How Music Works, David Byrne
How Music Works, David Byrne
List: $22.50 | Sale: $15.75
Club: $11.25

How Music Works

Author: David Byrne

Narrator: Andrew Garman, David Byrne

Unabridged: 13 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/26/2022


Synopsis

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • David Byrne’s incisive and enthusiastic look at the musical art form, from its very inceptions to the influences that shape it, whether acoustical, economic, social, or technological—now updated with a new chapter on digital curation.

“How Music Works is a buoyant hybrid of social history, anthropological survey, autobiography, personal philosophy, and business manual”—The Boston Globe

Utilizing his incomparable career and inspired collaborations with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and many others, David Byrne taps deeply into his lifetime of knowledge to explore the panoptic elements of music, how it shapes the human experience, and reveals the impetus behind how we create, consume, distribute, and enjoy the songs, symphonies, and rhythms that provide the backbeat of life. Byrne’s magnum opus uncovers thrilling realizations about the redemptive liberation that music brings us all.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Sasha on March 24, 2022

David Byrne is our great charlatan. He stands up there twitching and tweaking and exhorting, like an amateur weatherman who thinks too much about his hands. Like a caricature of an amateur weatherman. Like a snake oil salesman. He speaks in tongues. "You may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful......more

Goodreads review by Loring on February 08, 2013

I approached Byrne's latest with a little trepidation, due to a less than stellar NY Times review, and due to the number of people in the music industry (notably his own former bandmates in Talking Heads) who feel somewhat mistreated by Byrne. I was ready to read something that might be a bit arrog......more

Goodreads review by Jill on July 06, 2019

As this started out, my heart started rolling her eyes. "Great," she said, "another pretentious white guy talking out his ass about music." Some annoyances from the first couple chapters include a lot of multicultural chatter that basically amounts to "I have a black friend!" + sweeping generalizati......more

Goodreads review by julieta on April 10, 2018

Una maravilla de libro. De verdad, me gusta mucho más que el anterior, diarios de Bicicleta, me parece que se llamaba. Este es David con todo, y eso que no puedo decir que he seguido su carrera, aunque siempre he admirado su capacidad para hacer tantas cosas distintas, arte, performance, talking hea......more

Goodreads review by Vicki on June 06, 2017

There is a lot of information about musical roots and how musicians worked to perfect their sound according to what worked best with their style. I was fascinated by the facts about the designs of opera houses, concert halls and clubs. There are some entertaining tidbits in this book which covers no......more


Quotes

“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.”The Washington Post

“David Byrne is a brilliantly original, eccentric rock star, and he has written a book to match his protean talents . . . What’s best about [it] is that Byrne concentrates on his own experience, from a teenage geek splicing layers of guitar feedback on his father’s tape recorder (he had a mild self-diagnosed case of Asperger’s syndrome, he writes) to arty if neo-primitive rock star with the early Talking Heads at CBGB to increasingly sophisticated, globe-wandering art-rocker, happily collaborating with all manner of world musicians and pop-technological innovators.”The New York Times Book Review

“Byrne explores a whole symphony of argument in this extraordinary book with the precise, technical enthusiasm you’d expect from the painfully bright art school–educated son—born in Scotland, raised in the States—of an electrical engineer, occasionally mopping his fevered brow in the crestfallen manner of a nineteenth-century poet.”The Guardian

How Music Works is as engaging as it is eclectic: a buoyant hybrid of social history, anthropological survey, autobiography, personal philosophy, and business manual, sometimes on the same page . . . Even for the most ardent explorers (and Byrne is one) this is some seriously unknowable territory.”The Boston Globe

“By all accounts, Byrne’s style and energy are as apparent on the page as on the stage.”New York Magazine

“Highly recommended—anyone at all interested in music will learn a lot from this book.”Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Byrne’s erudite and entertaining prose reveals him to be a true musical intellectual, with serious and revealing things to say about his art.”Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Endlessly fascinating, insightful, and intelligent.”Booklist (starred review)

“Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Jay-Z, even Daniel Lanois have all given us books in recent years. And they’ve all been interesting and worth reading. But none of them is as good as David Byrne’s book . . . He weaves his account of the evolution of music from animals to humans and the history of changes in the way music studios work into the most accessible and unpretentious narrative of such a story that I have yet come across.”The Globe and Mail