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Before becoming a novelist I wrote plays for 10 years. I called one of them Crossing Cassandra. It’s a play about a love-quadrangle, an old woman, her son and grandson all falling in love with the same beautiful woman. I wrote it to celebrate my marriage. In writing it I found myself wanting to create a love song to my wife as part of the play. The song “Lover’s Prayer” was the result, employing a tune from one of Mozart’s Piano Sonatas. I began writing more songs and eventually my own music. The first one of note was “Next to Nothing.” The entire experience of discovering in middle age that I could write music still causes me to wonder about life.
Though several of my plays were dramatized, one produced in New York I decided as an artist I was in the wrong place. Novels have since become a much more successful expression of what I have to say. But I didn’t want to lose my songs. When I wrote my first novel, Troubadour, I decided to attach them to it. They remain some of my best work. Long before I wrote aphorisms about learning, for instance, I expressed them perfectly in the song “Learning”, which celebrates this remarkably rich experience as “The Elixir of Life.”
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