By Blake Maddux

With 12 studio albums and myriad EPs to his band’s credit, Stuart Murdoch can now boast — not that he’s the type to do so — of being a published novelist.

As the co-founder, lead singer, and initial main songwriter for Belle and Sebastian, Stuart Murdoch might well deserve at least a plurality of the credit for putting the indie genre of twee pop on both sides of the Atlantic map.

Over the course of four decades, the Glaswegians’ sound has integrated elements of delicate folk, indie pop’s measured enthusiasm, jangle’s bounciness, and less often — but just as effectively — rock, electronica, and dance. Murdoch’s lyrics, meanwhile, are frequently painfully poignant, whether they are achingly straightforward, deliciously obscure, or whimsically childlike.

With 12 studio albums and myriad EPs to his band’s credit, Murdoch can now boast — not that he’s the type to do so — of being a published novelist.

One of the most beautiful of Belle and Sebastian’s recordings serves as namesake for the recently published Nobody’s Empire. (Here is Matt Hanson’s Arts Fuse review of that song’s parent album.)

The unsurprisingly affecting volume tells the story of how Stephen, Carrie, and Richard prop each other up through their mutual struggles with physical and mental ailments, be it in their cooler, cloudier hometown or the warmer, sunnier climes of the Golden State.

Murdoch will be discussing and reading from Nobody’s Empire at The Rockwell in Davis Square, Somerville, on February 1. He kindly answered the followed questions for me via Zoom in advance of the event.

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The Arts Fuse: What was it like to transition from songwriter to novelist?

Stuart Murdoch: It was pretty smooth. It was quite enjoyable. When you’re writing something autobiographical you already have a shape because it’s based on your own life. But, at the same time, you’re telling the story from the point of view of a fictional character to some degree. At the same time, that character’s not far removed from the writer or the character who wrote the early Belle and Sebastian stuff. So you’re just changing format. You’re still putting yourself inside that space.

AF: How is the reader to distinguish between the character Stephen Rutherford and the author Stuart Murdoch?

SM: Most of the stuff that happens to Stephen happened to me. It’s mostly the other characters that sort of deviate from what actually happened. Some of the characters are combinations of people or somewhat fabricated. Many of the conversations never took place. But the main thrust of what happened to Stephen did happen to me.

AF: How did you come to write a book that covers some of the same themes as the song of the same title?

SM: It certainly covers the same theme. The song was written 10 years ago and it is about growing up with ME [myalgic encephalomyelitis], with chronic fatigue syndrome, and it was about a particular friendship with my best friend Kira. That friendship forms the backbone of the book to some degree. The Carrie and Stephen characters represent Stuart and Kira.

The song starts when I’m in bed before they take me to hospital, and the book begins maybe a few months after I got out of hospital. So it kind of starts from the same place, where your life has completely changed from what went before and you’re trying to figure out what kind of person you are now and how you’re going to live and if you’re gonna live. And quickly being reliant on friends.

“Nobody’s Empire” covers 25 years in a song, whereas the book covers two years. So there’s that difference. Funnily, I didn’t set out to call it Nobody’s Empire. I didn’t set out to do anything. I didn’t set out to write a novel. I was writing a story. When you create something, you do it first and ask questions later.

The title didn’t come about until I was doing some readings from the book in a rough version. Sometimes I would do online meditations and I’d read a chapter from the book for people’s entertainment. After one of these readings somebody messaged me and said, “So, the book’s gonna be called ‘Nobody’s Empire.’” (laughs) I had to admit that it galvanized me somewhat to call it that.

AF: Stephen has two major revelations early in the book while sitting at the piano. Why did these two epiphanies reveal themselves under those circumstances?

SM: God and music. You just roll them together, for me. I do think that those two revelations happened. The God one may have been a little bit shadier. I was having flickers of otherness around that time, intimations of something bigger than life. I did on one occasion go the piano early on at my mom’s house shortly after I was out of hospital. I remember having a feeling of life stretching ahead. Of life being greater than just what you can see around you, and instantly coming to the conclusion that there was a God who was in charge and had already been pulling strings in my life, as the song goes. Sometime after that, I sat down with a similarly revelatory feeling of being able to write a song, which Stephen is described as doing in the book.

AF: Stephen first touches American soil at Logan Airport. How does that less than ideal experience accord with your own?

SM: Well, let me talk directly about my personal experience of touching down at Logan for the first time, the first time I was in North America. It was very quick. We just changed [planes], and I remember me and my friend Michael — who’s the real Richard — just stepped outside and stood in a patch of snow just to feel the air and the difference. We looked around a bit, went swiftly back inside, and caught our connection. And that was it.

AF: Having suffered from ME/CFS and depression, Stephen seems to be quite active socially and makes many immediate connections in San Diego and San Francisco. How did he do this?

SM: I used to think it was sort of beginner’s luck. When you are in a place for the first time, you can leave your inhibitions behind. Nobody knows you, so you can be more forthright. When we got to America, we didn’t really know what the hell was going on. This was before the internet. This was us discovering a country by ourselves, so we always had to ask. We were given a period of grace where you’re genuinely interested and can just walk up to a stranger and ask. And the reciprocal thing was that Americans were more outgoing than the average British person. They would answer you back and be curious about you and keen to help.

AF: Getting back to the topic of Boston, Stephen mentions several Boston or Boston-adjacent bands as being among his favorite. Does Stephen have a specific awareness of or fondness for the Boston music scene of the era?

SM: I certainly loved those bands. They gouged right into me in the late ’80s. By the end of the ’80s we knew more about these groups, that they were all coming from the same area. I knew J Mascis was from Amherst. I actually interviewed J for a Glasgow magazine and promoted his band. I met Throwing Muses. I kinda followed them around Scotland a little bit. I was so into those guys. And Galaxie [500] as well. They did the things I write about in the book. They played at the venue that I worked at. So I was lucky to have those connections. Pixies as well. Actually, I ran into J this summer at a festival and talked to him for the first time in, you know, 30 years or something. He didn’t remember the earlier conversation, but it was really nice to catch up with him.

AF: Finally, you are married to photographer, filmmaker, and Massachusetts College of Art alumna Marisa Murdoch. Is she originally from Massachusetts?

SM: When I knew Marisa at first, she was always a Bostonite [sic]. I think she really found herself in Boston. But she was raised in Florida to Sicilian and Cuban parents. When she got out of Florida she really flourished in Jamaica Plain. Apparently we met at a Belle and Sebastian concert, ‘cause she got on stage with us and was dancing, back in maybe 2001 or something. But we didn’t meet properly until a music festival in Spain. She was traveling with a mutual friend and we met at the go-kart races after the gig.

AF: How did she get onto the stage? Did you bring her up there like in that Bruce Springsteen video with Courtney Cox?

SM: Back then there was always a point in the concert where people used to scramble on stage. And she was one of the people who scrambled! Even though she’s short of stature, she’s kinda punchy! At the last concert that Prince played in Glasgow, we were standing on the floor space watching Prince. I looked to the left and suddenly my wife wasn’t there. Then I looked up on stage and she was right next to Prince!

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Blake Maddux is a freelance journalist who regularly contributes to the Arts Fuse, Somerville Times, and Beverly Citizen. He has also written for DigBoston, the ARTery, Lynn Happens, the Providence Journal, The Onion’s A.V. Club, and the Columbus Dispatch. A native Ohioan, he moved to Boston in 2002 and currently lives with his wife and six-year-old twins — Elliot Samuel and Xander Jackson — in Salem, MA.