“The music is the practice that creates the ideas that generate the discourse.”Īlso, he liked to rock out. “It is important to remember that all my ideas are generated by the music,” he told an interviewer in 1977. Eno often sang his songs before he figured out what their lyrics were, composing them sound-first and word-second so his subconscious concerns could bubble up. He had a particular fondness for setting up systems complicated enough that they could take him somewhere unpredictable he famously never wrote down his synthesizers’ settings, in order to avoid falling into habits with them. But he dodged that bullet thanks to his other great obsession, which is giving up his conscious mind’s control. His is the kind of smartness that can trip itself up through overthinking, or make for art whose interest is mainly formal. (At one point, he owned 31 of them.) Between 19, his extensive recorded output included four studio albums of his own songs-the three reviewed here and 1975’s Another Green World.Įno is one of the smartest artists who’s ever made a pop recording. Eno had been playing synthesizers in Roxy Music until he quit in mid-1973, but his primary “instrument” was the tape recorder.
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What a songwriter, what a singer, what a producer, what a musician Brian Eno was in the days when he was habitually calling himself a “non-musician.” That was one of his many dry jokes: since his skills didn’t have to do with manual dexterity, he figured they fell in a different category from those of the musicians he worked with.