Wordsmiths in more ways than one.
It takes a great mind to write songs that evoke goosebumps or stir an emotional response, so to master as much with nothing but words is no easy feat. Songwriters are poets and storytellers by nature, but when you strip away the music and leave the words to stand on their own, it’s an entirely different ballgame. When it comes to dabbling in the language of literature and music, there are few who are highly regarded on both fronts, yet there are certainly some strong contenders who don’t often glean the credit they deserve.
Patti Smith
Before Patti Smith forayed into music, poetry was her creative outlet. While Smith’s award-winning memoir Just Kids is well known to any reader or music fan, she has many more published works worth exploring. Woolgathering and M Train each see Smith playing with the memoir format through poetry, essays and dreamlike depictions of her day-to-day life. Her books of poetry, Auguries of Innocence, Devotion, Early Work and The Coral Sea were published across decades – the latter, published in 1996, was eventually released as an album in 2008 – and exemplify the sheer beauty of Smith’s perspective on life, love and the world around her.
Nick Cave
Nick Cave’s lyricism is testament to his dexterity as a storyteller, so there’s little surprise he dabbles in fiction and poetry. A wordsmith through and through, Cave’s novels are lurid, stirring and proof of his wicked brilliance. Published in 1989, his first novel And the Ass Saw the Angel is a piece of southern gothic fiction and features a dark tenderness revolving around religious themes. Cave’s somewhat disturbing second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, explores the relationship between father and son, death and sex with countless mentions of Avril Lavigne’s vagina. Not only is Cave an author of fiction, his books also include The Sick Bag Song, a collection of musings Cave scribbled on sick bags while on tour in North America in 2004 and two books of poetry titled King Ink and King Ink II.
David Byrne
The mind of Talking Heads’ frontman David Byrne has always conjured intrigue through its weird and wonderful creations and Bicycle Diaries is no exception. While categorised as travel literature, Bicycle Diaries is difficult to pin down thematically. Byrne, a cycling fanatic, describes the inner workings of cities, their architecture and life-force around the globe from his fold-up bike which he carted across continents on tour with Talking Heads over the years. Across 25 years, Byrne has written books on a range of subjects, from PowerPoint as an artistic medium in Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information to the bible in The New Sins, proving his ever-shifting enigma.
Leonard Cohen
You need only glimpse Leonard Cohen’s discography to understand his affinity for poetry. While his collection of poems Book of Longing is a recognisable title, many may not know that Cohen got his start as an author before moving into music. Cohen published his first book of poems, Let Us Compare Mythologies, in 1956 before the release of his debut novel, The Favourite Game, in 1963. Fusing sex and religion into an obscure coming of age tale, the semi-autobiographical story follows the adolescence of a self-absorbed protagonist. Cohen’s second fictional novel, the vulgar and witty Beautiful Losers, is unanimously regarded to be not only his best work but one of the greatest experimental novels of the ‘60s, period.
Brian May
Although he is best known as the lead guitarist of Queen, Brian May is also an author and astrophysicist. Even more impressive than his titles are the scope of topics he has covered as a novelist. May has put his name to an assortment of books which have seen him team up with photo-historians to examine Victorian art, life and fashion, as seen in The Poor Man’s Picture Gallery, Crinoline and A Village Lost and Found. He’s also worked with expert astrophysicists for Bang! The Complete History of the Universe. May clearly fosters a fascination with stereoscopy, a technique for enhancing the illusion of depth in images, and uses the unique artform in many of his books.
Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket)
Daniel Handler may not be a household name when it comes to music, despite his roles in bands The Magnetic Fields and The Gothic Archies, but the accordion player is lauded in the literary world. Under the pen name Lemony Snicket, Handler authored the wildly popular children’s’ book series, A Series of Unfortunate Events, which has since been adapted into both a film and a Netflix series. While A Series of Unfortunate Events is Handler’s namesake, he has published a number of young adult and children’s fiction under both the Snicket moniker and his own name.
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