Dan Brown is best-known for his popular thrillers like The Da Vinci Code and Inferno. But Brown is about to embark on a new venture — one that’s set to take him into uncharted territory. Uncharted territories, to be more precise. Brown is working on his first picture book for younger readers — and he’s composing a soundtrack for it himself to boot.
At The Guardian, Alison Flood reports that Brown’s next book will be a picture book, Wild Symphony, in collaboration with illustrator Susan Batori. Flood writes that the book “is inspired by classic children’s stories such as Peter and the Wolf, and picture books from [Brown’s] childhood.”
Making matters more intriguing is the presence of a soundtrack for Brown’s new book. (“One piece of music has been composed for each animal, intended to be listened to as the book is read,” writes Flood.) Now, there are plenty of figures with a foot apiece in the worlds of books and music, from Jonathan Lethem to Jenny Hval. But Brown being part of that camp might come as a surprise to some.
As it turns out, though, Brown’s been making music since long before his bestseller days. A 2006 article by Joanna Walters and Alice O’Keeffe about Brown’s marriage to his wife Blythe, who was an early promoter of his work when music was still his primary calling in the early 1990s.
[Brown] had been plugging away at singing and part-time teaching, thanking Blythe on his second CD ‘for being my tireless co-writer, co-producer, second engineer, significant other and therapist’. He had even recorded a song about telephone sex and another with a sado-masochistic overtone called ‘Sweet Pleasure in Pain’, which has certainly raised some eyebrows about the nerdy guy and his powerful wife.
One assumes that the soundtrack for Wild Symphony will venture in a different direction that Brown’s earlier material. The book is due out on September 1; we’ll know more then.
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