Letting the days go by, into silent water
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground
   —The Talking Heads, "Once in a Lifetime"

Guitarist Phil Keaggy and I were never together in the same room when we made our two recent CDs. I sent digital files with keyboard parts via the Internet to Phil, and he sent them back to me with guitar parts added. When we started our careers, decades ago, we never could have imagined such a collaboration.

In How Music Works, David Byrne gives a fascinating overview of just how much the creation, production, distribution, and perception of music has evolved in recent times. Byrne, the creative force behind the band the Talking Heads, is not only a celebrated pop musician: his success as a recording artist has spawned creative endeavors as varied as managing his own record company, directing films, designing interactive sound installations, writing books about bicycle adventures, and creating a New York theatrical production.

As his resumé suggests, Byrne knows how to take an initial creative idea and follow it through to completion. The experiences he describes in How Music Works are fascinating and entertaining in their own right, but the book also offers valuable advice to the aspiring musician—the more hats you wear in the process of making music, the better chance you'll have of surviving in the business.

Byrne began his career living near and performing at the legendary New York venue CBGB. It was there, beginning in 1974, that he not only cut his musical chops but experienced a real sense of community with other artists. Into this personal narrative, Byrne weaves insights into developing and collaborating with other musicians, staging a show based on a venue's limitations, choosing the right clothes to wear onstage, and even adapting one's personal deficiencies to performance: "Years later," he writes, "I diagnosed myself as having a very mild (I think) form of Asperger's syndrome. Leaping up in public to do something wildly expressive and then quickly retreating back into my shell seemed, well, sort of normal to me."

The circle of the Talking Heads' success widened to performances all over the world, and Byrne's musical worldview widened as well. As a professional composer/recording artist who has traveled a bit myself, I particularly admired Byrne's reflections on his travels. He is a thoughtful and keen observer, not just looking to take from the various cultures he experiences but seeking to enter into them, learning from and sharing with their musicians and artists and savoring the serendipity of the road. An encounter in Japan, for instance, led to the signature big suit for the "Stop Making Sense" tour:

Was any of this applicable to a pop-music performance? I didn't know, but over dinner in Tokyo one night the fashion designer Jurgen Lehl offered the old adage that "everything on stage needs to be bigger." Inspired, I doodled an idea for a stage outfit. A business suit, but bigger and stylized in the manner of a Noh costume.

Byrne's account of the technology that has shaped contemporary music is at times a bit arduous—interesting to the recording enthusiast but probably too detailed for others. Having said that, his overview of the early history of the invention, development, and marketing of the sound recording is compelling. How does the experience of listening to live music and recorded music differ? What's the difference between hearing music alone and listening with others? The early technology developed by Victor and Edison, Byrne notes, already posed the dilemmas that we continue to wrestle with in the iPod era:

Sousa and many others deplored that music was becoming less public. It was moving off the bandstand and into the living room. Experiencing music used to always be something you did with a group of other people, but now you could experience it alone.

Byrne himself takes a post-Christian, revolutionary view of the world and of music: "I welcome the liberation of music from the prison of melody, rigid structure, and harmony. Why not?" And yet he adds this: "But I also listen to music that does adhere to those guidelines. Listening to the Music of the Spheres might be glorious, but I crave a concise song now and then." And finally: "I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea—do I have to choose between the two?"

Good question. There are waters flowing underground here.

Jeff Johnson is a recording artist. He established ArkMusic in 1978. His recent recordings include WaterSky and Frio Suite, collaborations with guitarist Phil Keaggy.

—Note: This review was based on the printed book. There is also an ebook which includes musical samples as part of the reference material.

Copyright © 2013 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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