Episode 145: Andrew Stuttaford / Brian Eno

Introducing the Band:
Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) are joined by Andrew Stuttaford. Andrew needs little introduction as the editor of NR's Capital Matters. Find him online right here at National Review or at @AStuttaford on Twitter/X.

Andrew’s Music Pick: Brian Eno
Here he comes, the boy who tried to vanish to the future or the past. Yes, it's time for Political Beats to celebrate one of the most influential musicians in the history of modern recorded sound -- a man who, ironically enough, is at pains to characterize himself as a non-musician. Children of the Eighties and Nineties may primarily understand Brian Eno as the producer who took U2 to megastardom, but his work as a producer is properly only a footnote to his work as a songwriter and (most importantly of all) a conceptualist. Eno first achieved fame with Roxy Music as their "noise man," providing outrageous sounds alongside "treatments" -- electronic reprocessing -- of the rest of the group's instruments. But Roxy Music was ultimately pianist/vocalist Bryan Ferry's baby, and so Eno soon struck out on his own, for a solo career that would bring him into collaboration with some of the best and most innovative musicians of the Seventies as he put out a sequence of four "lyrical" albums which bent the definition of "popular music" well past its breaking point and into the avant-garde. At the same time, Eno was creating an entirely new genre of recorded sound: so-called "ambient" music, written and recorded in such a way as to (per his maxim) "reward your attention without demanding it."

This, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg in a career that also includes brilliant songwriting collaborations with Robert Fripp, David Bowie, and Talking Heads among others. All of this and much more are discussed on a episode Political Beats has been waiting to do for eight years: Brian Eno played an enormous role in inventing the sonic world we still live in, and also made some of the most unexpectedly profound and beautiful music while doing so. We are lucky to be joined by NR's own Andrew Stuttaford for this episode, who lends particular credibility to the discussion as a fan from all the way back in 1972, during the Roxy years. Enjoy stepping into another (green) world.

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