I Stand Alone (But You Should Listen to Me): The Sully Erna Gospel of Self

By now, it should be clear that Sully Erna doesn’t just stand alone—he demands you admire the view while he poses for a statue.

Fresh off the release of I Stand Alone, the cinematic self-eulogy that documents his rise from Boston street kid to metaphysical bulldog, the Godsmack frontman is already hinting at his next act: a second memoir. Not a sequel to a towering legacy, mind you. A second memoir. As in, another 300 pages of mood lighting and mirror angles, presumably dictated from a leather couch while the incense burns down and the camera crew resets for a close-up.

There’s nothing wrong with telling your story before the curtain falls—if you’ve got something to say. Just ask Corey Taylor or Randy Blythe. Both men released memoirs in the thick of their creative primes, but they did it with blood on the page and humility in the margins. Blythe’s Dark Days isn’t a victory lap—it’s a grim, poetic account of his imprisonment in Prague, a meditation on guilt, justice, and the slow agony of self-reckoning. It’s a book that bleeds, not brags.

Taylor, for all his theatricality, approached his books like late-night confessions—unconcerned with legacy-building and focused instead on faith, grief, addiction, and the deeply weird questions that keep a person up at night. Neither man needed to convince you of their relevance. They assumed you already knew the music and went looking for the untold stories—the jagged edges, not the polished stones.

Compare that to Sully, who seems less interested in peeling back the curtain and more concerned with staging a one-man show behind it. His memoir, like his documentary, offers curation instead of confrontation. The narrative arc rises, falls, and rises again with suspicious ease, as if life were a press release with B-roll.

Erna’s announcement is less a revelation and more a symptom. His first memoir and now this film operate like a branding exercise disguised as a spiritual journey. His pain is there, sure. But it's lacquered in a layer of late-career myth-making so thick, you’d need a belt sander to get down to anything that bleeds.

There was a time when a rock star memoir meant something. It was the hard-won afterword to a life misspent and—miraculously—survived. Keef’s Life, Lemmy’s White Line Fever, even Duff McKagan’s bracingly literate It’s So Easy: these were dispatches from the cliff’s edge, filled with bruises, blackouts, and the kind of twisted wisdom you couldn’t Google. But now? Now we get memoirs in the middle of the damn act. The tour isn't over, the ink on the setlist isn’t dry, and here comes Chapter 17: “How I Learned to Meditate in a Boxing Gym.”

In the age of social media, the very premise of an autobiography begins to rot. What can Sully tell us in a book that we haven’t already scrolled past on Instagram? How much vulnerability is left once it’s been edited, spell-checked, and sandwiched between photo spreads of prayer beads and backstage passes? A memoir used to offer access; now it offers curation. And Erna, ever the architect of his own image, understands the power of controlling the cut. You don’t need a biographer when you’ve got Final Cut Pro and a spiritual quote of the day.

The real tragedy isn’t that Sully Erna wants to tell his story—it’s that he thinks we still need it. And maybe that’s the dead giveaway: the rock star memoir is no longer a map through the madness. It’s a business card. A résumé. A $26 paperback filled with bullet points and humblebrags. And in Sully’s case, it’s starting to feel like a sermon to an empty pew.