As some of you may know, aside from my writing duties I also host a podcast here at National Review called Political Beats. Despite the name (we’re nearly a decade in now, so it’s a bit too late to change), it is an entirely non-political space — indeed the reason it was first conceived back in 2017. We just talk about rock and pop and country and soul. If you’ve ever wondered why I love dropping as many sly musical references into my writing as possible, then there’s the explanation: My co-host Scot Bertram and I have a guest on each episode to evaluate, celebrate, and occasionally make jokes about the careers of great musicians from the modern era.

It’s a niche podcast — for serious music lovers — so I tend not to spend time on the Corner discussing it. That said, Political Beats is now eight years old, and I do it out of love; regardless of what I technically get paid to do around here these days, I will always think of myself as a “music podcaster” who accidentally wandered into the world of commentary, with fittingly ridiculous results.

And every now and then we record an episode I consider particularly special. So I wanted to draw attention to this month’s edition, all about the career and music of Brian Eno. The man may only be a vague association to you — producer? Background music dude? The Windows 95 “boot up” sound guy? — but to me he is one of the handful of people who, in the 1970s, helped invent the modern musical world. Let me save time by quoting myself:

Here he comes, the boy who tried to vanish to the future or the past. Yes, it’s time for Political Beats to celebrate one of the most influential musicians in the history of modern recorded sound — a man who, ironically enough, is at pains to characterize himself as a non-musician. Children of the Eighties and Nineties may primarily understand Brian Eno as the producer who took U2 to megastardom, but his work as a producer is properly only a footnote to his work as a songwriter and (most importantly of all) a conceptualist. Eno first achieved fame with Roxy Music as their “noise man,” providing outrageous sounds alongside “treatments” — electronic reprocessing — of the rest of the group’s instruments. But Roxy Music was ultimately pianist/vocalist Bryan Ferry’s baby, and so Eno soon struck out on his own, for a solo career that would bring him into collaboration with some of the best and most innovative musicians of the Seventies as he put out a sequence of four “lyrical” albums which bent the definition of “popular music” well past its breaking point and into the avant-garde. At the same time, Eno was creating an entirely new genre of recorded sound: so-called “ambient” music, written and recorded in such a way as to (per his maxim) “reward your attention without demanding it.”

This, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg in a career that also includes brilliant songwriting collaborations with Robert Fripp, David Bowie, and Talking Heads among others. All of this and much more are discussed on a episode Political Beats has been waiting to do for eight years: Brian Eno played an enormous role in inventing the sonic world we still live in, and also made some of the most unexpectedly profound and beautiful music while doing so.

In addition to that, this month’s episode is a family affair: Our guest is none other than NR’s own Andrew Stuttaford, who was not only his typical delightfully thoughtful self but also contributed a fan’s-eye-view: Andrew goes all the way back to the start as an Eno fan, to his days as the outrageously dressed Nosferatu doppelganger making bizarre noises onstage with Roxy Music in 1972. If you know nothing about Eno’s massive contribution to modern art, then I invite you plunge into the show — and as a bonus, here is a playlist of every single thing he ever recorded, in chronological order. Enjoy.