In 1999, John Lurie released the album The Legendary Marvin Pontiac: Greatest Hits, a posthumous collection of the work of an African-Jewish musician named Marvin Pontiac, a fictional character Lurie created. It includes a biographical profile describing the troubled genius's hard life, and the cover shows a photograph purported to be one of the few ever taken of him.[5] Lurie wrote the music and performed with John Medeski, Billy Martin, G. Calvin Weston, Marc Ribot, and Tony Scherr. The album received praise from David Bowie, Angelique Kidjo, Iggy Pop, Leonard Cohen and others. "For a long time, I was threatening to do a vocal record. But was uncomfortable putting out a record where I sang, in the beginning my singing was pretty awful and I needed a character to hide behind. Then every project one puts out into the world, there is an insistence from everywhere that one supplies a bio. It is no fun at all. So I wrote the Marvin bio, was way more fun.” In 2017, after 17 years, John Lurie released his first music album, Marvin Pontiac The Asylum Tapes. His new series, Painting with John, is scheduled to debut on HBO in January 2021.