Take Brian Eno, who I, at least, find remarkably interesting 50 years into his career. When I listen to Secret Life , the album he did with his protégé Fred Again.. in 2023, it sounds to me like one of the most modern and novel sounds in recent years—just as the album Eno did with Roxy Music in 1972 sounded ahead of its time (and is still surprisingly strange and interesting). In between, he invented ambient music, was one of the midwives of the No Wave sound of late 70s New York, helped shape arena rock with U2, and so on. He also wrote interesting essays, made procedural art, invented oblique strategies, and co-founded the Long Now Foundation. Almost at any point in the last 50 years, it feels like Eno’s been doing interesting work!

As I was reading about Eno and others last year, I was sort of hoping to come across a clever trick you could do to keep going like this. But the truth is painful and simple. Eno is able to remain interesting because he’s willing to risk everything he’s achieved again and again.

It is an endless loop where:

Eno does something random that no one is interested in

then, every few years, one of his projects turns into a surprise hit, after which

people come running, asking him to do more of it, offering him large sums of money, which he

turns down, in order to work on something that no one cares about.

With Roxy Music, in the early ‘70s, Eno incorporated synths and electronic processing into rock music, which wasn’t a thing at the time. When that became a hit, Eno got offered large sums of money to tour and make more records like that. But instead he quit the band and started playing classical music with an orchestra consisting of only bad musicians, something that, naturally, exasperated his manager. Then, when his forays into strange noises led to ambient music, his albums with Talking Heads, and No Wave, and so on, people got excited again and wanted to pour money at him to do more of that . Eno decided to go to Thailand to work on light art.

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