You’ve been in Watershed for more than twenty-five years; what was the evolution of your book?

This musician’s life I’ve lived started in high school, and we’ve been telling the stories for years, but I didn’t write do any creative writing until graduate school. I graduated with an MFA from Ohio State in 2007; my thesis was an early draft of this book. It was totally different. I started at the beginning and told the story of Watershed chronologically. It was an important draft because it was me telling myself the story, but it wasn’t a book anyone would want to read. I wrote 400 pages and barely got us out of college.

What was the impetus behind playing around with the timeline and going back and forth between past and present?

What I learned writing the crappy thesis version is the truly interesting thing about us is that we’re guys in our forties with all the inherent responsibilities. The story is “Old Guys Still Doing It After All These Years.” After figuring that out, I wanted to create dramatic irony so that the reader knows what happens to us, but the younger versions of ourselves have no idea. I want readers to say, “Dude, you’ll still be doing this at forty and you have no idea.”

What’s it like writing songs compared to prose? Is one easier than the other?

Prose is harder. Simply because, when you’re writing rock-n-roll at least, you can bank on the rhythm, the volume of the guitars, and the band’s sheer rockiness. In prose, you have to create all of it through words. It’s a nifty trick to pull off.

Has writing lyrics all these years helped your second writing career?

The biggest help is being conscious of the fact that you’re writing for an audience. Playing music, you can see the audience right in front of you, so you’re always conscientious of it. I teach creative writing at Coastal Carolina University and students always struggle with that idea. I have to remind them that a diary or journal is for you; otherwise, you’re writing for somebody else. Being a musician makes you aware of serving an audience. In writing, it’s “Kill your darlings.” In music, it’s “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.”

What does writing, especially being a published author, give you that music doesn’t?

Writing is lonely and kind of scary, but it’s fun to be on my own, seeing if I can survive the loneliness and lack of immediate audience response. I’m a band guy and I love the communal ethos, but I have enjoyed staring at a blank page and seeing if I can pull it off. I like being in that difficult position.

It seems like the kind of no-frills rock music that Watershed plays was much bigger in the 1970s. Do you ever feel like you were too late to the scene?

It’s true. Our big influences were groups like Cheap Trick, who played straight-ahead meat-and-potatoes rock-n-roll, and by the time we came around everything was lo-fi and indie. R.E.M. and the Replacements. We're a mainstream commercial FM radio rock band, so the timing wasn’t great. But then in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that sound came back a little bit. We’re not that much like Blink-182, but there’s a similarity in a pop-punk, short catchy songs with loud guitars, aesthetic that was popular again. We kind of missed that train too. That’s why we titled one of our albums The 5th of July. Watershed’s timing is always horrible -- perpetually a day late and a dollar short.