"My Life Was A Roller Coaster, No Doubt"

Soni of Hootie and The Blowfish

Cris Cohen: When you wrote this book, you had to relive a lot of these moments… some fantastic, some really awful. But ostensibly your family, friends and bandmates, were going to kind of relive this as well. How did you handle that?

Jim "Soni" Sonefeld of Hootie and The Blowfish: Writing something down about your life is way different than talking about it with friends, family, or a loved one. You realize the permanence when you see it written there. It makes you question how you speak, how you want to communicate.

My life was a roller coaster, no doubt. And I wanted to let people know that it was. But also, I didn't want to harm people.

There was part of me that said, “Tell them everything. It'll be amazing.” Because I had read a lot of music bios that were anywhere from illuminating to grotesque. And I didn't want to be that guy.

I still had kids that were teenagers. I had an ex-wife. I had bandmates that were still my bandmates. There's no need to harm people with your words, for some form of self-satisfaction, or to sell books. So I was very careful about what to write.

And yeah, living through things like the beginnings of the band… glorious. Wonderful. I couldn't wait.

But going through my mom being alive and then passing. That was a difficult part of the book. That was hard. That was probably the hardest part, really facing some things in grieving. Because grieving is kind of forever.

If you pass through maybe the worst of it, and you've moved from losing someone to remembering someone… it was still hard. It still is.

Even if I go back and read portions of my book for groups, that's one that I never get through.