Joe Pernice will perform at Iota on Sunday in support of his new novel and accompanying soundtrack, “It Feels So Good When I Stop.”

Joe Pernice, the leader of the Pernice Brothers and the force behind some of the most well-crafted classicist pop songs of the past decade, officially jumped into the wild word of fiction this week with his first proper novel, It Feels So Good When I Stop. The book’s story of a lost slacker unable to come to grips with his recent marriage (much less his life) may have strong shades of Nick Hornby’s half-pathetic music/sports obsessives, but Pernice is more brutally honest, giving a true warts-and-all portrayal of a deeply flawed character that sometimes hits a little close to home. And, of course, there’s a boatload of terrific, offbeat musical references and a steady stream of humor throughout. Pernice sat down with DCist last week to discuss the book, its companion “soundtrack,” and his tour, which brings him to Iota in Arlington on Sunday night.

Are you looking forward to touring solo? Is this the first time you’ve toured solo in a little while?

No, well, in a little while, yeah. I’ve done it before but I am looking forward to it. It’s a little different, you can go off script pretty easily.

What can we expect on this tour versus a normal Pernice Brothers tour?

Well, I haven’ really done a solo-solo tour in a long time. I think I did one with my guitar player, Peyton [Pinkerton], a while back. It might be kind of clichéd to say that it’s going to be intimate, but it certainly will. I’m going to read three passages from the book, and so I’ll read one and play some tunes, then read another one and play some tunes and read another one and so on.

Do you expect promotion for the book to be pretty different from taking a new album on the road? It seems like a lot of writers don’t actually like to take these things and get them on the road like a band might for a new album.

I think it’s pretty unprecedented, for a first time novelist, to be doing a 12-city tour. Maybe they’ll do a reading in New York and their home city. But I’m lucky and we have this fan base already kind of set up where I can go out and do this tour and read some of the book. But it’s a show, it’s not just a book tour, so it’s a little different in that sense. I’m a little of a unique case, kind of the Venn diagram, passing through the intersections of both worlds.

The book is really good, very funny. How long has it been in the works?

Well I think back in 2006 sometime I got an email from an editor at Riverhead and she had read my Smiths novella and said if I ever had a book, that they’d love to publish it. I didn’t have much time in 2006 because my wife was having a baby and I was making an album and touring an album, but through the year I started thinking about my ideas for the book and early in 2007 I think I sat down and wrote out an outline or a little synopsis of what the book was going to be. I sent it to her and then we made the deal. So it was 2007, and I had about 4 hours today outside of taking care of my son to work. So it took me a couple years to write from July 2007 on. It’s been about a two year event, or three years I guess.