Wesley Stace joins ICON for an honest and revealing interview, exploring all aspect of his career. His creative life is unusually difficult to fit into a single category. A novelist, critic, journalist, singer-songwriter, recording artist, curator, and professor—a career that has moved between literature, music, performance, criticism, and teaching. Born in Hastings, England in 1965, Stace studied English literature and social and political science at Jesus College, Cambridge, but left before completing his PhD to pursue a career in music. In his teens he became a devotee of singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Loudon Wainwright III, and John Prine, and took his stage name John Wesley Harding from the title of Dylan's 1967 album.
Performing for decades as John Wesley Harding, he played the UK folk circuit. He signed to Sire Records in the US and released a string of albums through the '90s and 2000s, eventually totaling 17 albums under the John Wesley Harding name. Along the way he recorded duets and shared stages with major artists — Lou Reed, Rosanne Cash, Iggy Pop, John Prine, and Bruce Springsteen (with whom he recorded a duet on his album Awake) — and made television appearances on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Late Show with David Letterman, and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. His songs have also turned up in film and TV, including High Fidelity and Transparent. In 2013, he began releasing music under his birth name, Wesley Stace, starting with the album Self-Titled. He later collaborated with the Jayhawks for 2017's Wesley Stace's John Wesley Harding, and explored a cocktail-jazz sound on 2021's Late Style.
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Literary Career

Stace is also a novelist with four books to his name. His debut, the internationally bestselling Misfortune, was selected by the Washington Post and Amazon as one of the best novels of the year; his second, By George, was one of the New York Public Library's 2007 Books To Remember; and his third, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, was named one of the Wall Street Journal's best fiction books of 2011. He has also co-written choreographer Mark Morris's memoir, Out Loud. He contributes regularly to the Times Literary Supplement and the Wall Street Journal.
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Other Work

Stace created Cabinet of Wonders, a monthly variety show at New York's City Winery mixing music, comedy, and literature, which The New Yorker called "one of the finest nights of entertainment this city has to offer." He has also taught at Princeton, Swarthmore, and Fairleigh Dickinson, and lives with his wife and daughter, currently based near Philadelphia.