Listening to the music

Music is not a sign; it doesn't mean anything, even if intended to express or evoke some definite feeling.

When you listen deeply, all and everything you hear is the music. Whether it was meant to be music, or meant to be heard at all, is irrelevant. The music is not separate from the listening, and it happens through the whole bodymind, not just ears or auditory system. When your whole bodymind is open to it, the music plays you. All you do is let it come and go.

Memory and anticipation come and go in the same way, naturally. Seeking, grasping and following also come and go, as interruptions, or as branching streams that flow in the darkness. Never mind; just wake up now and hear.

Everything that happens will happen today

This is the title of a new collaboration by David Byrne and Brian Eno, two major contributors to the late-20th-century music scene. Their 1980 release My Life In the Bush of Ghosts is still a favorite of mine. (I may live in the backwoods, but i still have a weakness for innovative music – ‘city music’, if i can call it that … )

This new one is mostly music by Eno, lyrics and vocals by Byrne, and the result is something quite different from what either of them would have come up with on his own, as they say in their own notes on the process. ‘Electronic gospel’, they call it. The lyrics are not ‘religious’ in the sense that most gospel music is, but some of them are quite profound – a quality that Byrne sometimes takes pains to avoid, or so it seems. Some of his lines here, like the title above, are well worth pondering. And all work well with Eno's music, to give us an unexpected and welcome gift from two veterans of the Talking Heads era who haven't lost their creative edge.