There’s a scene in the book where a shuttered Charleston rock club has a sign in the window that says “Support Live Music.” Is “Hitless Wonder” an elegy for rock clubs?

Good cheap spots for live performances are going away. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s there was a network of clubs that indie bands could play. There’s a handful left, but each town used to have five clubs to play. Even the tentpoles like CBGB, or Stash’s in Columbus, are gone. It’s hard to make a go of it with a rock club featuring live original music. I don’t know if bands don’t tour because gas is too expensive, it’s easier to get a video on YouTube and songs on iTunes, and the clubs are gone, or if clubs don’t open because there’s no audience, but the combination of all of it means the ten bands for $10 a night scene is gone.

If you hadn’t been signed by Epic, would you have kept going, after having tasted what it’s like to blow up?

I don’t know. On the one hand, the Epic deal was a giant infusion of energy that propelled us beyond the year that it lasted. So looking at it that way, it seems like there’s no way we’d be together. But then again, I know us. We’re some stubborn sons-of-bitches. Combine that with ridiculous levels of optimism and I could see us out on the road saying we’re going to get it. That it might not even be a record deal, but just writing a better song, recording a better album, playing a better show... In fact, that is what we’re chasing. It’s not about rock stardom anymore, if it ever was.

You say in the book that you hated realizing how much of a role happenstance plays, but it feels like so much of Watershed’s history is missed opportunities that weren’t necessarily of your own making.

I honestly don’t know if they were of our own making or not. We definitely had bad timing, but did we have bad luck? Maybe. But to get where we are, where we’ve been, took a tremendous amount of good luck. The spark that got us signed to Epic Records was a package we sent off to a girl we went to high school with who happened to be dating a guy who knew Jim Steinman, who wrote Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell songs. I have a hard time saying we would have made it but for bad luck. These things are complicated. It’s like love. What makes one band catch on with the public instead of another? Maybe it’s just some intangible “it” that some bands have and others don’t. In many ways, those things are out of a band’s control. We’ve learned over all these years to focus on writing the best songs we can write, playing the best shows we can play, and hope the rest takes care of itself.

Did you read a lot of rock-n-roll memoirs before starting "Hitless Wonder?"

I read Jacob Slichter’s “So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star,” Jen Trynin’s “Everything I’m Cracked Up to Be,” and a bit of the twisted heavy metal Nikki Sixx kind of stuff, but I didn’t want to do exhaustive music biography research. I didn’t want to be influenced too much by their stories, or have the fear that there’s too many similarities. Instead, I read a lot of other memoirs and tried to apply what I found to this particular story. J.R. Moehringer’s “The Tender Bar” was important. It told me, “This won’t be hard if I just tell the story.” It was hard, really freaking hard, but “The Tender Bar” made me realize actual human beings can do this.