Top Five Novels Written by Pop Musicians

Leonard Cohen, 2011

Mr. Cohen is one of my touchstones, an artist inseparable from the writer and person I’ve become. He, in a way, even brought me my wife, but that is another story. Before he recorded one of the greatest debuts in all of musicdom, Songs of Leonard Cohen, he was a poet and novelist. When I was a callow youth attending Memphis State, I carried his poems in my knapsack. The Favorite Game, his first published novel, appeared in 1963. It reads like the work of the young Philip Roth. If he’d never discovered music, Leonard Cohen may have become one of our best novelists. His second novel, Beautiful Losers (1966), is more experimental, and I am not as personally connected to it. Key line from The Favorite Game: “A thousand shadows, a single fire, everything that happened, twisted by telling, served the vision, and when he saw it, he was in the very center of things.”

John Lennon, 2010

And then, of course, The Beatles appeared on a flaming pie. Is there anyone my age who was not affected by the thunderstorm of their arrival on the scene? Unsurpassed music group, whose central songwriting genius, John Lennon, was also a paperback writer. Though not technically a novel—these two slim books, originally published separately, are collections of poems, stories and drawings—they nevertheless work as a whole and what a delightful whole it is. A whole that needs no fixing. I used to carry this little mass-market paperback in my jeans back pocket before I was really a reader of books. This may have been my first real literary experience. It may be the first book I owned. I think I was in 6th or 7th grade. His clever wordplay, evident in songs like “Happiness is a Warm Gun” and “Strawberry Fields,” is on full display here. Key line: “Wonsaponatime there was two balloons called Jock and Yono. They were strictly in love-bound to happen in a million years. They were together man.”

Richard Farina, 1996

Of all the musical artists who died too young, Farina’s death is one of the most heartbreaking. He and his wife, Mimi (Joan Baez’s sister), recorded only a handful of albums, all exquisite. And Richard, who was a friend of Thomas Pynchon’s at Cornell, wrote short fiction and this one novel. What a grand novel it is! It’s beautifully written, vivid, and full of whimsy and dark beauty, like his songs. Tragically, he died in a motorcycle accident the night of the party celebrating the publication of Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966). One can only speculate about what he would have achieved had he not died at 29. Key line: “Keep the story straight and you’ll get involved.”