From Rock Star to Writer: On the Second Careers of Some of Your Favorite Musicians

It seems like practically every popular musician has published a memoir, and with good reason. Celebrity memoirs tend to sell well; fans crave knowing more about the offstage life of their favorite artists; and reading about the glittering world of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll never grows old for those of us on the outside.

More surprisingly, in recent years a growing number of well-known musicians have come out with novels. Some of these novels bear a strong resemblance to their author’s real lives (as in Nobody’s Empire, by Stuart Murdoch, lead singer of Scottish indie band Belle & Sebastian). Others are about musicians in fictional situations (such as This Bird Has Flown, by Susanna Hoffs, founding member of ’80s pop-rock band the Bangles; or When I Died for the First Time, by Tim Booth, lead singer of the Britpop band James). Still others are entirely unrelated to the music industry (like Devil House, by John Darnielle, lead singer of indie-folk group the Mountain Goats; or The Ghost Theatre, by Mat Osman, bassist in the Britpop band Suede).

When an artist has already made a considerable impact in one field, what motivates them to embark upon a second career in an entirely different creative industry? How do their skills, success, and fanbase translate? Does spending decades as a working musician better prepare a creator to write and publish novels, or do they face the same obstacles as the rest of us? To find out, I spoke with six musician-novelists, all of whom have traditionally published works of fiction within the past two years.

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“I’ve been a reader my entire life,” Susanna Hoffs says, fondly recalling a childhood holed up at her local public library. She first toyed with writing a novel in the late 1980s, shortly before her band the Bangles broke up, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that Hoffs, now in her 60s, got serious. “It was like this imperative that I get going on my novel.” In time, that novel became This Bird Has Flown (Little, Brown and Company, 2023). “I feel very lucky that this particular dream from childhood—wanting to write a book—came true.”

Colin Meloy, too, had a passion for books from a young age. “My twin dreams as a kid were to be a novelist and then, when I discovered music, to be a musician.” He received a creative writing degree from the University of Montana and had been planning to return for his MFA when his band the Decemberists took off. The group enjoyed years of success before Meloy returned to the second of those twin dreams. “I’d abandoned creative writing for such a long time that when I first started writing Wildwood [HarperCollins, 2011], I was nervous. You know, did I still have it in me? But it felt comfortable. Not only did it feel comfortable, but it felt like it tickled a part of my brain that the songwriting didn’t.”

Mat Osman dabbled in fiction writing when he was at school. When his band Suede broke up in 2003, Osman—then in his mid-30s—embarked on a career as a journalist. “I had this romantic idea about writing,” he says. “The thing that’s beautiful about it is that you don’t need any equipment. You just need an idea and a pen and pencil, and I loved that.” Journalism led him to short story writing, which then led to even longer projects. Suede reunited in 2010, but Osman kept writing, releasing his first novel, The Ruins, with Repeater Books in 2020.

Given the particular books that interested Def Leppard’s Phil Collen when he was young, it’s no surprise that he’s wound up a graphic novelist. “I was probably the only kid in England who was a comics freak,” he reminisces. “I’ve got Silver Surfer #1, Hulk #3, Spider-Man #3. I’d been bitten by this amazing cultural bug that was American music and American art forms, like movies and comic books.” Nearly sixty years later, Collen is releasing his debut graphic novel, Hysteria—named after his band’s bestselling album—with Vault Comics this summer.

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Writing is an art, but publishing is a business, and it’s widely recognized that it’s easier to secure media attention, bookstore placement, and sales for an author who already has name recognition and a loyal fan base.

Musicians understand this as well as anyone, and their feelings about how their success in one creative field provides them opportunities in another are complicated.

Stuart Murdoch is close to a number of other writers, some of whom are still laboring in the query trenches. He acknowledges, “The fact that I was in this group [Belle & Sebastian] has obviously given me a leg up. So, sometimes I wonder whether…Well, you shouldn’t really stop to wonder too much. But you know, sometimes you wonder, Would I have this chance if I wasn’t already in the group?”

Meloy has now published two picture books, five middle-grade novels, and a forthcoming novel for adults (tentatively titled Cascadia, due out in 2026)—a prolific writing career—but he’s still better known as the frontman of the Decemberists. “I made my name in music. That’s how I first got an audience.” When he started publishing, “I was doing a lot of hand-wringing about wanting to separate those two worlds. I just don’t want to cross those streams. I wanted to cultivate them both separately as best as I can…Though I know that to a certain degree that’s kind of a fool’s errand.”

“I assume that all artists have a certain imposter syndrome thing,” Meloy says. “That’s why we got into this business in the first place: to try to prove to ourselves that we aren’t imposters. That is just a thing that is on my shoulders constantly. And I think my effort to try to separate the two [music and writing] is to try to at least see for myself that the work can live on its own.”

This desire to see if the books can succeed on their own merits, outside of their creator’s identity, may be part of why Meloy started his publishing career in children’s books—kids are one audience who might say to him, “I always thought of you as a writer and then discovered that you had this other life is in a band.”

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Being an established musician can certainly help someone get a book published. But what about its effect on the writing itself?  Osman describes it this way: “I’ve been through the process of making records, and there’s always a point about halfway through where you’re just like, ‘Well, this is fucking awful. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t hang together. We should all give this up and go and become milkmen.’ And then you just plow on, because this is your life, and you get there and you improve it and you change stuff and suddenly you think, ‘Oh, we’ve got an album.’ And I think having gone through that was, in a weird way, the most important thing [that songwriting gave to my novel writing career]. Not to do with talent or the artistic connection between them. Just that idea that the good stuff doesn’t start as good stuff. Just knowing that because it’s shit now doesn’t mean it’s going to be shit at the end.”

Comparing the processes of making albums and making records, Meloy says, “Songwriting has so many fewer rules. It can be this sort of amorphous thing, just whatever comes out. Sometimes it happens so quickly, you can write a song in the amount of time that it takes to play it. Sometimes it feels like these things can come out fully formed, and that is immensely satisfying because so much of being a creative artist is being able to see the thing outside of your head. And never do you get that satisfaction so quickly, I think, as in modern pop songwriting. Even the longest song that takes to write will never compare to the amount of time required in writing a novel.”

To a writer who’s been wrestling with a 100,000-word draft for years, the prospect of getting out a finished artistic product so quickly may sound incredible. But, Meloy notes, there are benefits to spending so long creating a single work. “Songwriting comes out so quickly often you’re like, ‘well, you know, I guess that’s kind of the experience that I had in creating that.’ And you do come back to it in recording and performing it, but those are not the creative process. The appeal of novel writing to me is that is that enormously generous amount of time that you have to live in the storytelling part of it. That can be over in a flash when you’re writing a song.”

Books give their creators more time and space to develop characters, themes, settings, and plots, while songs give them a broader set of tools with which to paint a picture. “There’s something really clear about music because it’s so heartfelt, and it’s not mediated through words or meanings or language,” Osman says.

Meloy points out, “The power of music and songwriting is that it has these multi layers. You have tempo, and you have melody, and you have chord progression, and you have the poetry of the language. It can create a real universe. But then there are certain aspects that you can get to in a novel that you just can’t approach with a song.” Overall, Meloy says, “They both have an expansiveness that the other one can’t quite.”

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In other ways, the creative process is the creative process, regardless of medium. “They’re jigsaw puzzles, songs are,” Collen says. “You get inspired by something, and before you know it, it goes off on a tangent. This [writing the book] was very similar to that. Artistic expression is [all] pretty similar. You can tap into any flow, and you hang on to it, and it just takes you.”

Hoffs, too, describes the visceral similarities in her experiences creating art. “When I’m writing or singing, there’s a kind of out-of-body element, but there’s this hands-on-the-wheel [feeling] at the same time. I’m driving it, and I’m driving forward, and I have control—but I don’t have total control.”

And, while writing a song may go much faster than writing a novel, Collen points out that maintaining a career as a musician—especially on tour—takes a lot more “perspiration” than the initial creative process. “When we’re on tour, I warm up for two hours. Joe [Elliott, lead vocalist] does three or four hours a day warming up. A lot of people don’t see that part of it.

Often there are certain ideas, themes, or experiences so central to an artist that they will explore them across multiple works and multiple media. For example, the story in Murdoch’s novel Nobody’s Empire (HarperVia, 2025) is, to some extent, mapped out by the song “Nobody’s Empire,” which his band released a decade prior. “In a sense,” he says of the book, “the song is a distillation.”

Some musicians even work their songwriting into their novels, as Jens Lekman has done in his debut, Other People’s Weddings (Abrams, 2025), co-authored with bestselling novelist David Levithan. Lekman wrote a series of new songs for this novel, each one corresponding to a different chapter, so the full story comes across through both music and text.

Although the processes of writing songs and novels can be quite different, the motivations to create them are the same. “I mean, at the end of the day, why do we make art?” Hoffs says. “It’s to connect with other humans. We need to feed our souls that way. I know I do. I know that I need to consume art in all its forms. Every one of those things is about connecting with our humanity. We as humans figured out a way to share these experiences and feelings with other human beings. It’s such a beautiful thing. It’s what compels me to wake up in the morning.”

Osman says, “What I think separates artists from the rest of the population, is: What do you do with strange, confusing ideas? If you sit and let them pass, or worry about them, then it doesn’t really help. But if you’re used to making music or painting or writing books, that’s your material. So often I wake up in the morning and there’s a strange thought in my head, and my first thought is: How do I get this down? Is this a scene from the book, is this a short story, is this a piece of music? What does it mean? That sense that everything is grist to be turned into art is such a gift. And more than anything, it’s just a habit, actually. I’ve just spent 30 years doing it. It just means that you always have that opportunity for alchemy in your back pocket.”

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The one place where a career in books just can’t compare to the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle is in promotion. “Even though you’re connecting with people who come to signing lines,” Meloy says, “and there’s a certain amount of performance in being able to read a little passage, it doesn’t even remotely compare to getting your cup filled by a music performance.”

Osman expresses a similar sentiment about the distance between creator and fan in books. “That’s the thing that I think is missing from writing. The feedback is so far away from the work. You never get people chanting your name. You never get people dancing to something you’ve done. There’s nothing visceral about it. You’re kind of shouting into the void. I’m not sure I could be a full-time author. It’s too lonely for me.”

It’s certainly true that the solo process of creating a novel can stand in stark contrast to the team effort of producing a song. Osman says, “I’m used to the collaborative process of being in the studio and having the rest of the band going, ‘yeah yeah yeah,’ or, ‘no no no,’ and having producers like, ‘can we try it this way, can we try it that way.’ When you’re in the studio, if something’s wrong, you’ll literally hear in your headphones, ‘That was awful. You’re supposed to be a professional musician.’ I’m quite used to being told, ‘This is just wrong.’ The first time I came to be edited, I found the politeness of literary editors really odd. I’d get these notes that would be like, ‘I was wondering if we could possibly look again…’ It’s taken me three books to get to the point with my agent and with editors where I say, ‘If it’s shit, just say, please.’”