Save Me from Myself: How I Found God, Quit Korn, Kicked Drugs, and Lived to Tell My Story — Meth, Korn, and a Bakersfield Altar Call

So here's the thing — everyone told me this book was going to be this big triumphant Christian testimony that would make me want to raise my hands in praise. And look, I'm not knocking anyone's faith journey. My abuela had her rosary in her hands every single night. But I went into Save Me from Myself expecting a rock memoir with spiritual texture, and what I got was... complicated. In ways I wasn't ready for.

I was up at 2 AM finishing a logo redesign for a brewery client, Frida asleep on my keyboard (as one does), and I had this playing through my headphones because I needed something raw to match the energy of staring at vector paths until my eyes crossed. And Brian "Head" Welch delivered raw, I'll give him that.

The Meth and the Music Hit Different Than Expected

What caught me off guard was how unpolished the honesty feels. Head doesn't romanticize the Korn years the way a lot of rock memoirs do — there's no wink-wink about the debauchery. The Ozzfest and Family Values Tour stories aren't fun party tales. They're bleak. He describes the cycle of tour bus meth use with this flatness that actually made my stomach turn, like he's still a little numb recounting it. That same quality — the flat, almost dissociated honesty of someone recounting their own unraveling — is something I found in a completely different historical register in Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel, where a man's slow disintegration is chronicled with that same eerie, matter-of-fact remove. The birth of his daughter Jennea not being enough to make him quit? That part wrecked me. Not ugly-cry wrecked, but that quiet gut-punch where you just sit with it. Because addiction doesn't care about love, and he says that without dressing it up.

But here's where I have to be honest — the faith conversion, the moment God saved him in Bakersfield in front of ten thousand people? I wanted to feel the magnitude of it. I really did. And on paper it's enormous. But something about how it's written (or maybe how it's read — I'll get there) made it feel more like a summary than a scene. Like he's telling you it was the most important moment of his life but you're watching it through frosted glass.

Ray Porter Is an Odd Choice and I Can't Decide How I Feel About It

Okay, so Ray Porter. I love this man's voice in other contexts — he's got that warm, authoritative quality that works beautifully for certain material. But this is a memoir by a nu-metal guitarist who snorted meth off tour bus surfaces, and Porter reads it with the measured cadence of someone narrating a documentary about national parks. It's not bad, exactly. It's just... mismatched?

Some listeners call it monotone and I get that. There are stretches — especially the middle chapters about the addiction spiral — where the delivery doesn't shift gear even when the content is escalating. You're hearing about increasingly desperate behavior in the same steady tone. Part of me thinks this could have been devastating if Head had narrated it himself, raw and unpolished. Part of me thinks Porter's steadiness actually mirrors the numbness of addiction, and maybe that's accidentally perfect?

I genuinely don't know. I went back and forth on this the entire six hours.

Who This Book Is Really For (And Who Should Steer Clear)

If you're someone in recovery, or loving someone in recovery, the addiction chapters will hit like a freight train. Head doesn't spare himself. If you're a Korn fan looking for juicy band drama — there's some, but it's filtered through the lens of "I was too high to appreciate any of this," which is its own kind of devastating.

If you're not religious, the back third might test your patience. The faith stuff is sincere but it leans heavily into "God did this, God did that" without a lot of introspection about the psychological mechanics underneath. That's valid for his experience! But as a listener who wanted more emotional complexity in the redemption arc, I felt a little left on the outside looking in.

Abuela would have loved the redemption. She would have clutched her rosary at the meth parts and then nodded firmly when Jesus showed up. She always believed people could be saved. I'm a little more complicated about it, but I felt her sitting next to me during that Bakersfield scene.

The Bookmark I'm Leaving in This One

At six hours and change, it's a quick listen, and the first half genuinely moved me. The faith stuff landed less for me personally, but that's about my own baggage, not his story. This book felt like sitting across from someone at a diner at 3 AM while they tell you the worst and best things that ever happened to them — and sometimes the telling is a little flat, but the truth underneath it shakes you anyway.