After researching the 17,000 previous TNB Self-Interviews, I realize you’re the first ever entirely self-published novelist to be granted such an interview. Why you?

I don’t know, but I’m honored.

You’re also the first one to have once been the bass player in a semi-famous band.

Yes, I did it! Fie, James Greer.

Somehow, in Seattle, for reasons no one could explain, No Fun Intended had a packed house.

The Verve, an all-ages club just off the interstate, was the kind of place any touring band hoped to avoid. It was a grey cinder-blocked box, capacity 400, so close to I-405 as to be underneath it. The shadow of the off-ramp made it darker and danker than it would’ve been otherwise, and with no other businesses around, the chances for a walk-in crowd were nil. Inside there were no seats, and the cement floor would’ve been more suitable for storing utility vehicles. The bar, which looked like a concession stand at a Little League game, was tucked around the corner, far away. The stage was so high horny kids would spend the night looking up Betty’s skirt.

When I started playing bass guitar at fourteen, I had it in my head to do something revolutionary with the instrument. I’m sure I was like other kids in the eighties who bought axes and imagined they’d summon their inner Eddie Van Halens to become some kind of wunderkind. The path to this land for me was murky, but the end result—being crowned the Undisputed King of the Bass—was clear. I had only one clue to finding this Valhallic destination, and that was the thirteenth note.

I received the rejection early yesterday morning, the last one, the one I”d been waiting on.

I finished my third novel, Badge, in late 2010, brimming with the confidence of having finally created something the traditional publishing industry might actually want. Ever since I cracked my first Vonnegut paperback when I was eighteen, I”ve fantasized about spending my life writing novels. Back then, such a dream required—and for the most part still does—getting an agent and a publisher.

TNB Contributor Art Edwards is best known around these parts for his top-notch interviews with some of writing’s most noted voices, as well as with people who aren’t associated with music at all. He, too, contributes interesting and thoughtful original essays to TNB, many of which focus on (and reveal his love for) music, though others reveal his love for more pedestrian interests. In any case, until recently, Art was known to the TNB community as a writer – and most assuredly one with a particular aptitude for music. Art’s three novels – Ghost Notes, Stuck Outside of Phoenix, and Badge, his newest (and as of yet unpublished) – each integrate music in its own way.

However, it wasn’t until recently that Art revealed to our community that he was co-founder, co-songwriter, and bass player with The Refreshments. Best known for the song “Banditos” from their 1996 album Fizzy Fuzzy Big & Buzzy, and for “Yahoos and Triangles,” the theme music to the animated series King of the Hill, The Refreshments, as Art puts it, “were kind of a big deal.”

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Art in person on several occasions and once even read out loud to a room full of people with him. The Art I met is a shy, affable, even-keeled man – one who doesn’t present at all as a Rock Star. I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Art and once and for all clearing up the question, “Who is Art Edwards really?”