Life staff writer Elizabeth Robie chatted with Dave Carew, fiction author and Nashville resident, who is currently promoting his second novel “Everything Means Nothing to Me,” the follow-up to 2001’s “Voice from the Gutter.” “Everything,” which was described by The Tennessean’s Roy E. Perry as “a haunting novel of obsessive love, abuse and violence” is centered on “Paul,” a Vanderbilt student, who becomes involved with a partially insane writer who lives at Paul’s aunt’s boarding house. Carew discussed his inspiration for the book, what he thinks about Vanderbilt and his love for Nashville.

VH: Why did you decide to move here?
DC: I was very, very enamored with the fact that it was a city that had a passion for music and the arts because that is what I do myself. I just thought it was sensational that Nashville is a city where pretty much everybody literally knows someone who writes music or has a passion for music and the arts.

VH: What were your inspirations for writing “Everything Means Nothing To Me”?
DC: I have always loved the Martin Scorsese film “Taxi Driver.” And I remember I was watching the film about six, seven years ago, and this really intriguing thought hit me. I said to myself, ‘What if there was a story about a very profound, lonely, alienated down- and-out character set in Nashville?’ I had even met a couple of prostitutes, drug addicts — people that were very, very down and out in life and I just thought, I just don’t think there was any art giving them voice, and the fact that I might be able to give them voice through both of my novels, actually, was a very intriguing and artistic challenge for me.

VH: What, exactly, does your title mean?
DC: The title is actually from an Elliott Smith song, although we need to be very clear that the book has absolutely nothing to do with Elliot Smith. I am a huge Elliot Smith fan, and I think that he was the genius pop-rock singer-songwriter of the last decade. Elliot Smith said in a YouTube interview that the title “Everything Means Nothing To Me” is not bleak and nihilistic. It is actually a sort of existential statement that forces us to draw back and say, well obviously everything means nothing to me is not the truth, so therefore what does have meaning for me in my life and what I should do in my life to create meaning.

VH: Your protagonist, Paul, is a Vanderbilt student. How did you make that decision?
DC: Paul is a Vanderbilt student that basically narrates the book. The book is actually a story within a story, because Paul the Vanderbilt student is narrating how he met this down-and-out writer, John Werrick, in his aunt’s boarding house. And Paul’s aunt’s boarding house is set right by Music Row and he and Werrick develop this sort of mystic brotherhood and go bar-hopping at places that students at Vanderbilt would actually recognize like the Gold Rush and 3rd and Lindsley and places like that. Werrick is telling Paul the story, so Paul is kind of relating the story of their bar-hopping, but through John Werrick we hear the story within the story of Werrick’s passion for the female singer-song writer, Eva Downing.

VH: What kind of character is Paul? Did you do any preliminary research before starting?
DC: For the first 12 years that I lived in Nashville, I lived very close to the Vanderbilt campus. And I am a big exercise freak — I usually take a very long walk every day which I believe to be really good exercise and to be very meditative, and literally every single day of the period from about 1983 to about 1995 when I moved a little bit away from campus I would take a walk literally on or near the Vanderbilt campus every single day. So I really assimilated a lot of the sights and the sounds of the campus and got a pretty good feel for the campus.

VH: Do you have any upcoming projects for the future?
DC: My attitude toward that is that I will only write another novel if the muse really hits me to do so. I’ve always admired writers like J.D. Salinger that basically were not — this sounds kind of funny — but were not that prolific. I feel that you should only write a novel, or write a song, or paint a picture if you really truly feel that you have something very beautiful and interesting to convey, so that would really be the criteria for me … that will be the principles of if the muse hits me again, I will very definitely write another novel, and if not, then I may not.