Roddy Bottum (Faith No More, Imperial Teen) going on book tour for new memoir ‘The Royal We’

Faith No More keyboardist and Imperial Teen frontman Roddy Bottum released a memoir, The Royal We, at the end of 2025 via Akashic Books. Here’s the back of the book synopsis:

THE ROYAL WE is a poetic survey of a time set in a magical city that once was and is no more. It is a memoir written by Roddy Bottum, a musician and artist, that documents his coming of age and out of the closet in 1980s San Francisco, a charged era of bicycle messengers, punk rock, street witches, wheatgrass, and rebellion. The book follows his travels from Los Angeles, growing up gay with no role models, to San Francisco, where he formed Faith No More and went on to tour the world relentlessly, surviving heroin addiction and the plight of AIDS, to become a queer icon.

The book is an elevated wallop of tongue and insight, much more than a tell-all. There are personal encounters with public figures like Kurt and Courtney and Guns N’ Roses, and recaps of gold records and arena rock—but it’s the testimonies of tragedy and addiction and preposterous life-spins that make this work so unique and intriguing. Bottum writes about his dark and harrowing past in a clear-eyed voice that is utterly devoid of self-pity, and his emboldened and confident pronouncements of achievement and unorthodox heroism flow in an unstoppable train that’s both captivating and inspirational.

Roddy will be promoting The Royal We on a book tour that starts in Brooklyn on January 26 at Greenlight Bookstore and heads to Baltimore, DC, Cambridge, Providence, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Atlanta, Nashville and more. All dates are listed below.

In other news, word is there’s a new Imperial Teen album on the way which will be the first since 2019’s Now We Are Timeless.