Writer Neil Gaiman collaborates with a string quartet for a first music album

Writer Neil Gaiman (center) makes music with FourPlay (L-R: Peter Hollo, Shenton Gregory aka Shenzo Gregorio, Lara Goodridge and Tim Hollo)

Chris Frape/Riot Act Media

From The Sandman and Lucifer to Good Omens, Neil Gaiman has written novels and comics that have been adapted into plays, TV series and films. Now, he’s setting his sights on music.

For his debut studio album Signs of Life, the British author joins Australia’s FourPlay String Quartet in an eclectic blend of classical and indie rock tunes with poetry and prose.

“I loved them. I loved the imagination. I loved the wit,” Gaiman tells NPR’s Morning Edition, recalling his first collaboration with the quartet in a 2010 Sydney Opera House reading of his novella The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains.

Their new collaboration released Friday is a meeting of unconventional minds between Gaiman — whose writing is often so idiosyncratic it’s impossible to pin down — and FourPlay, an indie rock band of sorts that happens to be playing the traditional string quartet instruments of two violins, a viola and a cello. The musicians got their start performing covers by artists as varied as Radiohead, Metallica and Leonard Cohen.

For a tour that brought them to Carnegie Hall, Gaiman and FourPlay crafted an original song about Joan of Arc, where the historical figure was figuratively brought back from the dead to cause all kinds of problems.

“I’m hoping she ignored my English accent in her work/ Because it’s really hard to hang around with saints,” Gaiman lyricizes in The Problem with Saints.

With that song under their belts, “there was kind of no stopping us,” Gaiman says. “Somewhere in there, we decided to just start creating and make more music….