If you're looking for entertainment, read some ego maniac's memoir, but if you want food for thought about a topic that never seems to get that treatment check out How Music Works.ĭisclaimer: I am a classically trained musician that likes country music, acoustic, jazz, and pop. As a music fan I was nodding my head throughout the book, and if I were a musician I'd have appreciated it even more. But he doesn't fail to give us some personal anecdotes along the way. This book avoids the hype and the provocative storytelling of many recent memoirs while offering rarely revealed facts about how the music business works and why we like music itself so much. You get financial figures for recent music projects that he's done, you get some history and analysis of the old CBGB scene in New York from whence Talking Heads sprang, you get discussion of recording techniques and how they affect the art of music, and much more. Here he explains nearly everything there is to know about music in a clear and non-romanticized way.

In The Bicycle Diaries he provides great insights into urban planning and other cultures.

Touching on the joy, the physics, and even the business of making music, How Music Works is a brainy, irresistible adventure and an impassioned argument about music's liberating, life-affirming power.ĭavid Byrne has once again proven that he is one of the best thinkers operating in the arts today. His range is panoptic, taking us from Wagnerian opera houses to African villages, from his earliest high school reel-to-reel recordings to his latest work in a home music studio (and all the big studios in between). Byrne sees music as part of a larger, almost Darwinian pattern of adaptations and responses to its cultural and physical context. In it he explores how profoundly music is shaped by its time and place, and he explains how the advent of recording technology in the twentieth century forever changed our relationship to playing, performing, and listening to music.Īcting as historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, he searches for patterns and shows how those patterns have affected his own work over the years with Talking Heads and his many collaborators, from Brian Eno to Caetano Veloso. How Music Works is David Byrne's remarkable and buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about.

How music works book review