The one person Brian Eno thought “enormously” expanded music for everyone
It’s hard to discuss the pillars of true innovation in music without mentioning the one name that encompasses it all: Brian Eno.
Some of Eno’s best-known and most celebrated works are with major names like David Bowie and Talking Heads, inspiring them to greatness through a mixture of laidback coaxing and hands-on pushing. After all, he helped to shape David Byrne’s familiar lyrical ramblings by encouraging him to lean into his own spontaneity, becoming a feature of Talking Heads that ensured their longevity.
However, perhaps more important than that is the way Eno seems to understand the deeper, more visceral layerings of music more than most people on the planet. Most musicians or producers, when they talk about music, it’s usually in a pragmatic sense or about how they arranged each segment to reflect a certain tone or theme.
Eno, on the other hand, has a genuine and meticulous understanding of the precise ways that music taps into emotions we don’t even have names for, and how different sweeps or twists and turns can both challenge our experiences and enhance how we immerse ourselves in the art itself. Sometimes, this can arise from a specific record, like how Fela Kuti’s Afrodisiac provided the basis of everything he’d work on with Talking Heads after he realised it was “the future of music”.
Other times, this can be a theme itself, like space, and the expansive nature of exploring something so vast in music itself. Having composed the score for For All Mankind, Eno knows a thing or two about why space is the ultimate fixation for musical innovators. “That process of imagining is unanchored to experience, unconfined by any demand other than it be in some way true to our feelings. Making music about space, then, is sheer fantasy, or perhaps sheer metaphor,” he once said.
Innovation, to Eno, is sometimes a person, too. Like many, Eno regards people like George Martin as the ultimate innovator and someone who made magic every single time they entered a recording studio. For Eno, it was Martin’s approach to technology and new approaches that made The Beatles so forward-thinking, more so than any other band at the time.
As he once reflected, “George Martin is someone who brought a whole set of skills that really had never been associated with recording before in the studio, and [he] expanded music enormously. It’s very difficult to imagine what The Beatles would have sounded like without George Martin.”
Beyond this, Martin had a prophetic aura that inspired and charmed anyone in his path, his presence alone serving as a mentor even in the subtlest of ways. After all, it was his input that talked The Police off a cliff when it came to recording their career-defining hit, ‘Every Breath You Take’, and all he had to do was “wave his magic wand” and tell them it was all going to be fine.
To someone like Eno, therefore, Martin had it all. He had the kind of attitude that made people feel like challenges were possible to overcome, and the knowledge that being innovative comes with its share of risks. But in doing what he did, he pushed the boundaries of music to new heights, expanding it beyond what anybody thought was even possible.
