Plenty of songwriters publish memoirs, but a full novel is a different undertaking. It means building characters, pacing a plot and sustaining a voice across hundreds of pages instead of three minutes.
The seven artists below all did it, and each has a published novel to show for it. Some came to fiction early, some late, and a few made a second career of it.
Leonard Cohen
Cohen was publishing books before he ever recorded an album. His first novel, The Favourite Game, appeared in 1963 and follows a young man from Montreal who grows into a writer.
His second, Beautiful Losers, came out in 1966 and was far stranger, mixing history, religion and desire in a fragmented style. It still turns up in discussions of experimental Canadian fiction. Cohen, who died in 2016, is a rare case of a songwriter whose novels came first.
Nick Cave
Cave’s debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, was published in 1989. It’s a dark, Gothic story set in a Southern American backwater, narrated by a mute outcast, and it reads like an extension of his early records.
Twenty years later he returned with The Death of Bunny Munro, published in 2009. That book follows a door to door salesman of beauty products on a grim road trip with his young son. The two novels are very different in tone, which shows Cave wasn’t simply repeating himself.
John Darnielle
Darnielle fronts The Mountain Goats, a band known for dense, literary lyrics, so his move into fiction felt natural. His first novel, Wolf in White Van, came out in 2014 and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
It centers on a reclusive man who designs a mail based role playing game. Darnielle has kept writing novels since, including Universal Harvester in 2017 and Devil House in 2022. He keeps making albums too.
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Willy Vlautin
Vlautin led the alternative country band Richmond Fontaine, and his songs were already full of drifters and low wage workers. His debut novel, The Motel Life, appeared in 2006 and was adapted into a film released in 2012.
He followed it with Northline in 2008 and Lean on Pete in 2010. The latter became a 2017 film directed by Andrew Haigh. Vlautin’s plain, compassionate prose has earned him a reputation as a serious novelist, not just a musician with a side project.
Jimmy Buffett
Buffett was best known for island flavored songs like Margaritaville, yet he had a long publishing career. Tales from Margaritaville, a 1989 collection of short fiction, was followed by the novel Where Is Joe Merchant? in 1992.
That novel is an adventure story with a tropical setting and a cast of oddballs, which suited his public persona. Buffett died in September 2023. His books remain a reminder that his storytelling went beyond the stage.
Steve Earle
Earle is a Texas born songwriter with a long career in country and rock. In 2011 he published his first novel, I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, which borrows its title from a Hank Williams song.
The story follows a morphine addicted doctor in 1963 San Antonio who is haunted by the ghost of Williams. Earle released an album of the same name that year. The book shows how comfortably his songwriting and fiction overlap.
Richard Hell
Hell helped shape New York punk as a member of Television and later as leader of Richard Hell and the Voidoids. In 1996 he published the novel Go Now, a fast, rough story about a troubled writer and musician.
He later wrote the memoir I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, released in 2013. Before either book, Hell was already known for his sharp, poetic writing, and Go Now was his first full length work of fiction.
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