Riff: What Makes a Writer Want to Rock Out?

Illustration by Tom Gauld

My secret life in rock music at last collided with my literary career during a phone call in 2003. I was talking with my editor, discussing possible avenues for publicity for my coming book, a collection of 100 very short stories. This volume's slightness was overshadowed only by its even slighter potential for earning back its advance. The situation demanded creative thinking. It was an overseas call, and had so far cost about a third of the advance. Impulsively, I said, "I'll record an album of 100 songs!"

"Pardon me?"

"One hundred really short songs. And we'll give it the same title. And you can use it to promote the book!"

"Um. . . ."

"It will be great," I said. "People will love it. I'll get to work on it right away."

"Well, all right" was the reply. I chose to interpret this as wild enthusiasm. Within minutes of hanging up, I retreated to my home recording studio, a 10-by-10-foot Sheetrock chamber lined with convoluted packing foam that I had built in my basement for the purpose of composing, performing and recording music no one would ever hear.

It is disingenuous, I suppose, to call what I was doing a "secret life." I wasn't actually keeping it a secret. Indeed, I would bore anyone who was willing to listen with monologues about my songwriting, musical instruments and recording equipment (much of it homemade and only marginally functional), and my techniques for combining the three. In fact, very few people were willing to listen, and most of them were on the Internet. Among my Internet recording friends, I was the only writer; and among my writer friends, I was the only rock musician. Sure, I knew a few writers with a guitar gathering dust in the corner of a book-lined office, but I identified myself as a solitary nerd with incompatible obsessions. Fiction writing was my life's work; music was a slightly embarrassing avocation.

I wrote and recorded the hundred-song album. (It required more work, by far, than I expended on the book.) I had CD's pressed. (A request to my publisher for material assistance in this endeavor was politely rebuffed.) The album was sent out, along with the book, to reviewers. Some of them reviewed the book, but nobody mentioned the album. Mission accomplished. Mission ignored.

A decade later, I'm in a new rock group. We are called the Starry Mountain Sweetheart Band. Four of its five members are fiction writers. (The fifth is a lawyer, a personnel decision I am certain we'll eventually have cause to be thankful for.) Indeed, at times it seems as if every writer I've met since 2003 is also a musician, and most of the musicians I've met are, or would like to be, writers. Literary works are now routinely accompanied by purpose-made soundtracks; bands are calling upon literary writers to supply lyrics. It is not uncommon for literary readings to be bookended by musical acts, and one of the most popular current literary blogs, The Largehearted Boy, is also among the most popular music blogs. The worlds of rock and lit appear to be merging. How did this happen?

For one thing, I wasn't the only guy trying to make an album in his basement in the early 2000s; cheaper and better digital technology has erased many of the technical barriers that once prevented would-be recording artists from doing it themselves. As Willy Vlautin, author of three novels and frontman of the band Richmond Fontaine, told me: "There's no studio fee, and there's no one saying your time is up. . . . That's new to the scene." Differences in process that used to separate these pursuits have disappeared, making the parallels between them more visible. "Most songwriters edit and toil the same way a poet does, or a fiction writer," he says. "Recording music is like editing a story; there's a thousand ways to look at it, a thousand ways to approach it and a thousand decisions to make." For Vlautin, both forms are types of narratives, but the process of creating each is emotionally distinct. "I always say, If you see me and I look healthy, I'm writing a novel; if you see me and it looks like I just slept under a truck, then I'm probably writing songs."