The book deal for My Life According to Rock Band traces back to a Christmas morning 15 years ago.
Charlottesville native Cade Wiberg unwrapped his favorite video game ever on December 25, 2007. The young gamer had played and enjoyed Guitar Hero, Rock Band’s predecessor, but it had always felt like a solitary pursuit.
When Wiberg and his younger sister picked up their plastic guitar and drums, and plugged into Rock Band for the first time that Christmas Day, the experience was something more.
“Rock Band was, like, the first all-inclusive music game,” Wiberg says. “With Guitar Hero, people would see those plastic guitars and think, ‘oh that’s just a video game.’”
Rock Band would become an obsession, with Wiberg chugging through every song on every release of the game, bonding with friends over their shared love of virtual rockin’, eventually picking up a real guitar, and dreaming of becoming a real rock star.
The obsession, if not the rock god aspirations, stayed with Wiberg throughout college, when he began dabbling in creative nonfiction writing, all the way up to now. (He still hosts monthly Rock Band nights at Reason Beer.) Wiberg’s writing first merged with music when he penned a short essay structured around The Beatles’ greatest hits album, 1, for a class at James Madison University. Writing a few autobiographical paragraphs inspired by each song on 1, Wiberg found a narrative style. With supportive feedback from his classmates and teacher, he decided to expand on the idea—Rock Band was the obvious structural hook.
Wiberg completed My Life According to Rock Band, which contains 58 stories about his life, in 2019. This time around, the stories riffed off the 45 standard and 13 bonus tracks featured on the original Rock Band game. There’s Wiberg’s opening chapter, “29 Fingers,” inspired by the Konks song of the same name, along with others like the Metallica-inspired “Enter Sandman” and Weezer-driven “Say It Ain’t So.” A Bon Jovi chapter, “Wanted Dead or Alive,” tells of two old friends growing apart even as they have their first beers together. And “I’m So Sick” finds a love-ill Wiberg first paranoid that he’s lost his girlfriend, then deciding she’s gonna be his girl after all, but all the while lacking the self-awareness to know the relationship is dead on arrival.
When Wiberg set out to publish My Life According to Rock Band, he turned to Jay Varner, the professor for whom he’d written his Beatles-inspired essay. On Varner’s advice, he sent his manuscript to 100 literary agents. They all rejected him. “They all said, ‘We would love it if you had published something,’” Wiberg says, understanding the irony. “They want you to be popular already.”
Then, he found Brandylane in Richmond. The publisher liked the story right away and gave Wiberg a co-publishing deal. Pre-sales went live in February this year, and partly on the strength of Wiberg’s reputation in the Rock Band community, the book sold well, breaking into the top-100 in two Amazon Books subcategories: dating and friendship.
“It’s basically a coming-of-age story and just entails all of those teenage things we went through: growing up, falling in love, drinking for the first time, striking out with girls,” Wiberg says. “It started as random journal entries and came together from there.”
Wiberg, who’ll read passages from the book on June 17 at New Dominion Bookshop, doesn’t know where My Life According to Rock Band will take him. He says he’s been writing short stories his whole life, but he doesn’t expect his new essay collection to let him quit his day job as a Violet Crown Cinema manager.
Wiberg does know that, between his short-form, Beatles-inspired essay and his first full-length book, he did a lot of growing up; he had more stories to tell. Maybe, if the first book does well while his own life story keeps a-rollin’, Wiberg will shred through a Rock Band-inspired trilogy. “I have toyed with the idea, but I haven’t done anything official,” he says.
Wiberg expects his love of Rock Band the game to continue. While a lot of folks rocked out to it for a few years in the wake of 2007’s plastic guitar high-water mark and then put it away, Wiberg keeps buying all the downloadable content he can and hosting his Rock Band parties.
“I never expected to be solely living off the income from the book forever or anything like that,” Wiberg says. “It’s just something I wanted to do. And it has been really cool.”
