We're on a skeleton crew this week as we sift through the dregs of 2009, and I have a long leisurely lunch calling my name, so pardon the lack of updates. But in the meantime...

Here is a great in-depth interview with Geeta Dayal on her volume on Brian Eno from KEXP in Seattle:

Why an album by Brian Eno?

I got into Brian Eno’s music as a teenager, but I got into his ambient work first and his rock music much later. I’m 30 years old now. When I was 17 or 18, I was really into electronic music. (I still am.) I bought my first Kraftwerk record when I was 13 and that’s probably what inspired me to go to MIT at a fairly young age. Electronic music just seemed like the natural soundtrack for a place like MIT. I had friends who built homemade synthesizers and robots and things like that; I made lots of short films and studied the brain.

It’s funny, because I basically worked backwards with Eno. I started out listening to the ambient records, then heard the rock albums, and then heard Roxy Music last. It was interesting to hear Eno that way, because I could really see his work as part of a continuum.

As for Eno’s other productions, I love Talking Heads and David Bowie and No New York (the inspirational early New York post-punk compilation). I was never a huge fan of U2, so I was never one of those people who knew Brian Eno because of U2. It was really sort of the other way around — I paid closer attention to U2 because of Eno.

Bonus: A very cool interview with Jonathan Lethem about P.K. Dick, conducted by Erik Davis, who wrote the 33.3 on Zeppelin.