How Music Works is David Byrne's buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about.
Equal parts historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, Byrne draws on his own work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and his myriad collaborators - along with journeys to Wagnerian opera houses, African villages, and anywhere music exists - to show that music-making is not just the act of a solitary composer in a studio, but rather a logical, populist, and beautiful result of cultural circumstance.
A brainy, irresistible adventure, How Music Works is an impassioned argument about music's liberating, life-affirming power.
"A very involving read - Byrne is good company - he has a gift for a telling analogy that makes complex points easily grasped"
Keith Bruce
"It was wildly ambitious to try and turn this galaxy of theory into a readable work of scholarship but Byrne has done it, and done it with style. Brian Eno might as well cancel that book deal now"
