YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Eno

lines on the record
83
first
2026-07-21
most recent
2026-07-21
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “That's a nice way of putting it, yeah. So I wanted to make flying feel like a more spiritual experience is what if I had to put it into a sentence with a controversial word in it. And by that I mean I used to be very frightened of flying. And of course I had to do it at that time in my career. And I thought, well, what about if you could make a kind of music that made you less worried about the idea of dying? What about if you could make a piece of music that made your life seem less the center of your attention? If you could see yourself as just being one atom in a universe of complicated molecules, would that make things feel better? So in a way, it was intended to take the...”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I don't want there to be an edge to the music. I want it so that you don't know whether some of the things you're hearing are in the world around you or are part of the music. So I want it not to have a sharp boundary. I want it to sort of fade out into the rest of the world's noises around you.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “And hearing a piece of music coming is because they haven't got the machine to work properly. And you have two thoughts then. You have a thought. They're playing music because they want to stop us thinking about the possibility we might crash. And secondly, they can't even get the bloody player to work properly. So we're going to crash. You know, you can use music as a mask, which is what is normally done in public situations as a way of covering up the noise or you can use music that invites the noise to sound like it's part of it. So with all of that kind of music, what I call ambient music,”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Think it's more contemplative. I think it makes you relax into the situation that you're in, whatever that happens to be, presumably in an airport in this case, rather than tries to pretend that you're not in that place. So my nightmare-ish form of music is getting on an aeroplane.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Act of making a work of art. But most of what I do isn't really motivated by such high-sounding ideas. Most of the time I'm fiddling around and something starts to happen. Something. Intrigues me, or some feeling starts to happen. I think I like that feeling. How can I bring that forward? How can I make more of it? And I often don't know why I'm doing that or how it will end up. I have an archive of about 11,000 unfinished pieces of music. And what I do occasionally is pull one of those out And suddenly, I haven't seen it for 15 years”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I just thought nobody's thought about this issue of what kind of music would belong in this place. You know, we use music in public all the time. But does anybody actually sit down and think seriously, what would be the best kind of music to have in this important place where people are arriving, leaving, going on to important new phases in their lives or going back to loved ones or whatever? It ought to be something a bit more. I started thinking, what should it be more of? And so I started thinking and trying to make a kind of music that I thought would make the airport experience feel important and special. And there were quite a lot of technical considerations, like obviously it mustn't interfere with communication. Mustn't keep stopping and starting. Must not matter if it gets interrupted. On and so on. So that was a very conscious”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “At best, what I'm doing is thinking, I often start something by thinking, I wish there was a piece of music like this, whatever this means in my mind. For instance, one of my best-known records is music for airports. And that came from a very direct experience like that of sitting in a newly built airport in Germany, near Cologne. And everything about the airport was dazzlingly beautiful. It was lovely structure. And they had terrible German disco music playing really loud through the whole PA system in the airport.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Difficult to do, and I think there are many people who I would call artists who never experience any difficulty with what they're doing. It's just what they do. People who make beautiful cakes, for example. One of my daughters loves doing Maozipan decorations on cakes. And they're beautiful, the things she makes. But I'm sure she wouldn't call that being an artist, but I can't see what the difference is. You know, why is that not being an artist? So that's one of the other art world things that in order to make it valuable to justify the high prices, we've got to think of some way of Kind of making it seem abnormal, making it seem like something that only abnormal humans can do.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Which is sort of what those artists were doing, then why not stay in it? You know, if the rest of the world is awkward and you don't fit into it, it's got lots of sharp corners and you can make this world where suddenly you're sort of in control of it. You've decided the terms of that world. And I think a lot of what's happening when artists are working is that they're trying to make the world they would prefer to be in. Now that sometimes gets dismissed as escapism, but I don't think it is. And anyway, I don't think there's anything wrong with escapism. It's sometimes a really good idea to escape and to get out of things and think about them from a distance rather than from being in the center of them. But this is another of the misconceptions about art that it ought to be.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Have you ever heard of place in Switzerland, Lausanne called the Mous ⁇ de Larbut? It's the, I think, the greatest museum of outsider art in the world. So these are people who none of whom were called artists in their lifetime. A lot of them were in mental institutions and they had nothing much else to do and they painted for their whole lives. Some of them did it completely in secret. Nobody even knew until they died that they had been working as artists for their whole life. Kind of feeling about that is that if you can invent a”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, but it's funny that we expected it would be otherwise. It's because we've sort of imputed a moral dimension to art. And all I'm saying is that, no, I think it's much more biologically functional than we think it is. I don't think it's such a spiritual moral business being an artist.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “A very good way of putting it, I think. We've been told somehow that art is this very important thing that is good for you. And I think it is, but I don't think it's good for you in that way. I don't think it necessarily improves you in any moral dimension whatsoever. I think it's quite possible that, as some people now insist, Picasso was a bit of a shit.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yes. Now, you're absolutely right. And in saying that it helps us use our minds in that way, I'm not saying necessarily for good things. It just makes our minds better imagining, but they can just as easily be imagining terrible things. You know, one of the great art collectors of the 20th century was Himmler. Had a huge collection which he'd stolen mostly from Dutch and low countries Jews, French Jews, and he was apparently very learned in that area. But to your point, the ability of something to make a mind work better isn't the same as the ability of something to make a mind work to good ends. That's a different problem. That's a problem of morality, spirituality, something like that.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Whatever else you want to do. I'm always sort of trying to find something that. Suddenly makes me think, Oh, there's a different kind of world. I've never been in a world like that before. If we go back to the idea of adults playing, I think that's what we're doing, pretending, imagining situations and then sort of figuring out the mechanics of them by imagining them is the clue to everything that makes humans such a powerful and probably dangerous species. Even if you thought art was not valuable for anything else at all You would have to say that this process of giving our minds a way of imagining futures.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “It's very built I think when you're working as an artist, you're always world building. You're creating a world. It might be a huge world like, you know, George Orwell's 1984. That's a whole world completely thought out. And when you read that book, you decide to live in that world for a time. And you decide to experience the feelings of living in a world like that. Because the wonderful thing about art is that it isn't dangerous. You can live in that terrible totalitarian world, and then you can shut the book and go and put on a Fred again song.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yes, when you're making something, it starts to come alive when you start to have feelings that you didn't expect from it. You think, well, I'm going to make this, that, the other. And as it starts to form, it starts to change. It starts to become something that you hadn't imagined. And you can either say, okay, I don't want that, which is what a lot of people do. They shut that down and try to get back to what they're supposed to be doing. I don't do that and I think a lot of artists don't do that. We say, oh, I wonder where it's going. I wonder where it's taking me. And you just carry on then and think there's certain point you reach. Either way, you can't make it any better. You notice that what you're adding is starting to subtract rather than to add, or you've hit the deadline.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “If you had to name the emotion that that song has, what would you call that? I mean, for me, there's something. Melancholy and like a nostalgia for a different future or something, a nostalgia for a future that didn't happen, which isn't sad, but to me, it's a very moving song, actually”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I don't really know why that works, but I think it's something to do with the sense of near incoherence of the voice. It's like somebody trying to say something. And come out properly, it's broken, you know, it doesn't come out clearly and straightforwardly. So there's a sort of either a reticence or a feeling of the machine doesn't work any longer, the machine that is me speaking isn't quite working. It's defective in some way.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “You have to make it seem very important. You have to pretend that it isn't just an object of commerce. It's an attempt to build something up by repackaging it in this kind of crust of usually incomprehensible language. I think some of the worst writing in the world is writing about art, about fine art. And it ought to be much simpler. One of the reasons you like it is because it doesn't translate into words. It doesn't turn into sentences. It hits you in some other place, some other part of your mind.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Well, one of the problems that fine art faces is the problem of its own irrelevance to most people's lives. Nobody buys a £2 million or a 20 million pound painting just because they like it. They buy it because there's a good chance they'll be able to sell it again at a profit or it secures them a sort of social status that is not easily obtainable.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Part of the value of any piece of work and the power of it is how it sits in the cultural conversation in general and in your cultural conversation in particular. So a little difference that is very significant to you may be meaningless to somebody else. For instance, I've always had a rather blind spot for Shakespeare. No English person is ever supposed to admit that, but Shakespeare's never thrilled me. I find it hard to read and quite unrewarding. When a critic, a writer, picks out a Shakespeare sentence and talks about its significance, they do that because they know the rest of the Shakespeare canon and they know where it sits in there and what value it therefore has, it doesn't mean anything to me because I don't know any of those things and I don't care about them in that case either.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I think the answer to that is that, of course, when we look at any piece of art, we're not looking just at that piece of art, we're looking at this piece of art in terms of our own personal history. So it's like you're hearing the latest sentence in a conversation you've been having for your whole life. I wrote this little story once about somebody finding... In some post apocalyptic time, finding an art museum, and the whole place is wrecked, but there's lots of pictures still around. And they find one picture that obviously hasn't been finished, which is just a white canvas, which of course, in fact, is Malievich's white on white. So it has no meaning to that person who doesn't share its history.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “That's what really moves me. And I think when that happens, you should pay attention to that. You should think, why do I really like that? What does that mean that I like that thing? What does that connect me to that's so important to me? And we frequently don't do that because the distraction rate is so high. There are so many things to think about all the time”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “We're being told probably about 10 or 12,000 times a day what we ought to like, what other people like, what some people would prefer that we liked. We're told that in the form of advertising and the form of political messages, in the form of all of the things that try to persuade us to think or believe one thing rather than another, it's the biggest industry in the Western world, actually. Persuasion. It's very easy in that flood, actually, of that tsunami of suggestions about what we ought to like to forget what we actually do like. So I think what he's doing there, he's suggesting that the deepest feelings we have are actually the most reliable things that we know about. One of the things that happens when you're looking at art or listening to art, something connects to you and you think that's what I really like.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And they are, in fact, our first antennae, our first judgment of a situation, our first sense of whether it's dangerous or friendly or useful or useless is made on the basis of feelings. And then after that, we backfill with other information we find. And we sometimes find that our feelings, the quick response were incorrect. But surprisingly often, we find that they were actually exactly on the money. I knew that as soon as I saw her. One thing that I was thinking about while you were talking is a way I...”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yes, so they have a bad reputation because they're very hard to quantify and measure. And of course, science wants things that are easily comparable and easily describable in some kind of language of quantity and measure. Feelings, because they're subjective, are very difficult to do that with. However, the first response we have to most things is a feeling response, particularly if they're unfamiliar things. What's the first thing that happens when you meet somebody? You kind of form an impression of them quite quickly. You think he looks like a decent person, he looks quite friendly, he doesn't look hostile. I think I could get on with him. Or she looks pretty interesting and I think I'm in love with her. Feelings form very quickly, actually, and they form without really much volition on our part.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “And imagining how they connect to other things that we know about, and then feeding that knowledge back into our lives and into our relationships. I want to zoom in on a word you use there, which is feel. One of the central arguments of the book is that art is a way we explore or attune to our feelings. And I guess that raises another question. You say, and I agree with this, that feelings have a bad reputation. So to you, What do feelings do and why do they matter?”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Don't think, oh, they're just wasting their time, they should do something more serious. We realize that when children play, they're learning. Their understanding about materials, about social relationships, about their own bodies, their own minds, about where they live, all of those things that are very important to understand. And they do that infallibly and with a huge appetite. That's what children like doing. And we understand, all of us understand that that's the way they learn things. Art is grown up play. It's a way of imagining things and imagining what they would feel like.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Line of art and it includes, of course, obvious things like symphonies and photographs and paintings, but it includes cardigans and jewellery and makeup and tattoos and all the things that humans do that they don't have to do. None of those things have survival benefits in the obvious sense. They're things we do to do something in our mind, to change our mind in some way. So what does art do? Why do we like it? I have this phrase in the book that children learn through play and adults play through art. And I think that's really what it does. When we look at children and we watch them playing,”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Brian Nino. Welcome to the show. Hello, Israel. Nice to meet you. So, your new book is called What Art Does. And I guess tell me, what does Art Doll perhaps I should tell you first why I thought that question needed answering because in education in England and in fact I think probably in most parts of the world the budgets that always get cut are the arts budgets because they're apparently more important things that we should be teaching people science engineering, financial technology that kind of thing. Yeah, you should be making short trades exactly exactly are you really alive if you can't short a stock so I've always thought that art is actually one of the most important things that humans do with their time in my book there is a long list of things that I consider could come under the head”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Eno composed the sound that plays when you boot up Windows 95. Do you remember that one A lot of sound we just take for granted, a lot of the way sound is now made. You know how help bring that into existence? A lot of his work on creating generative systems that make music can be seen as a forerunner to much of today's AI systems. And you know, is more than just a sonic technician or tinkerer. He's this wonderful thinker and philosopher of art and just being a human being. And he's got this really delightful new book out, What Art Does An Unfinished Theory, as well as a new album with Beatty Wolf called Liminal. I wanted to talk to him about all of it, or at least as much of it as I could. As always, my email, Ezra Klinesho at NYTimes dot com.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “He certainly coined the term, built out the philosophy, sort of has eaten a lot of the music we now listen to. But also he's just done so many other things. He's produced seminal albums by YouTube. David Bow Talking head Lori Anders”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “I want to share one of my favorite episodes in recent memory with a musician and artist and legend, Brian Eno. We spoke in 2025 about his book What Art Does and What Art and Creativity Mean in the Age of AI. The conversation remains a breath of fresh air, so I hope you at this particular moment enjoy it. I've got an email from a lot of you lately saying, Can we do a show just off the news? Can one show not be in the grim march of events? So here it is. Had you intro Brian Eno. You know, as a claim, as much as anyone does, to have invented the genre of ambient music.”

    2026-07-21 · The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: A Breath of Fresh Air With Brian Eno · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source