David Byrne's book, "How Music Works", is an incredibly well-written, well-informed book on music. It opened up whole new avenues of music appreciation for me.

David Byrne's book, "How Music Works", is an incredibly well-written, well-informed book on music. It opened up whole new avenues of music appreciation for me. Prior to reading it, I had never truly considered things like how the space in which music was consumed needed to be tailored to the type of music that would be played in that venue. For example, the acoustic precision of an opera house or cathedral would be wasted on The Ramones or Black Flag, just as the boxy space of a place like CBGB would be totally wrong for a chamber orchestra. It makes sense in retrospect, of course, but as a non-musician I had never considered it before. Now I'm reading Ted Gioia's "Music: A Subversive History". While the latter has much more academic research behind it than the former, I get the impression that David Byrne aspires to write at the same level as Gioia. And in my opinion, he's not that far off.