Lemony Snicket wears many hats, which is to say that he is a man in possession of many talents, a man who has held a variety of professions over the years. To wit, some know him as the ex-theater critic for the Daily Punctilio. Others still know him as a suspected spy for a clandestine organization whose exact purpose is shady at best. But to the world at large Lemony Snicket is predominantly known as a best-selling author, a scribe who has made a solitary vigilance out of chronicling the unfortunate events surrounding the Baudelaire orphans via his A Series Of Unfortunate Events series of books. If you recall I said that Lemony Snicket wears many hats and as such we're not done listing his various aliases and former professions. You see in some circles Mr. Snicket is also known as Daniel Handler, respected author of The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth. Digging even deeper, uncovering even more circles, Lemony Snicket-who-is-really-Daniel Handler is also a rock star. Now when I say rock star I don't mean like Mick Jagger or Bono, more like some nondescript, but no less talented indie rock star, if you get my drift. To be more precise, Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler is a part-full-time member of The Magnetic Fields

If you doubt the validity of my previous sentence, consider this: in the liner notes for The Magnetic Fields magnum opus 3-CD 69 Love Songs , Handler is credited as follows: Daniel Handler: Accordion. Yep, that's right, accordion. I warned you that he wasn't a mainstream rock star, didn't I? Handler is also present on "Waltzing Me All the Way Home" (courtesy of St. Martin's Press, naturally) which can be found on The 6ths album Hyacinths and Thistles (for those not up on their indie rock family trees, The 6ths is a side project cobbled together by The Magnetic Fields frontman/brain trust Stephin Merritt).Long, convoluted introductions out of the way, exactly how did Mr. Handler make the shift from the literary world to the often dog-eat-dog world of rock and roll? Funny you should ask. However, a more appropriate question to be asking at this juncture is: Why the accordion? Was it a family instrument handed down from generation to generation each subsequent Snicket expected to master his own signature polka? Handler laughs at such a thought. "No, my family was actually horrified when I started playing the accordion," he says. "I started playing it in college. I'd taken piano lessons when I was a kid, so I could play keyboard instruments. I took it up in college because I wanted to be in a band but it was during this sort of small window of time where no keyboard instruments were cool. It was like the late '80s/early '90s and you couldn't have a keyboard onstage or you were just lame. I joined a band that wanted to sound like the Cowboy Junkies and they used an accordion, so that was just sort of my way in. I couldn't play guitar and I thought 'I'll just take up this weird instrument and maybe someone will be interested.' I always think it's funny because when you talk about it now, now so much music is electronic that I wouldn't have done it now. But there was this sort of window of time [where keyboards were frowned upon]."