room at The Concert Hall
February 28 - Lansing, MI @ Grewal Hall at 224
March 01 - Joliet, IL @ The Forge
March 03 - Nashville, TN @ The Basement East
March 04 - Dallas, TX @ Granada Theater
March 05 - Austin, TX @ Parish
March 07 - Denver, CO @ Meow Wolf
March 09 - Seattle, WA @ El Corazon
March 12 - San Francisco, CA @ The Independent
March 13 - Los Angeles, CA @ El Rey Theatre
March 14 - San Diego, CA @ House of Blues

In his gripping, best-selling debut memoir, "Dark Days", Blythe unflinchingly wrote about some of the most harrowing episodes of his past. Now, in his highly anticipated follow-up, Blythe shares how he works daily to maintain positivity in a world that feels like it is spinning out of control. 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 says: "For me, the single most gratifying aspect of being an artist is learning that your work has been useful to others in some way. I've been told by lots of readers that my last book, 'Dark Days', helped them. I hope 'Just Beyond The Light' does the same."

Ben Schafer, executive editor at Grand Central Publishing, adds: "In chaotic times, Randy's outlook is a bulwark against despair. His perspective is hard-earned, and 'Just Beyond The Light' reminds us that we can all work daily to achieve balance in our lives and strive to implement it in the world."

In a recent interview with Radioactive MikeZ, host of the 96.7 KCAL-FM program "Wired In The Empire", Blythe was asked if "Just Beyond The Light" picks up where "Dark Days", which focused on his ordeal in a Czech Republic prison and his subsequent acquittal, left off or if it's a completely different book. Randy said: "It's a completely different book. It's a collection of — I wouldn't call 'em essays, but different chapters about, basically different people and experiences who have [changed] my perspective for the better.

"As I get older, I try not to make the same stupid mistakes again and again and again and again," he explained. "And surprise, surprise, if you look at people who — you look at them and you think, 'Man, this person has their life together,' or, 'They've acted in a manner that I find admirable,' if you pay attention to them and follow their example, you don't do stupid things yourself. I'm not saying that I don't still do stupid things, but I'm trying fully in my old age to learn from others more."

When Radioactive MikeZ noted that it's "interesting" that Randy actually interviewed his then-94-year-old grandmother for the book, Blythe said: "Yeah, she passed away. There's a chapter. Well, I didn't interview her for the book. I interviewed her because she was 94. She lived to be a hundred and a half. And there's a whole chapter about her. She raised me for part of my childhood and she was raised during the The [Great] Depression. She did not screw around. She was a very real person who lived through a whole lot. But I interviewed her when she was 94, just for the fact that I heard so many stories from her of growing up in a different time. And I was, like, 'She's not gonna be here forever. I might as well get all this stuff down,' just for my own purposes and for my family to have. She was the last of that generation in my family. So when I started to write this book on perspective and people I've learned things from, she was a natural choice. Luckily, I had that interview to draw on. So if you have old people in your life — this is what I'm gonna tell you — if you have old people in your life, interview them now… I'm gonna have to do that with my parents soon. I mean, they're not ancient or anything, but your memory starts failing as you get older. So it's time to get that stuff before it disappears."

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."

In July, 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."

Blythe explained that he wanted "Dark Days: A Memoir" to be different from other rock autobiographies by not focusing exclusively on LAMB OF GOD and the band's touring lifestyle.

"Long after LAMB OF GOD is done, I will still be writing books," he said. "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."

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.