[SB 239] How Music Works, Conan Gray, Norah Jones

Hi, I’m Matt, and welcome to Steady Beats, where I ruminate on music, muscle, and motion at midlife.

This week, a hodgepodge of music-related reviews.

How Music Works, by David Byrne

This book baffled me.

David Byrne, co-founder of the Talking Heads, has been a smashing success at entertaining people. He knows how to create content that gets and holds attention.

So why was this book so boring?

How Music Works is loaded with rich history, thoughtful theory, and plenty of research. It’s not autobiographical, but Bryne weaves his in own incredible perspective on, and experience in, music. He’s brilliant.

We learn why jazz is improvisational. How some concert halls are designed to make certain genres sound bad, to keep them out. How the environment music is created in and for shapes so much of its characteristics. The book is deep and thoughtful.

But the writing is bland.

It lacks rhythm. It lacks surprise. It lacks hooks and foreshadowing and unique turns of phrase—all the things Byrne has spent a lifetime creating in his music.

And that’s the puzzling thing.

The book will change the way you think about music. It will broaden your perspective of different genres and the music making process.

It’s just that getting to those insights doesn’t feel like Burning Down the House. It feels like power washing one.

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Conan Gray: Found Heaven

If you love the 80s SynthPop sound, there’s a 99.999% chance you will love Found Heaven, the third album from Conan Gray.

And I do mean love. There are echoes—not imitations—of so many great 80s bands here: Duran Duran, Talking Heads, Wang Chung, The Human League, Thompson Twins, Queen, even Devo on the devious “Bourgeoisieses” track.

Found Heaven was delivered to me by my personal new music algorithm—my 16-year-old daughter. She knows my lane.

Sadly, the album is only 36 minutes long despite featuring 13 tracks.

(Songs are short these days and not allowed to have instrumental intros, because you’ll skip to another track. Our loss.)

There are, as the kids say, “no skips” on this fast and fun retro trip. “Alley Rose”, for example, is a fusion of that 80s SynthPop sound with power ballad stylings:

Before you even get to Alley Rose, the opening tracks “Found Heaven,” “Never Ending Song,” “Fainted Love” and “Lonely Dancers” would have all been in heavy rotation on early-80s MTV, complete with Gray’s Mark Goodman-lookalike haircut.

Honestly, this is the best new album I’ve listened to in a long time. Trust me on this one. Listen to Found Heaven once and you’ll have it on repeat, floating along on a cloud of 80s nostalgia.

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Norah Jones: Visions

“Visions” is shoulder music.

Shoulder music is best served in the shoulder periods of your day—early in the morning on the slow start to a long weekend, or in the wind down from a long weekday.

I’ve been streaming this one quite a bit lately, in those shoulder periods. The simple jazz instrumentation (that’s not a negative), along with Jones’ vocals weave into a strong impression of music from the 60s. It’s a light and easygoing album, ideal for plugging into the coming summer season. Here is “Running”, with visuals that carry that 60s aesthetic forward:

Norah Jones has been off my radar since “Come Away With Me” in 2002. My mistake. Glad to have Visions to listen to this summer.

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