Song and Circumstance

It's always gratifying to get a book enthusiastically endorsed by an expert in the field, in advance of its publication. But it's not every day that we get such a lovely blurb from the subject of the book in question.

Here's what David Byrne has to say about Song and Circumstance: The Work of David Byrne from the Talking Heads to the Present, by Sytze Steenstra...

“If I ever need to remind myself what I was reading or mulling over at various points in my life I have only to look in this scrupulously researched and uncannily on-the-money book. Would that we all had references like this! It is for me a beautiful and narcissistically bizarre experience to re-experience my life through the series of ideas and the flow of connections I have made as they are reported and interpreted by Sytze Steenstra. The book is delightfully and unusually free of gossip and psychological assumptions and explanations (not that those don’t also contain some truth); instead it focuses almost exclusively on what I’ve done, said or written—and comes to some conclusions that are (to me) surprising and unexpected. Sytze finds connections I wasn’t aware of, and continuity and patterns where initially one might see randomness and chaos. This book makes me seem both smarter than I am and possibly stranger than I am."

The book should be out in late March or early April (despite Amazon's cheery optimism).