Does that mean Someone Who Isn’t Me is the literary equivalent of Waiting, a debut work that shows more promise than power? Not exactly. After all, Rickly is now in his 40s. Between Thursday and all the other bands he’s fronted over the past quarter-decade, he’s written the equivalent of many books, only in song form. Of course, a novel is very different from an album, and many musicians have dashed themselves against the rocks in an attempt to transfer their lyrical ability to prose. As it turns out, Rickly is solidly in the camp of successful songwriters-turned-authors such as John Darnielle and Nick Cave. When it comes to making the shift to the written word, he’s a natural, albeit a germinal one.
Someone Who Isn’t Me is a semifictional account of Rickly’s own ups and downs as a tormented creative, a sensual being, and a heroin addict. If that sounds less than original, that’s because writers such as William Burroughs and Jim Carroll perfected this type of book decades ago. (It takes all of three pages into Someone before Rickly actually name checks Burroughs.) That doesn’t, however, make Rickly’s addition to the canon any less vital. A saga of innerspace, the story pingpongs across years and coasts as Rickly alternately tiptoes and bulldozes through band tours, romantic relationships, and a chronicle of his real-life drug battles. He uses his own name for his protagonist, but he’s wise to detach much of his narrative from hard reality. Elevating his story above the bounds of believability, he injects speculative elements such as the imagined, psychedelic, anti-heroin drug called ibogaine, which evokes science-fictional pharmaceuticals of literature past like Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-gerasone and Philip K. Dick’s silenizine.
Again, there’s nothing really new here, except for Rickly’s singular language and force. His lyrics and vocals have always experimented with form, texture, emotion, and modes of address, so it’s no surprise that Someone does the same. Passages of cut-glass sharpness dissolve into flow-state streams of consciousness. He navigates “whole city blocks compressing in accordion bellows”; he recounts how he “started a band and screamed into rusty microphones, jumping around the stage until my shoes filled with blood.” Hallucinatory prose is rarely this vivid — nor does it usually bristle with the visceral punk energy that Rickly has honed throughout his career as an explosive onstage presence.