Not surprisingly, he is least convincing when writing about classical music and opera. While those who want an in-depth memoir of Talking Heads, for example, may be disappointed (although there are some terrific nuggets), Byrne touches on so many subjects that few readers with a more general interest in music will feel left out. It is part autobiography, part how-to guide, part history and part prognostication - all engaging but none really complete. This is a decidedly generous book - welcoming, informal, digressive, full of ideas and intelligence - and one has the pleasant sense that Byrne is speaking directly to the reader, sharing a few confidences he has picked up over the years. “How Music Works” suggests that such anxiety is long past. Still, as Byrne recalls, he was “incredibly shy at the time and remained so for many years,” and I remember our few meetings as virtually monosyllabic, both of us staring resolutely at the ground. Some disclosure may be in order here: I knew Byrne slightly more than 30 years ago, we have a number of mutual friends, and we lived in the same Manhattan building for a while. Most recently, he has taken up the cause of bicycling, specifically bicycling in New York, which is the usual way the Scotland native gets around his adopted city and which he chronicled in a breezy series of observations published as “Bicycle Diaries.”īyrne’s new book, an ambitious, illustrated 345-page volume titled “How Music Works,” puts me in mind of what it might be like to run into the author at a bar and spend the next few hours talking about a lot of things.
He founded a venturesome record company, Luaka Bop, which presented many artists then unknown in the United States, and he has continued to make his own albums (with and without his longtime musical partner, Brian Eno).
In the years since, Byrne has worked in theater, film, photography and many other genres.
His long-ago group Talking Heads stood out initially for its geeky, reductive, white-bread minimalism, then reinvented itself as a swinging, latter-day big band, brimming over with influences from North Africa and South America. David Byrne has always resisted easy definition.
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