How Music Works

*UPDATED WITH NEW MATERIAL*

How Music Works is musician and creative polymath David Byrne’s incisive and enthusiastic look at the musical art form. From its very inceptions to the comprehensive influences that shape it, whether composed in a vast concert hall, via digital arrangement, or intimately by fireside on drums, Byrne taps deeply into his lifetime of experience to explore the panoptic elements of music and how it shapes the human experience. Utilizing his incomparable career and inspired collaborations with the Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and many others, Byrne reveals the impetus behind how we create, consume, distribute, and enjoy the songs, symphonies, and rhythms that provide the backbeat of life. Globally reaching in scale, but warmly inviting in tone, Byrne’s magnum opus reveals ever-new and thrilling realizations about the redemptive liberation that music brings us all.   

Praise for How Music Works

“Brilliantly original”—The New York Times Book Review

“Fascinating” —Booklist

“Extraordinary” —The Guardian

“Dazzling”—The Onion A.V. Club

“Essential”—The San Francisco Chronicle

“Absorbing”—The Independent